Thank you / Miigwetch! CUAG gratefully acknowledges the many lenders whose generosity has made this exhibition possible: the Indigenous Art Collection at Crown-Indigenous Relations and Northern Affairs Canada, the Government of Ontario Art Collection, the Archives of Ontario, Howard Adler, Barry Ace and Earl Truelove, Blake Angeconeb, Rawlson King and Linda Grussani, Bill Staubi and Bear Witness.
- Home
- Digital Guide: Christian Chapman: Run to the Hills!
Digital Guide: Christian Chapman: Run to the Hills!
Curated by Danielle Printup
April 16, 2026 – October 25, 2026
Download the Large Font PDF Guide
Christian Chapman, “Wisdom” (2011), acrylic and oil on gesso paper. Indigenous Art Collection, Crown-Indigenous Relations and Northern Affairs Canada. Photo by Lawrence Cook.
Christian Chapman, an Anishinaabe artist from Fort William First Nation in Ontario, has always cherished and attended to stories, admiring their depth, elusiveness, the ways they carry meaning, and how storytellers in his family — young and old — could uniquely animate their being. These stories warmly anchored him in Anishinaabe traditions from the north shore of Lake Superior, stretching back to times before his own. He would listen, carefully attentive, beaming with his own curiosity. For Chapman, these stories are treasures, sources of inspiration and influence that travel with him into the shifting imaginary of Anishinaabe storytelling.
Run to the Hills! spotlights Chapman’s gift as a storyteller who, like relatives before him, finds his own way of being in conversation with ancestral oral traditions. Using painting, printmaking, and other mixed media techniques, he forms a new graphic language for narrative expression that still carries old-timey sensibilities.
In his work, you’ll find elements of Anishinaabeg humour in the mundane and small moments of daily life, alongside the deeper political undercurrents that tug at its edges. This situates his practice in a new liminal zone where identities merge, and stories intersect—sometimes grounded in Anishinaabe Aki, other times wandering in from the magical world of Disney. He experiments with text, image, and visual juxtapositions, sometimes offering up pointed themes, other times leaving space for more to be imagined.
Through these playful encounters, he builds a new arbour for Indigenous audiences, a space where the subtle humour of Indigenous experience and familiar symbols of popular culture coexist seamlessly. Viewers are gently invited into this realm, which opens with sharp yet recognizable crossings, showing how the lines between these connected worlds are always changing.
Chapman draws on the styles of visual art icons, Woodland School, Mishomis Norval Morrisseau and the American Pop artist Andy Warhol, bending them through his own unique lens. With profound affection for Anishinaabe story forms from where the North Shore sleeps, his reinterpretations are brave, inventive and cheeky. Bounded perpetually to every storyteller in his family preceding him. By bringing in belly laughs, mischief, and critical analysis, Chapman keeps the Woodland style’s pull alive for the next wave of Anishinaabe makers.
The exhibit’s name, Run to the Hills! nods to Iron Maiden’s hit track and references Chapman’s 2017 print, Fight for Your Life. The song, widely known and belted outby Native uncles across Turtle Island, serves as a rallying cry for Indigenous empowerment and grit. Chapman harnesses these forces throughout his practice, honouring the timeless defiance that lives on across generations — much like old stories — while always leaving room for laughter to sneak in.
Curated by Danielle Printup
Christian Chapman: Run to the Hills! is organized and circulated by the Carleton University Art Gallery. It has been made possible in part by the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council.
“My father once told me that the northern lights were the spirits of the dead. He was dead serious. I was happy to hear that there might be an afterlife. What a wonderful afterlife it would be.”
– Christian Chapman
Don’t let your babies grow up to be Cowboys, 2010
Mixed media on canvas. Collection of the artist
Chapman cheekily inserts himself between two Western pop culture figures: onscreen cowboy Charles Bronson and famous filmmaker Clint Eastwood. All three are dressed in classic cowboy attire, iconically emblematic of the American West. By slipping himself into this scene, Chapman lassos the myth and takes tight hold of it.
Behind them sits the “End of the Trail” silhouette, looming like a familiar shadow you can’t unsee once you notice it. Most viewers know this classic trope: an Indigenous rider bent forward on his horse, an outline built to read as surrender, exhaustion, defeat. Chapman plants that figure there on purpose, not as background decoration but as a prompt, and maybe a provocation too, about how these images stick to us, what they pass down, what gets inherited without permission. By visually interrogating this narrative, he teases it, unsettling the basic “Cowboy vs. Indian” dichotomy that consistently relegates Indigenous folks to the margins while casting the triumphant settler as the hero.
Pretendian, 2022
Acrylic on canvas. Indigenous Art Collection, Crown-Indigenous Relations and Northern Affairs Canada
Indigenous peoples continue to feel the unease of the Pretendian crisis in their careers and daily lives. From experiencing the harmful shadow they cast, to navigating the distrust they breed. The community watches as Pretendians like Thomas King and Buffy Sainte-Marie act out stolen identities, a spectacle that strips away any real power and presence from those with deep connections to their Nations and communities.
