Alan Syliboy

In a career spanning over 50 years, Mi’kmaw artist Alan Syliboy has been on a journey to recover the visual language of his culture. “The Journey So Far” is a succinct telling of his progress. Comprised of works from each stage of his multi-faceted career, the heart of the exhibition is a collection from one collector who, for over 30 years, purchased a work almost annually from Syliboy. Marcia Hennessy’s collection eventually numbered over 100 works, the most comprehensive collection of the artist’s work anywhere.

Selections from his archive, along with works from friends and family, combine to make a retrospective that is more self-portrait than scholarly endeavour. That is fitting, as his journey is ongoing, and the exhibition is more of a check-in than a final reckoning. Syliboy is engaged in reclamation, in rediscovering and reviving the traditional iconography of his people, who, along with the other inhabitants of the leading edge of Turtle Island, were the first to greet the succeeding waves of European colonizers.

In what is now eastern Canada and northern Maine, the Beothuk, the Mi’kmaq, the Wolastoqiyik, the Peskotomuhkati and the Penobscot peoples suffered wave after wave of colonization. The Beothuk culture did not survive, and the other nations, the Wabanaki Confederacy, were decimated by disease, by war and by cultural genocide as their languages and religions were suppressed by the colonial powers. Once nomadic, the Wabanaki peoples were forced to settle in permanent communities, usually ones far from any means of following their traditional lifestyles. After centuries of colonization their languages were dying and their cultural and religious traditions were all but forgotten. But with concerted efforts from the 1960s to the present day, a cultural renaissance began and eventually flourished. The languages survived and with them the stories that give life to the words.

At base Alan Syliboy is a storyteller, though he cannot tell his stories in his own language. Sent to a Catholic day school as a child, he was forced to speak only English. Even the Elders of his community, most fluent Mi’kmaw speakers, were enlisted to deny their children the right to speak and think in their own language, convinced by the Church and by the larger community that they were setting their children up for success in the modern Western world.

His natural voice silenced, Syliboy looked to visual art, turning the stories he heard from his Elders into drawings that gave them new life. Mi’kmaq handcrafts—porcupine quillwork, basketry—provided the rudiments of a visual language for Syliboy, but it was an older source that was to prove most influential: petroglyphs, Mi’kmaq stone carvings that line the shores of ancient settlements and sacred places. These drawings in stone provided him with the initial imagery that would inform his practice. From the 1970s he has been following the teaching he found in the stones of Mi’kma’ki. “I’ve made marks on the ground,” he writes. “It’s time for me to leave my marks for the next generation.”

As a retrospective “The Journey So Far” looks backward over a career, but just as importantly, it looks forward to a new vibrancy in Mi’kmaw visual culture. Syliboy had few mentors when he was starting as an artist. The only professional artist he knew was the late Shirley Bear, who encouraged him to study petroglyphs. Five decades later Syliboy is at the centre of a burgeoning cross-disciplinary renaissance of Wabanaki art. Now artists such as Ursula Johnson, Jordan Bennett and Jeremy Dutcher have international careers, built on the foundations laid by Syliboy’s generation.

The cross-disciplinarity of so much contemporary Indigenous culture is natural to Syliboy, whose painting career is part of a larger practice that includes books, animated films and musical recordings. “The Journey So Far” includes storyboards for his prize-winning animated short The Thundermaker, and throughout the run of the exhibition, readings and musical performances augmented the visual display. The prints, drawings and paintings that make up the bulk of the exhibition trace Syliboy’s artistic journey. The earliest works, such as Clara, 1978, show him working to absorb the lessons of Western art history and painting traditions (Syliboy spent time as a student at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design) to tell personal stories. Clara, his paternal aunt, died in residential school as a child from a disease that should have been treatable. By the 1990s we see Syliboy’s evolving voice. Butterfly, 1992, combines traditional Mi’kmaq decorative elements, such as the double curve, with his own imaginative expansion of the language of petroglyphs. In a series of multimedia works from the late 1990s, he combines drawings and photographs in a way that shows the influence of the late Carl Beam, and of Robert Rauschenberg, who influenced them both.

By the 2000s Syliboy was mostly working with paint, the scale of his work growing exponentially, with the introduction of narrative as repeated characters such as “Little Thunder” (a Glooskap figure), Wolverine and Star Woman. These figures, based on characters from story and from the graven images of the petroglyphs, people Syliboy’s paintings more and more, joined by creatures from the natural—rather than the spiritual—world: whales, moose, deer, caribou.

The tour de force in the exhibition is a massive mural that stretches across one side of the brutalist box that contains the Dalhousie Art Gallery. Jipijka’m (Great Horned Serpent) depicts a powerful spirit that can take on human form and live on land or water. Traditionally an ally of the shaman, the figure here is an ally with the artist in his transformative journey.

Despite the loss of the fluency he had as a child, Syliboy first learned to speak in Mi’kmaw. The structure of that language informs his world view, one in which much more is animate than in the Western one, and petroglyphs are its oldest visual manifestations. “What the petroglyphs do is take you to a place where your ancestors are,” he has said. “You can think beyond the moment and the material world and everything that goes with that. We’re a modern people, but they let you know where you come from and who you came from.” Where Syliboy is from, listening to stones makes perfect sense. ❚

“Alan Syliboy: The Journey So Far” was exhibited at Dalhousie Art Gallery, Halifax, from May 9, 2024, to August 11, 2024.

Ray Cronin is a New Brunswick-based writer, editor and curator and the author of 14 books on Canadian art. In 2023 he was appointed curator of Canadian Art at the Beaverbrook Art Gallery in Fredericton.