Jewish Separate School in Winnipeg, 1975 .
identifying a blind spot in Trudeau’s vision of glittering cultural tesserae. The Winnipeg Art Gallery owns a work by Kurelek that is particularly striking in this regard, a tiny but powerful depiction of a prairie highway in a blizzard. At the side of the road, a tiny figure stands with his thumb outstretched, hoping for a ride. The title of the work today is Gotta Get Home , 1974, previously titled Indian Hitchhiking from Saskatchewan . Who among settler artists was thinking about Indigenous displacement and poverty in 1974? While Kurelek’s religious faith led him to hold some bizarre and extreme positions on issues of the day such as abortion, sexual freedom and the perils of consumerism, his under- lying message was one of empathy and understanding. The work of multiculturalism is ongoing in our country. At the McMichael, we are de- lighted to have acquired Jewish Life in Can- ada , a series that contributes to this work. The series has already established itself as a favourite with our visitors. Standing in front and a darker story of abandoned farms, harassed street merchants, and forlorn new immigrants huddled on train platforms far from their homelands. Was Kurelek celebrating the success of Jewish settlers in Canada or grieving their struggle to belong? —Sarah Milroy of these paintings, people stop and talk. They find themselves in the scenes, identify- ing the places and the human experiences Kurelek sets before them: the woman beside a railway platform in Saskatchewan with her immigration papers held to her chest, an impossibly detailed brick wall under demo- lition in Toronto, the Winnipeg tailor with William Kurelek’s series Jewish Life in Canada is paradoxical because it seems to articulate two visions of the immigrant experience at once: a sunny story of rejoicing brides, contented dairy farmers, and cheerful children at their violin practice; $45
Pioneer series was unveiled in Parliament six years after his death, Mary Kurelek, the artist’s mother, was seated beside Prime Min- ister Pierre Trudeau, in a moment of solidarity. If the Group of Seven had been brilliant at promoting their ideal of Canada as a land of “wilderness” and manly adventure, Kurelek upheld a dream of tolerance, inclusivity, and opportunity that remains more unrealized than most Canadians care to admit. Notably, the implementation of the Multiculturalism Act has been critiqued for doing little to uphold the Indigenous cultures of Canada, focusing instead on the celebration of newcomers—an omission that Kurelek’s art seems to tease at in his works depicting Inuit life in the Canadian Arctic. Saccharine, anachronistic images permeate his book The Last of the Arctic , made to order as a commission for Christopher Ondaatje’s Pagurion Press, but the artist’s own take on life in the North in his series of 30 paintings called A Point of View: Cape Dorset N.W.T ., 1968, is more nuanced and sensitive to con- temporary realities. In these works, Kurelek includes telephone poles, trucks, skidoos, and the abandoned oil drums that littered the landscape—and even the local airport on a blistering bright winter day. These are not images of an Indigenous culture frozen in time but of living and evolving communities. I see a rare prescience here, with Kurelek
his measuring tape, the little boy in Mont- real practising his violin before dinner, the lighting of candles for a family Shabbat in Edmonton. Visitors linger over these details and the eccentric frames that distinguish them, created by the artist himself, each one skilfully attuned to the image. They respond as well to the warmth of Kurelek’s imagin- ation, his scenes of family life, of labour, of the rituals that bind, and his dream of a nation where all can belong. n
Milroy
Jewish Life in Canada William Kurelek
William Kurelek, Jewish Life in Canada , published by Goose Lane Editions with McMichael Canadian Art Collection in 2023
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