To Move Across the Land
Curators : Armando Perla & Michael Patten
La Biennale d’art contemporain autochtone (BACA), 8th edition
October 2, 2026, to February 28, 2027
Artist-in-Residence
Carrie Allison
Musée McCord Stewart
690 Sherbrooke St W, Montreal, QC, H3A 1E9
As part of the Artist-in-Residence program, multidisciplinary artist Carrie Allison is developing a new body of work inspired by floral beadwork traditions from her maternal nêhiyaw and Métis homelands. Drawing on her ongoing research in the Museum’s Indigenous Cultures collection, she explores the connections between territory, memory, and material culture.The project examines how beadwork carries stories of place and lineage, while also reflecting on the role museums play in preserving and interpreting these histories. Through a series of pieces that blend traditional techniques, archival inquiry, and contemporary approaches, the artist engages with themes of inheritance, transmission, and the evolving relationships between communities and cultural institutions.This exhibition will mark an unfolding chapter in Allison’s broader research, offering an intimate look at beadwork as both cultural continuity and creative resurgence.
Carrie Allison (nêhiýaw/Métis/mixed European descent) is a multidisciplinary visual artist based in K’jipuktuk, Mi’kma’ki (Halifax, Nova Scotia). Her Métis and nêhiýaw family names are: Beaudry, Surprenant, Noskeye, and Payiw; her maternal roots and relations are based in and around maskotewisipiy (High Prairie, Alberta), Treaty 8 and she is a citizen of the Manitoba Metis Federation.She grew up on the unceded and unsurrendered lands of the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), Stó:lō and Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh), xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), and Tsawwassen Nations. Situated in K’jipuktuk since 2010, her practice responds to her maternal nêhiýaw and Métis ancestry, thinking through intergenerational cultural loss and acts of reclaiming, resilience, resistance, and activism, while also thinking through notions of allyship, kinship and visiting.Old and new technologies are combined to tell stories of the land, continuance, growth, and of healing. The work she makes is rooted in research and pedagogical discourses with the intent to share knowledge and garner understanding for complex histories, concepts, and possible futures.
This Artist-in-Residence program was created in 2012 out of a desire to bring on a new meaning to the McCord Stewart Museum’s collections through the eyes of a contemporary artist. This is a way to rediscover the collections from other perspectives. The program invites artists to take a critical and conceptual look at the collections, reflecting on the connections between their artistic practice and the objects and stories they uncover during their research.
The Biennale d’art contemporain autochtone (BACA) would like to thank its partners the Canada Council for the Arts, the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec, the Secrétariat des affaires Autochtones, the Conseil des arts de Montréal, Tourisme Montréal, and Creative New Zealand.
Launched in 2012, the Contemporary Native Art Biennial (BACA) is a Montreal-based non-profit organization (registered in 2016) that promotes the work of Indigenous artists. The biennial is held every two years, in multiple venues, with each iteration focusing on a specific theme. The event is aimed at an ever-growing audience—Indigenous and non-Indigenous alike—and features both emerging and established artists. Our mission is to promote Indigenous art and to sensitize and educate the public on the cultural issues of the First Nations.