While First Nations cultural practice still honours traditional forms, contemporary indigenous artists have diversified into many areas. The fourteen contributors whose essays make up Me Artsy pursue such varied disciplines as filmmaking, gourmet cuisine, blues piano, fashion design, acting, writing and painting as well as traditional drumming and storytelling. Their concerns include the eternal ones that occupy artists everywhere—how does one get started, where do you find inspiration, how does one make a living. What makes Me Artsy special is that all these concerns are always overlaid with an awareness of First Nations identity.

The essays explore many common themes around the role of art in First Nations communities, including the importance of art for creating social change, the role of art in representing Native culture and the fusion of traditional and contemporary techniques. On a more personal level, the essays describe the significance of art in the lives of the contributors, along with their sometimes unlikely journeys to success, stories that are often touched with humour and humility.

Chef David Wolfman describes gruelling years in the kitchens of the exclusive National Club; filmmaker Zacharias Kunuk discusses leaping into his first feature film without knowing how to finance it; and playwright Drew Hayden Taylor tells the story of putting a bullet through his first play and burying it in his yard.

Other contributors include actor/playwright Monique Mojica, painter Marianne Nicolson, fashion designer Kim Picard, painter Maxine Noel, blues pianist Murray Porter, scholar Karyn Recollet, dancer/choreographer Santee Smith, director/actor Rose Stella, traditional drummer Steve Teekens, writer and storyteller Richard Van Camp and manga artist Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas.

Ojibway writer Drew Hayden Taylor is from the Curve Lake Reserve in Ontario. Hailed by the Montreal Gazette as one of Canada’s leading Native dramatists, he writes for the screen as well as the stage and contributes regularly to North American Native periodicals and national NEWSpapers. His plays have garnered many prestigious awards, and his beguiling and perceptive storytelling style has enthralled audiences in Canada, the United States and Germany. His 1998 play Only Drunks and Children Tell the Truth has been anthologized in Seventh Generation: An Anthology of Native American Plays, published by the Theatre Communications Group. Although based in Toronto, Taylor has travelled extensively throughout North America, honouring requests to read from his work and to attend arts festivals, workshops and productions of his plays. He was also invited to Robert Redford’s Sundance Institute in California, where he taught a series of seminars on the depiction of Native characters in fiction, drama and film. One of his most established bodies of work includes what he calls the Blues Quartet, an ongoing, outrageous and often farcical examination of Native and non-Native stereotypes.

Drew Hayden Taylor's profile page