“Artist in Union with Mother Earth is one of the many erotic works Norval Morrisseau produced in his career, though most of them are found in private collections and have seldom been seen publicly. Morrisseau’s erotic works significantly reveal the artist’s personal views on sexuality and they also celebrate un-sanitized versions of the profane, which play a strong role in Indigenous cultural stories.” — Carmen Robertson, excerpted from Norval Morrisseau: Life & Work
“I certainly built a kind of narrative in my own mind about him. As I said earlier, I drew lessons in my way about how the reality of art and the idealisms that I attach art at one time and I still do. But I bought it hook line and sinker at one time, and now I would say I would never do that. It’s probably better. And I actually think art should be different, I guess. I used to think art had to be a higher calling and immune from more basic realities that constitutes the world. And now I think art should be infected by that too. It should be real. And so the calling becomes what do you do about it now? How do you commit to expression in that situation? That’s more demanding.” — Ken Lum