The Legacy of Ahmoo Angeconeb

A photo of Ahmoo Angeconeb by Alastair MacKay
 for the opening ceremony of his 2007 exhibition titled,
Ahmoo's Prayer at the Thunder Bay Art Gallery

We are naturally geared to be impressed by dramatic effects, bold and bright colours and clever artistic hijinks that we often neglect the beauty and ability of drawing techniques to make bold statements, to inhabit and exhibit powerful links to the past and other cultures.

     As a professional print maker, Ahmoo Angeconeb’s deceivingly simple and unique use of line in his prints and drawings make powerful impressions, intuitively felt first before one realizes how much work, thought, history and referencing of other cultures is incorporated into his work.

    Angeconeb passed away a few weeks ago succumbing to health issues related to diabetes. He left a lasting legacy of art and influence in the arts community stemming not only from his art, but from his instruction as a teacher of adults and children, primarily in Northwestern Ontario. He was also a surprisingly upbeat and inspirational despite his acute condition in the last few years of his life.

     Born in Sioux Lookout in 1955 he was raised Lac Seul First Nation of the Whitefish Bay community until he was six when he attended a residential school in Pelican Falls with his siblings. Ojibway culture and language came by way of elders he met when getting a high school education in Kenora. There a teacher from Ireland introduced him to oil paints and he attended traditional First Nations ceremonies. Already drawing at the age of four, having used a bullet to draw with at one point, he was inspired at the age of thirteen by the work of Norval Morrisseau. He later studied visual arts over the years at York University, Lakehead University and Dalhousie University where he was also an instructor.

     With his art being curated and collected internationally, Ahmoo’s art shows featured thirty years worth of drawings, serigraphs, linocut prints and etchings. Across Canada his work travelled through Thunder Bay, Sioux Lookout, Winnipeg, London, Vancouver, Toronto, Montreal, and Halifax. He had shows In Santa Fe, Paris, Monaco, Basel in Switzerland. He was especially loved in Germany with many shows in Cologne, Berlin, Zurich and Munich. He was an artist in residence to the Sami, the Laplanders in Northern Finland. Prince Albert of Monaco has some of his work.

     His travels abroad influenced his style greatly. As an Ojibwe ambassador he  met with indigenous artists from other parts of the world. Not only was he introduced to their art and to the original art of their ancestors, Angeconeb was surprised by the commonality of imagery, thousands of years old, having visited  sites in the South of France to see ancient pictographs and petroglyphs.

    Although Angeconeb’s subject matter of bison, birds, stags, thunderbirds and other animals were solidly woodland art based, influences upon his style came from other indigenous cultures and traditional Japanese and ancient Egyptian work. He even incorporated the design elements of European heraldry. 

   His art is particularly known for their human figures looking much like bears with wide eyes and ghostly appearance. Both animals and humans often morph into one another to suggest spiritual realms beyond our physical reality. He personalized these worlds with his own symbology relying on his artistic temperament rather than employing static imagery out of habit or tradition.
Two of his sculptures sit outside the Thunder Bay Art Gallery. The gallery regularly pulls his work out of their collection for retrospective shows as in the gallery’s current show: The Perspective From Here: 150 Artists From the North. His work can be purchased at the Ahnisnabae Gallery at 18 Court Street.