Death Boat and Other Stories Opening Reception and Curatorial Talk

Join us for an opening reception and curatorial talk for Death Boat and Other Stories: The Kampelmacher Memorial Collection of Indigenous Art.

Cash bar and appetizers provided.

ABOUT THE EXHIBITION

Death Boat and Other Stories: The Kampelmacher Memorial Collection of Indigenous Art, was curated by Felicia Gay and organized by the MacKenzie Art Gallery, will be on view from 18 July 2025 to 2 May 2027. 

Death Boat and Other Stories investigates interpretations of transformation in Indigenous cultural art practices across Turtle Island. This exhibition features artworks drawn from the Kampelmacher Collection, which offer multifaceted worldviews situated in Indigenous knowledges and relationality. The themes of transitional space, place, and time inform a beautifully situated and embodied visual story.

Collectors Thomas Druyan and Alice Ladner began acquiring Indigenous art in 1992, amassing well over 1,000 works. The couple named the collection after Thomas Druyan’s parents, Wolf and Sala Kampelmacher. The collection illustrates myriad artistic expressions from across North America. As MacKenzie curator Felicia Gay researched the collection, she was strongly drawn to Inuk artist Roger Aksadjuak’s ceramic artwork Death Boat (2008). Gay understood Death Boat as an animate being; it spoke to her, in its own way, prompting the themes in the exhibition. At first glance, the death boat appears to represent a funerary practice, perhaps representing the transition from life to death or the continuation of life after death. As a vessel, it is carrying not only a person, but also a story. The spaces that humans, animals, and other sentient beings inhabit are temporal but never fixed. To be Indigenous is to know profoundly what transformation is.