Contemporary, Indigenous and digital art

The art of the last half-century is too varied to fit a single story. Artists work in every medium, from paint and photography to installation, video, performance, data and artificial intelligence. Many of the most important voices come from communities that the traditional canon excluded, including Indigenous artists who draw on traditions thousands of years old while responding to colonial histories and contemporary life. This lesson looks at a selection of these developments most relevant to image makers: national landscape traditions and their critics, Indigenous art in Canada and the United States, the protocols for respectful engagement with Indigenous imagery, large-scale photography and video art, and the debates around digital and AI-generated images.

Revisiting the national landscape

Lesson 5 showed how nineteenth-century landscape painting was bound up with national identity. In the twentieth century, these traditions continued and were challenged.

The Group of Seven, who first exhibited together in Toronto in 1920, set out to paint a distinctly Canadian landscape in bold colour and simplified forms: lakes, rocks and windswept pines of the Canadian Shield, and later the Rockies and the Arctic. Tom Thomson, whose paintings of Algonquin Park inspired the group, died in 1917 before it formed. Their images became national icons, reproduced on stamps, coins and posters. Emily Carr, working on the West Coast, painted the forests of British Columbia and the carved poles of Haida, Kwakwaka'wakw and other First Nations villages from the early 1900s to the 1940s, in works of great intensity.

Later critics pointed out that the Group of Seven typically showed the North as an empty wilderness, overlooking the Indigenous nations whose territories they painted and the logging, mining and railways reshaping the land. Carr's paintings of carved poles, made with deep admiration, also reflected an assumption, common at the time, that Indigenous cultures were vanishing, at a moment when the Canadian government was actively suppressing them, including through the potlatch ban in force from 1885 to 1951. Today, galleries present these works alongside Indigenous perspectives on the same lands.

Indigenous art: continuity and innovation

Indigenous art in North America is not a single tradition but the art of hundreds of distinct nations, each with its own visual languages, materials and protocols. Contemporary Indigenous artists work in every medium, often combining customary forms with contemporary practice and addressing colonization, land, language, identity and survival.

Several Canadian traditions have had a profound influence on visual culture. On the Northwest Coast, formline design, the flowing, swelling lines and characteristic ovoid and U shapes used in Haida, Tlingit, Tsimshian and other art, organizes images of crest animals on poles, boxes, blankets and prints. The Haida artist Bill Reid, who died in 1998, revived and transformed these forms in large sculptures.

In Kinngait, then known as Cape Dorset, in what is now Nunavut, Inuit artists began making prints in the late 1950s with the encouragement of the artist James Houston, launching annual print collections from 1959. Kenojuak Ashevak's print The Enchanted Owl, from 1960, became one of the most famous Canadian images. The studio, now known as Kinngait Studios, remains one of the longest-running printmaking studios in the world, and contemporary Inuit artists such as Annie Pootoogook, whose drawings of everyday life in Kinngait won the Sobey Art Award in 2006, expanded its subjects.

In Ontario, the Anishinaabe artist Norval Morrisseau, who held his first major exhibition in Toronto in 1962, developed a style known as Woodland or Legend painting, with bold black outlines and bright colours depicting spiritual beings and teachings, sometimes called x-ray style because it shows inner lines of connection. In 1973, Morrisseau, Daphne Odjig, Alex Janvier and others formed the Professional Native Indian Artists Inc., often called the Indian Group of Seven, to demand recognition from galleries that had treated Indigenous art as craft.

Contemporary artists continue to reshape Canadian art. Kent Monkman, of Cree ancestry, paints large canvases in the style of nineteenth-century history and landscape painting featuring his gender-fluid alter ego, Miss Chief Eagle Testickle, to rewrite colonial narratives with humour and anger. In 2019, he created two monumental paintings for the Great Hall of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Rebecca Belmore, an Anishinaabe artist, makes performance and installation works addressing violence and land; she represented Canada at the Venice Biennale in 2005.

Protocols and respect: cultural appropriation

Indigenous imagery has often been copied without permission, from souvenir trinkets and sports logos to fashion and stock graphics. Cultural appropriation describes taking elements of a culture, especially a marginalized one, without understanding, permission or benefit to its people, in ways that can distort meanings, sacred contexts or ownership. Many Indigenous designs are not public decorations but belong to particular families, clans or nations, with rules about who may use them.

In Canada, the Igloo Tag trademark, created by the federal government in 1958 and now managed by the Inuit Art Foundation, certifies authentic Inuit art. Many arts funders and institutions, including the Canada Council for the Arts, publish guidance on respecting Indigenous cultural protocols, and the government has committed to implementing the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples through federal legislation passed in 2021.

Contemporary photography and video art

Since the 1970s, photography and video have become central to contemporary art. Large-scale colour photographs, often printed several metres wide and sometimes staged like paintings, rival history painting in scale and ambition. German photographers trained by Bernd and Hilla Becher, who photographed industrial structures in neutral, grid-like series, made monumental images of buildings, crowds and landscapes.

Vancouver became internationally known for photo-conceptual art. Jeff Wall's large backlit transparencies, from the late 1970s onward, stage scenes of everyday life that echo historical paintings, such as a photograph restaging a Japanese print in a windy field near Vancouver. Stan Douglas makes photographs and films reconstructing historical moments, and Edward Burtynsky, from Ontario, photographs industrial landscapes such as quarries, mines and oil fields at vast scale, raising questions about environmental change; his images have been presented in large exhibitions and documentaries.

Video art began in the 1960s, when portable video equipment allowed artists such as Nam June Paik to manipulate television images. Today, multi-screen installations, projection mapping and immersive environments draw on cinema's techniques but place viewers in galleries, public spaces and virtual worlds.

Digital art and artificial intelligence

Digital tools have transformed image making, from digital photography and editing to 3D rendering, generative art made with code, and images produced by AI systems trained on vast collections of existing images. Early computer artists in the 1960s, such as Vera Molnár, used plotters and simple programs to explore systematic variation. Today, artists such as Refik Anadol create large data-driven installations; his work Unsupervised, which used a machine learning model trained on MoMA's collection, was shown at the museum in 2022 and 2023.

AI image generation has raised intense debates. Many artists object that their work was used to train systems without consent or payment. Courts and copyright offices are deciding whether AI-generated images can be protected, and whether training on copyrighted images is lawful. The guidance changes quickly, so check current sources.

In Canada, the Copyright Act does not specifically address AI-generated works, and the government has consulted on AI and copyright. A registration listing an AI system as a co-author of an image was issued by the Canadian copyright office in 2021 and is being challenged in Federal Court by the Samuelson-Glushko Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic (CIPPIC), so the question of AI authorship remains unsettled at the time of writing (October 2026).

For image makers, art history offers useful perspective. Each new technology, from the camera obscura and photography to photomontage and digital editing, provoked fears about the end of art and debates about skill, authorship and authenticity. Those debates were resolved partly through law and partly through artists discovering what the new tool did best. The same process is now unfolding with AI.

What image makers take from contemporary art

Contemporary art shows that every medium, including photography, video, installation, code and AI, can carry serious artistic ideas. Revisiting national landscapes teaches that images of land carry histories of who is included and excluded. Indigenous artists demonstrate continuity and innovation, and their protocols teach respect, permission, attribution and shared benefit. Large-scale and staged photography connect directly to painting's history. And AI debates echo earlier controversies about photography and montage, reminding you to understand both the law and the ethics of the tools you use.