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bio
Bebonkwe Brown ᐱᐳᐣ ᐅᓵᐃ is a contemporary Plains Cree/Anishnawbe/Metis Nation artist from
Paspaschase First Nation, Alberta, Canada. Her home territory is in and around Amiskwacîwâskahikan
(aka Edmonton). Throughout her career she has made camp at various locations in Canada, the USA and the UK, including Vancouver, Toronto, Winnipeg, the Lower Similkameen Reservation (Keremeos, BC), St.Paul (Minnesota), Brighton (UK) and London (UK). She has been based in Brooklyn, New York since 2006.
Bebonkwe studied fine arts in London (UK) and Toronto (Canada), as well as apprenticing in traditional First Nations art forms and cultural/ceremonial practices with highly respected artists, elders and medicine people. She has received project awards from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, the Alberta Foundation for the Arts, First Peoples Fund and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts. She is a recipient of the prestigious Chalmer’s Arts Fellowship and has participated in a number of reputed artist residencies. She has also been a provincial and federal level arts funding juror, and worked in First Nations Cultural advisory and educational roles for art institiutions and exhibitions. Her work has been exhibited, screened, and performed internationally.
Bebonkwe’s trailblazing 35 year practice employs and entwines the creative genres, iconography, technology, and languages of both Indigenous and Western creative traditions and genres, while always maintain a foundation of ancient First Nations paradigm, perspective, and connection, while pushing the boundaries of Contemporary Western arts practices.
Bebonkwe (Beh-bone-kway) means Winter in Anishnawbe
Winter ᐱᐳᐣ is Pipon (Pih-poun) in Plains Cree.
Though her strongest cultural affiliation is Plains Cree,
she usually goes by Bebonkwe
to honor the Anishnawbe ceremony and elder she received her named in and from.
Bebonkwe Brown is also known as Jude Norris, Kihiw Mitahtahkwan Awasis & sometimes, Nia Lova.
instagram @bebonkwe
artist statement
I’m deeply invested in and excited by making contemporary artwork that continues vibrant, sophisticated, community-centered and ever-evolving First Nations creative legacies. I aim to create pieces imbued with what Indigenous people call ‘good medicine’. My artworks have the ability to uplift the viewer through their beauty, yet the beauty I’m interested in goes beyond visual pleasure. They express and celebrate cultural continuance through an embrace of rapture, sensuality, playfulness, and the mysterious. They house paradox in both energy and aesthetic. Through my work I’m often simultaneously expressing both serenity and ferocity, balance and tension, the recognizable and the unknowable, the comforting and the uncanny, damage and healing, grief and joy.
Since 1986 I’ve created a large body of multimedia work using my English/Metis name, Jude Norris.
The body of work I’ve created since 2012, when I refocussed on my original medium, painting,
while also continuing existing and new sculptural series,
has been created using my Native name, Bebonkwe (Winter),
and my Russian grandfather’s immigrant alias, Brown.
My use of alternate personas/names reflects both traditonal practices and
the complex nature of navigating and adapting to Native/Settler dynamics as a Native artist
working within the colonized environment of the stolen First Nations territories of Turtle Island.
My creative practice and materials mirror the challenge and strangeness of traversing of two largely dispirit cultures, a dynamic that all Native people navigate. I work in a variety of media, combining traditional Indigenous science with Western new-tech, organic with digital, to create work that reflects this journey in a way that’s highly contemporary while being informed by and infused with ancient First Nations cultural teachings, paradigms, experience and aesthetic. I often employ traditonal gathering practices and work in collaboration with plant and animal relatives, allowing them to speak through their stunning, sensual forms.
My combinations of traditional, land-gathered and/or ‘urban’ media and materials, as well as my use of minimalism in paintings and sculptural works begun around 2002 in my freestanding and wall sculptures (created as Jude Norris) including the braided, antler and natura directus et delectabilis series, as well as the scar paintings.
