{"id":613327,"date":"2026-04-18T23:20:33","date_gmt":"2026-04-18T23:20:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/613327\/"},"modified":"2026-04-18T23:20:33","modified_gmt":"2026-04-18T23:20:33","slug":"drew-hayden-taylors-new-play-about-forged-morrisseaus-asks-whats-real-and-what-isnt","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/613327\/","title":{"rendered":"Drew Hayden Taylor\u2019s new play about forged Morrisseaus asks ‘what’s real and what isnt’"},"content":{"rendered":"

Dubbed the \u201cPicasso of the North\u201d by French modernist Marc Chagall, the Ojibway artist was plagued by a slew of fakes<\/a> fit to match his Spanish namesake. Some experts put the number of fake Morrisseaus at as many as 10,000<\/a>, making him one of the most counterfeited artists in the world. It\u2019s a big problem, but Drew Hayden Taylor\u2019s new play makes it personal.<\/p>\n

The Undeniable Accusations of Red Cadmium Light<\/a>, which opens at the Firehall Arts Centre in Vancouver on April 22, follows Nazhi, the curator of an art gallery on the Otter Lake First Nation in central Ontario. Nazhi specializes in Morrisseau\u2019s work, and when a type of paint called Red Cadmium Light is found on one of the artist\u2019s pieces dated years before the pigment was invented, she\u2019s plunged headfirst into a thorny rabbit hole that threatens to engulf her career and her relationship with her daughter.<\/p>\n

Taylor, an award-winning Ojibway author, playwright and journalist from Curve Lake First Nation, says the play is \u201cessentially about what is real and what isn\u2019t.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

The idea \u2014 to write about Morrisseau and the people that pretend to be him \u2014 came to Taylor at a book launch where he met an expert in authenticating Morrisseau\u2019s work. After the two got to talking, he found himself intrigued by \u201cthe larger implications of somebody who makes a living pretending to be Norval.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"DrewDrew Hayden Taylor, writer of The Undeniable Accusations of Red Cadmium Light. (Paul Chato)<\/p>\n

Columpa Bobb \u2014 Tsleil Waututh and Nlaka’pamux actor, playwright and director of the Firehall\u2019s production of Red Cadmium Light \u2014 says the play opens \u201ca much bigger bag of issues\u201d than simple forgery. In Canada, the faking of Indigenous art is a massive industry<\/a>, but Bobb says it\u2019s only one thread in a knot of duplicity and legislated authenticity that deprives Indigenous communities of the right to self-determination. It feels \u201calmost impossible to unravel,\u201d she says. It\u2019s a good thing, then, that Red Cadmium Light isn\u2019t trying to.<\/p>\n

\u201cNormally my process in writing a play is the first act asks questions; the second act answers them,\u201d says Taylor. \u201cBut, in this case, the first act asks questions and the second act asks different questions.\u201d The industry intrigue of the fake painting at the play\u2019s outset works as a \u201cspringboard for larger, more personal issues\u201d that haunt the audience just as much as the characters.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s that personal touch, Bobb says, that makes Taylor\u2019s exploration of such a fraught topic feel fresh.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Columpa Bobb (Facebook )<\/p>\n

As an Indigenous artist herself, she was aware of people exploiting Morrisseau even before the forgeries made the news. She remembers watching him paint outside the Vancouver Aboriginal Friendship Centre (then called the Vancouver Indian Centre) when she was a child in the late 1970s and early \u201880s.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cHe was painting there partially so that people who worked there could keep an eye out for him,\u201d she says, \u201cbecause people were trying to take advantage of him \u2026 Our folks have known about this kind of thing for a while.\u201d Even so, Bobb always thought of the forgery industry more as a political topic than an interpersonal one.\u00a0<\/p>\n

When she read the script for Red Cadmium Light, she was surprised she never thought of something similar herself, but felt its personal care was completely in keeping with Taylor\u2019s style. \u201cDrew\u2019s got a big heart,\u201d she says, \u201cso of course he\u2019s going to be thinking of the hearts of others.\u201d<\/p>\n

Bobb and Taylor have been friends and collaborators for years. The last play Bobb directed at the Firehall \u2014 2017\u2019s Only Drunks and Children Tell the Truth \u2014 was also written by Taylor, who considers the venue his west coast home. He\u2019s looking forward to seeing what Bobb and another longtime collaborator, the Firehall\u2019s artistic producer, Donna Spencer, will make of the script.<\/p>\n

For her part, Bobb is excited to dive into the \u201cvery deep, dark pool\u201d that is the issue of pretendians in the art world, and she\u2019s looking forward to paying tribute to Morrisseau\u2019s work.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Previously, Androgyny, a huge, colourful painting from famed Anishnaabe artist Norval Morriseau hung in a featured space at Rideau Hall. (Sandra Abma\/CBC)<\/p>\n

Bobb is Coast Salish and grew up on the west coast. Though she always appreciated Morrisseau\u2019s emotional treatment of colours, it was only when she moved to Ontario that she felt the paintings touch her heart. \u201cAs soon as I saw an eastern fall, I got it \u2026 The starkness of the climate in the winter and the drama of the stillness \u2014 it\u2019s quite remarkable, but it\u2019s very unlike here [in BC].\u201d<\/p>\n

Translating that starkness and drama to the stage is front-of-mind for Bobb. It\u2019s a deceptively difficult question \u2014 how do you represent forgery in a visual medium without platforming it? Bobb didn\u2019t want to see \u201ca stage peopled with replicas of Indigenous artwork,\u201d so she and the team are \u201cplaying a lot with shape and light\u201d to try and evoke the pieces in question without displaying them outright.<\/p>\n

Bobb says the production design by Charles Beaver, augmented with lighting by Rebekah Johnson, are more conceptual than strictly literal. She wants the play to create \u201clayers of different kinds of tension, where the elasticity of tension waxes and wanes.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Euro-Wwestern tropes of set-up and payoff are useful at times, she says, but she doesn\u2019t want to let the audience off the hook that easily.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy pappy Dan George used to say, \u2018You need to allow yourself to embrace the beautiful struggles that are life itself, and fall in love with beautiful oppositions,\u201d she says, referring to her great-grandfather, who was chief of the Tsleil-Waututh Nation, for 30 years in the late 20th century. It\u2019s true that the struggles Red Cadmium Light tackles are painful \u2014 exploitation, identity theft and duplicity all sanctioned by the settler state \u2014 but Taylor and Bobb do their best to make them beautiful.<\/p>\n

The Undeniable Accusations of Red Cadmium Light<\/a> runs from April 18 – May 3 at The Firehall Arts Centre (280 E. Cordova St.) in Vancouver.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Dubbed the \u201cPicasso of the North\u201d by French modernist Marc Chagall, the Ojibway artist was plagued by a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":613328,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[76,354,355,49,48,356,75],"class_list":["post-613327","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arts-and-design","tag-arts","tag-arts-and-design","tag-artsanddesign","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-design","tag-entertainment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/613327","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=613327"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/613327\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/613328"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=613327"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=613327"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=613327"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}