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Gerald McMaster

  • Mentor 2023
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Curator, Author, and Professor
Ontario College Art & Design
Gerald McMaster – curator, artist, author, and professor – is former Tier 1 Canada Research Chair and director of the Wapatah: Centre for Indigenous Visual Knowledge at OCAD University.

McMaster has 40 years of international work and expertise in contemporary art, critical theory, museology and indigenous aesthetics, working at such institutions as the Art Gallery of Ontario, Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, and the Canadian Museum of Civilization.
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Gerald McMaster – curator, artist, author, and professor – is former Tier 1 Canada Research Chair and director of the Wapatah: Centre for Indigenous Visual Knowledge at OCAD University.

McMaster has 40 years of international work and expertise in contemporary art, critical theory, museology and indigenous aesthetics, working at such institutions as the Art Gallery of Ontario, Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, and the Canadian Museum of Civilization.

He was chosen to represent Canada as curator at the Venice Biennale (1995); in 2018 he was curator for 18 Indigenous architects at the Venice Architecture Biennale. In 2012 he was

Artistic Director to the 18th Biennale of Sydney. In 2022 he curated the Arctic Amazon exhibition at the Power Plant in Toronto. His book, Iljuwas Bill Reid (2020), was published by Art Canada Institute.

He studied fine arts at the Institute of American Indian Art (Santa Fe, New Mexico) and the Minneapolis College of Art and Design (BFA 1977). Received his MA in anthropology from Carleton University, he went on to defend his doctoral dissertation at the University of Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis, Theory, and Interpretation (1999).

McMaster is a nêhiyaw (Plains Cree) and a citizen of the Siksika First Nation.