From seeing Hollywood Indians in old Westerns, to artist grant applications, Indigenous peoples watch from the sidelines as identity becomes something that can be worn or performed. Chapman spotlights this theft head-on, writing “Pretendian,” boldly in red as a label and challenge. Rather than defining Indigenous identity, he exposes how it’s distorted, reclaiming a slice of that power here through sharp satire.
André René Roussimoff, 2018
Mixed media on canvas. Private Collection
Chapman’s André René Roussimoff—known as André the Giant—is this sweet tribute to his grandma, straight from childhood memories of wrestling nights when they’d huddle up in the living room. He’d watch her bolt from her chair, hollering at the TV, just lost in the excitement for her favourite wrestler. Chapman ties that energy to the Thunderbird—an Anishinaabe being of immense power—lifting André from wrestling legend to something larger, almost sacred.
Copper Thunderbird, 2009
Mixed media on canvas. Collection of the artist
Chapman centers Mishomis Norval Morrisseau—Woodland School founder, Anishinaabe legend—right at the heart of this work. Pulling the title straight from Morrisseau’s own Anishinaabe name, he reveals his reverence for a painter whose vivid colours and bold strokes still ripple outward, fueling new generations.
Morrisseau grips a rattle and wears a ceremonial headdress, his hair twisting into those signature tendrils that dance like his ancestor figures always did. Chapman layers in screen-printing—a new move—that doesn’t hide the nod to Morrisseau but leans into it, owning the lineage or artistic experimentation.
Morrisseau is depicted here as a guide and creative Elder, sparking a back-and-forth across generations in that Woodland visual language. Chapman’s canvas pulls him close—a bond that defies time, history, even stylistic twists—rooted, as Anishinaabe ways do, in gratitude and respect.
Fighting on the deck of the SS Edmund Fitzgerald, 2021
Silkscreen on paper, edition 4/12. Collection of the artist
Chapman weaves Anishinaabe stories into our shared history in this print, bringing the sacred right into everyday life.
There’s Mishipeshu—that copper-skinned water lynx from Anishinaabe cosmology—lurking right by the SS Edmund Fitzgerald, the iron-ore giant that went down in Lake Superior on November 10, 1975. Twenty-nine lives lost. A mystery that birthed songs, poems, whispered rumours that linger like mysterious residue. Questions that probably never settle.
But Chapman reframes it all with Mishipeshu’s gaze. The powerful being, known as a protector to some, is also a guardian of Lake Superior deep dangers. Here? It embodies the toll, peril, memory itself—heavier waters. The print doesn’t just place cosmology beside tragedy; it makes it the lens through which loss and the unknown take tangible shape.
Kikkoman, 2019
China Lily, 2019
Silkscreen on paper, edition 3/10. Private Collection
Playing off the never-ending preferred soy sauce debate that happens within Indigenous kitchens across Turtle Island, these two prints capture how seriously food, including its accoutrements, is taken. Chapman understands how dinner table humour is so central to Indigenous communities, honouring it through the famous China Lily vs. Kikkoman showdown.
By making a pantry staple a punchline, Chapman brings to our attention the fact that food in Indigenous households is so much more than sustenance. It’s where stories, shared memories, and family traditions all continue to live and tease.
Trickster, 2021
Acrylic and oil bar on canvas. Collection of Blake’s Christian Chapman Permanent Gallery Collection. Never for sale. Never.
Chapman uses oil bar in this study to draw attention to two important people in his world: Trickster and Norval Morrisseau. Trickster is a key figure in many Anishinaabe stories. He is dynamic and changeable, rebellious, transformative, and hard to pin down in a good way.
The oil bar’s bold, immediate texture adds to that energy, making the figure appear as a gesture, a mark, or something that is almost real. Chapman shows a strong side profile with floral iconography, reminiscent of Morrisseau’s iconic Woodland style. This leads to Trickster as a catalyst of disturbance, purposely breaking the peace of beauty.
Chapman sees Morrisseau as a radical figure in the aesthetics of Anishinaabe resistance. One person changes, the other person makes things possible, and the effort keeps them both moving forward.
Wild Rice, 2016
Chapman’s Soup series. Screenprint on paper, edition 2/4. Collection of the Thunder Bay Art Gallery, Gift of William Staubi, 2024
Asinabka Festival, 2016
Chapman’s Soup series . Silkscreen on paper, edition 4/15. Collection of Howard Adler
Andy Warhol and his Campbell’s Soup cans—icons of consumer society in Pop Art—get boldly reimagined in Chapman’s Soup series. Chapman adopts the style, swapping in Indigenous soups, including wild rice, thereby uniting Canadian and Indigenous culinary traditions.
The series also acknowledges the ASINABKA Film and Media Arts Festival in Ottawa, a non-profit organization directed by Indigenous artists. Wild Rice originated as a fundraising initiative for the festival, thus establishing the connection: Chapman’s prints are not detached from community life; rather, they move through it and contribute to its support.
