Norman Vorano

Dr. Norman Vorano is a scholar and curator who publishes widely in historical and contemporary North American Indigenous arts. Currently, he is the Queen's National Scholar in Indigenous Art and Visual Culture in the Department of Art History and Art Conservation, and cross appointed to the Agnes Etherington Art Centre (AEAC) at Queen's University. From 2005 to 2014, he was the Curator of Contemporary Inuit Art at the Canadian Museum of History in Gatineau. He received his PhD from the University of Rochester's Program in Visual and Cultural Studies and his MA and BFA from York University.

Vorano has sought to make research on museums, history, and culture accessible through exhibitions and web-based initiatives. He is particularly interested in questions around Indigenous modernism(s), traditional knowledge embodied in art and material culture, and museums as sites of contact and identity. In 2017, his exhibition Picturing Arctic Modernity: North Baffin Drawings From 1964 opened at the AEAC, and is slated to travel across Canada and in Nunavut between 2018 and 2019. Exploring the impact of modernity in the Arctic, the exhibition uses online interviews with Nunavummiut to present and interpret historical Inuit drawings from the collection of the Canadian Museum of History. His 2011 catalogue and exhibition, Inuit Prints, Japanese Inspiration: Early Printmaking in the Canadian Arctic traced the global influences of mid-twentieth century printmaking in Cape Dorset, Nunavut. Since 2011, Vorano has been a research partner in a comparative project that explores Indigenous modernisms from around the globe, Multiple Modernisms: Twentieth Century Artistic Modernisms in Global Perspective.