Saulteaux artist Robert Houle (b.1947) has claimed space and authority for Indigenous representation in contemporary art for more than fifty years. This new publication celebrates his generational influence and coincides with his exhibition Red Is Beautiful, organized by the Art Gallery of Ontario and touring to the Winnipeg Art Gallery and the National Museum of the American Indian at the Smithsonian Institution. A curator, writer, and educator as well as an artist, Houle has made a profound impact. Growing up on the Sandy Bay First Nation/Kaa-wii-kwe-tawang-kak in Manitoba, he was placed in residential school and denied access to his family and traditions. Always fiercely principled, he has dedicated his career to challenging colonialist perspectives. In 1980, he resigned from his position as the first curator of contemporary Indigenous art at the National Museum of Man (now the Canadian Museum of History) and set off on a path toward creating a remarkable body of work that spans painting, drawing, and large-scale installation. Robert Houle: Life & Work reveals how Houle's artistic output has opened critical discussion on political and cultural issues surrounding First Nations peoples, including Indigenous identity, the impact of colonialism, and land claims and residential schools. Houle has played a pivotal role in bringing contemporary Indigenous artists into the Canadian art mainstream through his writing and curating of important exhibitions, such as Land, Spirit, Power: First Nations at the National Gallery of Canada in 1992. This book also explores the artist's public art projects, critical elements of his legacy for art in Canada.

Houle's painting blends Western abstraction, postmodernism and conceptualism with First Nations art history and techniques, challenging expectations about Indigenous aesthetics An extensive survey spanning more than 50 years, Robert Houle: Red Is Beautiful celebrates Houle's ongoing career as an internationally recognized Indigenous artist, curator and writer, calling attention to First Nations and settler-colonialist histories through the critical lens of his impressive oeuvre. Painful personal experiences from the time he spent in residential school as a youth are brought into sharp relief through painting. Houle's visual commentary tackles global topics including commercial appropriation, Indigenous resistance movements, land rights, religion and war, among others. A leader in challenging systemic racial biases, Houle has played a significant role at successfully introducing Indigenous art and its relationship to the contemporary art world in Canada and beyond. Rare excerpts from the artist's archive are featured alongside major scholarly texts, poetic writings and personal anecdotes from fellow prominent Indigenous thinkers and creators, offering new insights about an artist ahead of his time. Robert Houle (born 1947) teaches at the OCADU and has collaborated on projects that seek to establish awareness of First Nations contemporary art, such as the Land, Spirit, Power exhibition at the National Gallery of Canada in 1992. He is represented by Kinsman Robinson Galleries in Toronto.

Exhibition catalogue for 'Land, Spirit, Power' at the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, in 1992, a collection of contemporary art intended as a response and contribution to current discussions on questions of cultural identity, from the specific perspective of First Nations. Includes three essays, and data on each artist.

Making African Christianity argues that Africans successfully naturalized Christianity. It examines the long history of the faith among colonial Zulu Christians (known as amaKholwa) in what would become South Africa. As it has become clear that Africans are not discarding Christianity, a number of scholars have taken up the challenge of understanding why this is the case and how we got to this point. While functionalist arguments have their place, this book argues that we need to understand what is imbedded within the faith that many find so appealing. Houle argues that other aspects of the faith also needed to be 'translated,'particularly the theology of Christianity. For Zulu, the religion would never be a good fit unless converts could fill critical gaps such as how Christianity could account for the active and everyday presence of the amadhlozi ancestral spirits - a problem that was true for African converts across the continent in slightly different ways. Accomplishing this translation took years and a number of false-starts. Coming to this understanding is one of the particularly important contributions of this work, for like Benedict Anderson's 'Imagined Communities,' the early African Christian communities were entirely constructed ones. Here was a group struggling to understand what it meant to be both African and Christian. For much of their history this dual identity was difficult to reconcile, but through constant struggle to do so they transformed both themselves and their adopted faith. This manuscript goes far in filling a critical gap in how we have gotten to this point and will be welcomed by African historians, those interested in the history of colonialism, missions, southern African, and in particular Christianity.

This companion volume to an exhibition at the National Museum of the American Indian in New York reveals how Anishinaabe (also known in the United States as Ojibwe or Chippewa) artists have expressed the deeply rooted spiritual and social dimensions of their relations with the Great Lakes region. Featuring 70 color images of visually powerful historical and contemporary works, Before and After the Horizon is the only book to consider the work of Anishinaabe artists overall and to discuss 500 years of Anishinaabe art history.