I'm Sherry Crawford, known as White Bear Standing, an Algonquin artist of the Kijicho-Manito Madaouskarini Algonquin Nation, living in Millbrook, Ontario.

 

I was making art long before I knew the word for it. As a child among a large circle of kin near Anderson and Paudash Lakes, I drew life-size figures in the sand of the gravel pit next door, decorated mud pies with flowers, built forts and sculptures in the forest and on the beach, and made pinecone wreaths from whatever the land gave me. I sketched and drew for years after that — different stages of my career before I had a career.

 

In 2010 I met artist and museum founder Elena Nagy. She saw an artist in me before I believed it myself, and I began to paint in earnest. My first finished painting was a portrait of Elder Tom Crane Bear, painted from a magazine cover that arrived in my mailbox that same day.

 

Today I paint in acrylic, and I work digitally too — my Mouseworks are drawn with a computer mouse. My paintings grow out of the Seven Grandfather Teachings — love, respect, wisdom, truth, honesty, bravery, humility — and out of the land itself: bears, eagles, the Standing People, and hidden faces that seem to appear on their own while I paint. The work has grown beyond the canvas as well — the White Bear Standing Reconciliation Gardens built with Fraser Young, my Seven Teachings paintings standing enlarged as signs along the Wàwàtesì Trail in Bancroft, and my lanterns at LunarFest and Toronto's Cavalcade of Lights.

 

My own gallery opens in spring 2027 near Bancroft — the next chapter of a story that started with a stick in the sand.

 

— Sherry Crawford, White Bear Standing