Thursday Lates: Curating Through Story: A Curatorial Talk with Felicia Gay
About
The Art of Faye HeavyShield is a collaborative reflection between HeavyShield and curator Felicia Gay on HeavyShield’s practice as an artist, as well as her indelible contributions to North American and Indigenous art history. Join Felicia Gay as she discusses some of the ways she worked to center Swampy Cree curatorial methodologies in order to understand and process Faye HeavyShield’s work into a retrospective highlighting the artists near forty years of practice.
About Felicia Gay
Felicia Gay is of Swampy Cree and Scottish (Gordon Clan) heritage and brings to contemporary curation a thoughtful lens of Indigenous worldviews and counternarratives. She was the founding Artistic Director of Red Shift Gallery in Saskatoon(alongside co-founder Joi Arcand) and was most recently the Curator at Wanuskewin Galleries. Working as a curator since 2004, she was awarded the Canada Council for the Arts Aboriginal Curatorial Residency with AKA Artist-Run in Saskatoon, SK in 2006. Felicia has also worked as a cultural worker with various arts-based organizations in the province and has been a sessional and guest lecturer at the University of Saskatchewan and First Nations University of Canada since 2008. Felicia has an MA and a BA Honors in art history with a focus on Indigenous contemporary art and curatorial praxis from the University of Saskatchewan. She is currently a PhD candidate and Mitacs Curatorial Fellow, cross-appointed with the MacKenzie Art Gallery and the Faculty of Media, Art, and Performance at the University of Regina. Felicia is the 2018 recipient of the Saskatchewan Arts Awards Leadership–Individual Award for her work with curation and advocacy for creating space with Indigenous art and artists. Her insight and expertise have been featured in keynote presentations and essays in a number of forums, including the Canadian Arts Summit, Canadian Art magazine, and in various publications. In 2018 she curated PowerLines: The Work of Norval Morrisseau, a retrospective and symposium at Wanuskewin Heritage Park, Saskatoon, SK.