In the fall of 2025, 13 Indigenous artists started their journey in the Indigenous Artist Mentorship Project (I AM Project) through the Whyte Museum in Banff. The mentors offering guidance are AJA Louden and Joseph Sanchez, and now the artists are creating brand new works that will be exhibited in the gallery space at the museum in November. “In Alberta, there are so many amazing Indigenous artists specifically,” said Emma De Sousa, curatorial assistant and I AM Project manager. “They’re just kind of a perfect group to work with in the sense that the creativity is completely unique to what we see anywhere else.” De Sousa says this is a continuation of the museum’s relationship with Indigenous artists connected to the Bow Valley who participated in the Cave and Basin Mural Project in the past few summers. “We’ve moved into the gallery in this iteration,” she said. “And there’s going to be a very large exhibition in our main gallery space with all of this different artwork that they do in their personal practice, but they get to kind of enact now at the museum.” De Sousa has watched the artists grow in their time in the museum’s initiatives, becoming confident as artists and even applying for grants to fund their work. “In our workshop week I said, ‘If you had a dream project, what would you create?’” De Sousa said. “And I got to watch that expand and explode and (witness them) be taken out of a more restrictive system that they’re normally in—as artists, you have a commission that you have to meet, where this (project) is much more expansive.” Kristy North Peigan is one of the 13 participants and says the mentors pushed her creativity. “I make things that light up,” she said. “It was really important to them that I integrate some of that futurism into my projects as well, so I have a triptych that is very classic religious iconography, but I’m using it to tell the story of three Blackfoot, manly-hearted women that were really iconic in their time.” North Peigan creates cosplay and costumes that bring pop culture into her Indigenous identity. “I have a three-part series, and the rough working title is High Boss Woman," she said. “I’m doing a Blackfoot Wonder Woman, then basically Kristy’s Barbie dressing room where you get a little bit of a lens into what my day looks like from being a muralist, public artist, cosplayer, everything.” Tiffany Wollman’s inspiration for her painting came from seeing a ditch full of flowers while driving on vacation. She’s a Cree-Métis artist and paints on a massive scale. Her painting relates to Métis living in Manitoba between 1900 and 1960. “Many people were left without anywhere to live,” she said. “They lost money, they had nowhere to go, they didn’t get reservations like the First Nations, so they had to resort to living in the ditches (on narrow strips of Crown land). Their nickname was ‘(road) allowance people.’” Wollman has eight weeks to complete her nine-metre-long painting that she thinks will take her close to 400 hours. “Now that I know that they were 30 feet wide, I feel like I have to commit to 30 feet to really immerse the viewer in the depth and the width of the landscape that you had to build your little house on and squat on,” she said. De Sousa says in all, there will likely be more than 20 pieces of art she has to fit into the gallery space at the Whyte Museum. The I AM Project will open to the public in November. You can learn more about the Indigenous Artist Mentorship Project at https://www.whyte.org/post/inside-indigenous-artist-mentorship-project.
