Daphne Odjig

Daphne Odjig (Daphne Fisher; 1919 – 2016) was a visual artist from Canada of Odawa-Potawatomi-English heritage. Her art is often characterised as Woodland Art or Pictographic style. Odjig was a founding member of the artists’ alliance Professional Native Indian Artists Inc., also known as the Indian Group of Seven. Her artistic career spanned six decades and included lyrical legend paintings, personal reflective memories, and trenchant historical and political critiques. Experimental and creatively fearless, her styles and media varied widely with her subject matter. Fluid calligraphic lines characterised her early narrative paintings, while her later history paintings were densely expressive. Afterwards, her work featured elegiac colour studies of the British Columbia forests. Odjig combined her originality as a painter with her social awareness as a feminist to create a body of work that helped bring an Indigenous voice to the foreground of contemporary Canadian art.