Namaakii Bee Bear Hat, Us in Sikoohkotoki (pt.2), two large-scale photo prints on paper and hand-written text with waterbased marker, 2025. Courtesy of the artist.
NAMAAKII BEE BEAR HAT | SOMETHING GIVEN
UPPER GALLERY
AUG. 9, 2025 - OCT. 18, 2025
ARTIST TALK: AUG. 9, 2025 | 2 P.M.
OPENING RECEPTION: AUG. 9, 2025 | 7 P.M.
The beauty of a lesson is that it is transitory. It is a gift held for a time before it moves again from giver to receiver, becoming unique to each practitioner in the process. Namaakii Bee Bear Hat’s solo exhibition Something Given, reflects on the lessons and knowledge passed through generations down to her. These lessons were taught to her, her siblings, and cousins from elder members of her family in the process of learning how to be prepared to hunt, trap, and fish on the land. In the exhibition, these teachings are made tangible through small ceramic sculptures of the gifted objects associated with each lesson.
A lesson is also a legacy. Knowledge passed down from one generation to the next is often one of the most enduring connections to the generations that have come before. For Bear Hat, the lessons started when she was a child, as her father sought to teach her self-reliance on the land. Even going back to when her father was a young man, that same independence was an important part of the lessons he learned from his own parents. The hands-on learning he passed to Bear Hat includes practical skills like knowing how to start a fire for camp, hunting, and finding smudge in the bush interwoven with spiritual teachings.
Akin to how lessons learned on the land are dependent on natural cycles, Something Given is also closely connected to the variances of earth, sun, and water. Earlier this year, Bear Hat visited Sikoohkotoki (Lethbridge) to collect natural clay to create the gift sculptures, take photographs, and borrow the rocks seen in the exhibition. Made from rough-hewn pieces of local cottonwood, the plinths that support the gift sculptures rise and fall in height like the hills and the rippled puddle mirrors on the floor suggest moving waters as they reflect daylight at different intensities throughout the day. The four plinths and four mirrors directly tie to Blackfoot knowledge and teachings about the significance of four in relation to the four cardinal directions and the cyclical nature of the four seasons, reminders of the movement of knowledge as it is passed on.
Curated by Adam Whitford, Curator & Exhibitions Manager
Namaakii Bee Bear Hat is a Mohkinstsis based artist, whose Blackfoot and Cree/Dane-zaa ancestors have lived on the lands that are now part of Treaty 7 and 8, for many millennia. Her work explores this cultural lineage through installation, photography, text and collage. Bear Hat graduated from the Alberta University of the Arts in 2011, where she majored in painting. Her work explores identity and story-telling, wanting to give back to the rich stories of her home territories. Within her work, Bear Hat is unfolding that which ties her to these unique landscapes.
Bear Hat’s most recent work, these trails are home, was a part of Story Keeping (2023) exhibition at The Nanaimo Art Gallery. Other recent exhibitions include, Big Rock River: Contemporary Indigenous Art in an Ancient Land (2022) exhibition at The Okotoks Art Gallery; Related (2022), at Libby Leshgold Gallery, Vancouver; Visions of the Hunt (2018), The Esplanade, Medicine Hat; níchiwamiskwém | nimidet | ma soeur | my sister, Contemporary Native Art Biennial (BACA), Art Mûr, Montréal and I Believe in Living (2018), Untitled Arts Society, Calgary. Bear Hat has also been awarded the Joane Cardinal Schubert Memorial Scholarship in 2011 and the Sonia de Grandmaison Scholarship in 2013.