Honouring the history of Ahmoo Angeconeb

“Honoured.”
That’s how Lac Seul artist Ahmoo Angeconeb feels about the 30-year retrospective of his artwork currently on exhibit at the A-frame Gallery in Sioux Lookout.
“Opening night was really great,” Angeconeb said. “There were over 60 people that attended the opening. That was the largest number the A-frame Gallery ever got to an opening. They were really impressed with the artwork.”
A wide variety of Angeconeb’s drawings, serigraphs, linocut prints and etchings from over the past 30 years were featured in The Degrees of Abstraction: The Art of Allen Ahmoo Angeconeb, which opened Jan. 30 and is scheduled to run until March 30.
“A lot of different people had different favourite pieces,” Angeconeb said. “There was no one particular piece that everyone was in favour of.”
Angeconeb’s favourite piece was the pencil drawing from 2004, Untitled #2.
“It’s a turquoise and white pencil drawing on black paper,” Angeconeb said. “It shows a man in the middle and four caribou surrounding it. It’s a self portrait of myself being surrounded by four caribou.”
Although Angeconeb has had some health issues over the past few years, including a stroke in 2010 that affected his left arm and leg and a lower right leg amputation last fall, he attended the Feb. 9 opening reception at the A-frame Gallery along with his family and Lance Hildebrand, who curated the retrospective.
“With drawing, it doesn’t affect me because I’m right-handed,” Angeconeb said about the stroke. “But with my left hand and left arm being paralyzed, I can’t carve as much.”
His right foot and lower leg were amputated due to an ulcer infection stemming from diabetes.
“So I’m in a wheelchair,” Angeconeb said, noting he hopes to get an artificial limb this spring. “It really slows down my travel.”
His future plans include the creation of gold-coloured pencil drawings on black paper and wood block prints.
“I have a show at the moment in Minneapolis,” Angeconeb said. “It opened Jan. 20 and it just finished.”
Although Angeconeb started drawing at the age of five on his mother’s wall in the Lac Seul community of Whitefish Bay, it wasn’t until he was 13 years old that he discovered Norval Morrisseau, learned about oil paint and was taught professional art lessons by a teacher from Ireland.
Angeconeb first studied at York University in Toronto for one year when he was 22, then continued his studies at Dalhousie University in Halifax, N.B. and completed his studies with
a Bachelors Degree in Fine Arts at Lakehead University in 1989.
His artwork has since been featured extensively throughout North America and Europe, including solo exhibitions in Paris, France; Cologne, Berlin and Munich, Germany; Basel and Zurich, Switzerland; Monaco; Santa Fe, NM; Toronto; Montreal; Halifax; London, Ont. and Vancouver.
Angeconeb’s artwork is held in numerous public and private collections around the world and he frequently lectures on Native art and has acted for the Ontario Arts Council as a consultant and juror for Native art.
He has also been an artist in residence to the Saami (Laplanders) in northern Scandinavia.