“As someone who attended a day school and has spent decades working alongside Indigenous artists and communities, I wrote this book because I came to understand that art was doing work that words alone could not—bearing witness, restoring dignity, and refusing silence.”

– Gerald McMaster

About The Author

Gerald McMaster (O.C., PhD) is a curator, artist, author, and scholar with over four decades of international experience in contemporary art, critical theory, museology, and Indigenous aesthetics. A former Tier 1 Canada Research Chair at OCAD University and Director of the Wapatah Centre for Indigenous Visual Knowledge, McMaster has played a pivotal role in shaping the intellectual and curatorial landscape of contemporary Indigenous art through his sustained advocacy for Indigenous voice, representation, and visual knowledge.

Beginning his career as both artist and curator, McMaster challenged conventional museological approaches, particularly the display of culturally sensitive objects within ethnographic frameworks and the exclusion of Indigenous artists from mainstream art institutions. Grounded in Indigenous epistemologies, his practice introduced alternative approaches to exhibition-making and contributed to the emergence of a distinctly Indigenous visuality.

He has curated numerous landmark exhibitions, including Indigena (1992), First American Art (2004), Inuit Modern (2010), Postcommodity (2021), and Arctic/Amazon: Networks of Global Indigeneity (2022), each expanding curatorial discourse around identity, authorship, self-representation, and the relational dimensions of land, ceremony, and sovereignty. His international leadership includes serving as curator of the Canada Pavilion at the 1995 Venice Biennale, artistic director of the 2012 Biennale of Sydney, and curator of the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale.

McMaster studied fine arts at the Institute of American Indian Arts and the Minneapolis College of Art and Design (BFA 1977), earned an MA in anthropology from Carleton University, and completed a PhD in cultural analysis at the University of Amsterdam. A citizen of the Siksika Nation and of Plains Cree heritage, he has dedicated his career to advancing Indigenous art and thought on a global stage.