I unabashedly embrace the spiritual in both my process and pieces. My intention with and perception of an artwork extends into the realm of what is culturally understood to be a healing, transformative or ‘medicine’ object (for both maker and viewer). My artworks are energetically imbued with a creative process informed by solid awareness of and conscious connection to the Spirit world. The meanings or dialogues contained in them tend to unfold spontaneously, in connection and collaboration with my Ancestors.
I aim to express this spiritual connection in a way that honors and upholds the aesthetic refinement, honesty and constant evolution of Native creative tradition. Yet within these traditional approaches, my work usurps restrictive, romanticized notions about Native culture and expression as being something stereotypical, safe and unchanging. It repositions and reflects the traditional as constantly incorporating new media and influences in innovative ways. I understand the perpetuation of what the mainstream often calls ‘Native Art’ as potentially damaging to the healthy continuation of our cultures.
My wall and floor works are predominantly abstract, allowing room for narratives that lie beyond language, and for the intuitive, meditative, playful, sensual and emotive in my work to unfold spontaneously.
My more recent body of work explores and continues longstanding ‘pan-tribal’ adornment in contemporary ways, incorporating sculptural elements from my earlier multi-media pieces, which contain or are composed of fringe, ribbon, beadwork, stick piercings, braids, hide, hair, antler, seeds, shells, fur and/or fabric. And many of my sculptural works are wall-mounted, further disregarding Western compartmentalizing of painting and sculpture.
Enveloped in this journey is a critique of Indigenous adornment’s relationship with abstraction in Western modernist art. My painted work involves a reclamation of Native women’s very long history of creating abstract imagery, and the deep but largely unacknowledged influence of this creative history on supposedly ‘new’, male-dominated Western abstract art genres.
In pre-colonial Turtle Island (the Americas) everything was adorned, with a high level of artistry, and usually abstractly. Traditionally, in my own and other plains Nations, abstract imagery was usually created by women (while men’s creative expression was more often figurative). This abstract adornment was not just decorative, but understood to carry Spiritual power through source, beauty and story, and to contribute inextricably to the wellbeing and prosperity of both individual and community.
In continuing this legacy of female, Spirit-centered abstract imagery, my paintings juxtapose expressionistic, organic grounds with contemporary slants of tribal adornment. Though the imagery, materials and/or surfaces of my painting’s grounds are often sourced from Western-tech and/or urban environments, their visual connection with the movements of water, wind, clouds, storms, galaxies, and biological/microscopic environments, are expressive of the land, sky, stars and our connection to all levels of life. In this, also, they contain gynocentric cultural continuation.
The embrace of paradox running throughout my arts practice continues with my use of hard/soft/unexpected painting combinations. The geometric patterns I use are influenced both by contemporary First Nations dance regalia (infused into my being during much time spent on the powwow trail) and pre-colonial tribal items. But they are also composed of or embedded with unexpected, repurposed, exagerated and/or digitally generated sources, markings, materials, creative process and so on.
I use circles a lot, placing them in relationship with hard-edged geometries, or covering painting surfaces in repetitive patterns, called ‘all over’ in Western art speak, and yet pre-dating the Settler art world by thousands of years in Indigneous art practices. The circle is indead central (pun embraced) to Native cultures, and has multiplicitous meaning in my work. You can read more about this on my intertribal-series page.
I also embrace the cirle as a symbol reflective of feminine energy. Pre-colonially, Native cultures were predominantly matriarchal, and (despite the impacts and influence of colonizing patriarchies) there still is much more understanding and respect for feminine energy and power than in Western societal paradigms. This is what allows us to be in deep and sustainable relationship with the Earth and All Our Relations (in both the physical and spirit realms). The unending patterns of circles in my paintings are another element of cultural continuance in my work, creating a non-linear, non-literal, femcentric narrative that relates to places beyond the restrictions of linear, mind-dominant thinking and culture.
Whatever medium/s I’m using, I understand the underlying activity and alchemy in my creative work to involve connecting to, channeling, shape-shifting and sharing energy. Ultimately my artworks are acts of following heart and transmuting the seemingly insurmountable into uplift, which in my experience are the most fundamental teachings, endeavors, and expressions there are.
Bebonkwe with ‘pehpehtahkwiik 2’.
Photo by Brandon Perdomo.