Norval Morrisseau: Life & Work describes how the artist worked outside the established traditions of European visual culture. He defied categorization and challenged conventional understandings of Indigenous art. Although during his lifetime the media judged him harshly for his alcoholism and his traditional beliefs, Morrisseau succeeded in raising awareness of Indigenous aesthetics and cultural narratives as he developed an artistic vocabulary that inspired a new Canadian art movement. Carmen Robertson reveals that, at a time when most Canadian artists were experimenting with the techniques of modern abstraction, Norval Morrisseau rejected those contemporary artistic trends in favour of a visual aesthetic that drew most directly from Anishinaabe cultural sources. This book considers the plight of an artist who, in the face of intense discrimination, created a style that was all his own
