Alan Syliboy: Culture is Our Medicine – Ray Cronin

2022 / Canadian Art, Biography, Artists / $22.95
9781554472468 / Trade paper / 64 pp

A Gaspereau Field Guide to Canadian Artists: No. 7

Mi’kmaw painter and multidisciplinary artist Alan Syliboy’s art career began in the early 1970s when an innovative art education program aimed at Indigenous youth took him to New England and introduced him to other artists, art forms and possibilities. But it was by returning home to Millbrook, Nova Scotia, and wrestling with how to create art in and for his small community that he truly began to find his voice. Drawing on the iconography of Mi’kmaw petroglyphs and stories, Syliboy’s work blurs the lines between traditional and contemporary Native art, reaching backward while also making his viewers aware of “time’s rupture and inevitable distortion.”