Moderate Livelihood, 2020
Silkscreen on paper, edition 20/20. Collection of the Thunder Bay Art Gallery, Gift of William Staubi, 2024
Bill Staubi acquired this print directly from Chapman at a fundraiser benefiting the Mi’kmaq of Nova Scotia, following violent assaults by non-Indigenous individuals in 2020. That year, Mi’kmaq villages diminished their commercial fishing fleet while asserting that their moderate-livelihood fishery, safeguarded as a treaty right, would persist.
Non-Indigenous residents exploited the term “moderate livelihood” as a tool, vandalizing boats and traps, damaging equipment, and harassing individuals who purchased lobster from Mi’kmaq fishers.
Indian Taco, 2021
Silkscreen on paper, edition 2/6. Collection of Rawlson King and Linda Grussani
Chapman praises the Indian Taco as a unique Indigenous comfort food that is a staple at Powwows, festivals, and community events and is loved for good reasons. Chapman made the series to help raise money for the Onaman Collective, a social arts and justice group that works with Indigenous people. Indian Taco fundraisers play an active role in community spaces. They help Indigenous service programs stay open and give money to grassroots projects and people in need in the community. Chapman’s print turns food into a symbol of pride, support, and working together, going beyond just the delicious bite.
Don’t Whistle at the Northern Lights, 2010
Mixed media on canvas. Indigenous Art Collection, Crown-Indigenous Relations and Northern Affairs Canada
“My father once told me that the northern lights were the spirits of the dead. He was dead serious. I was happy to hear that there might be an afterlife. What a wonderful afterlife it would be.”
– Christian Chapman
Chapman’s own words here illustrate how stories hug his practice tight, like a warm blanket. For Anishinaabeg, the lifeforms of stories are ever-evolving, acting as a living, protective shield for little ones, a door into that more-than-human world, and a soft, steady heartbeat tying generations together.
Anishinaabe ways of life depend on relationships that are formed via stories such as these. Stories spark curiosity, encourage creativity, and help Anishinaabeg understand their place in the cosmos. Narrative is both a gift and a tool for Chapman; it guides his creative process with sensitivity and patience as he learns the Anishinaabe story forms.
By returning to childhood memories of Northern Lights stories, he keeps his family’s stories alive. He simultaneously carries out an act of creative restitution by transforming the colonial capture into a starlit homage by projecting photographs of Indigenous peoples taken by Edward Curtis into the lights in the role of ancestors in the celestial realm. These figures are now free to move about in Anishinaabe cosmologies as storied beings, rather than being fixed for study.
Bravery, 2011
Wisdom, 2011
Acrylic and oil on gesso paper. Indigenous Art Collection, Crown-Indigenous Relations and Northern Affairs Canada
Somewhere, in an alternative universe, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs are Anishinaabeg. Within that world, Chapman’s work fits seamlessly, blending Disney whimsy with Anishinaabe relational understandings.
Always an innovator, he builds a bridge between these two different cultural frames by playfully reinterpreting the Seven Grandfather Teachings, which he affectionately calls the Seven Grandparents.
Wisdom, love, respect, bravery, honesty, humility, and truth are not just lessons on a classroom wall, but guiding principles of governance and living in a good way. They represent care and duty at the same time. They define kindness via accountability, caring through reciprocity, and create a way to keep the community in balance.
Never Climb Out of A Window In Your Home. Traditionally, Only Dead People Are Brought Out Like That, 2014
Silkscreen on paper, edition 1/1 . Collection of Barry Ace and Earl Truelove
The Love I’m Glad I Never Had, 2015
Silkscreen on paper, edition 3/5 . Collection of Barry Ace and Earl Truelove
Powwow Series, 2016
Silkscreen on paper, edition 1/7 . Collection of Bear Witness
The Ghoul Who Lives in the Sun (Black), 2018
Silkscreen on paper, edition 2/3. Collection of the artist
The Garden of Earthly Delights, 2019
Silkscreen on paper, edition 7/8. Collection of the artist
Le Dejeuner sur l’herbe, 2019
Silkscreen on paper, edition 8/8. Collection of the artist
Wisdom of the Universe, 2021
Silkscreen on paper, edition 3/12. Collection of the artist
Shit-ass, 2021
Silkscreen on paper, edition 2/12. Collection of the artist
Spock, 2016
Silkscreen on paper, edition 1/16. Collection of Howard Adler
1492, 2017
Silkscreen on archival paper, edition 1/14 . Collection of the Artist
Bingo, 2016
Silkscreen on paper, edition 4/10 . Collection of the Thunder Bay Art Gallery, Gift of William Staubi, 2024
Happy Thoughts, 2020
Silkscreen on paper, edition 8/12. Indigenous Art Collection, Crown-Indigenous Relations and Northern Affairs Canada
Acknowledgements
