Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill

The School for the Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University is excited to welcome Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill as a new Assistant Professor in the Visual Art area and a Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Contemporary Arts.

Hill examines how Indigenous artists can create and share knowledge on their own terms while challenging the colonial systems that shape art galleries, museums, and universities. Her research explores how artistic practice can strengthen Indigenous ways of knowing and support Indigenous resurgence, and what role Indigenous artists can play within institutions built on the dispossession of Indigenous peoples.

Her CRC program includes three interconnected projects: a land-based residency where artists learn through shared activities such as gathering materials and working on the land; a symposium focused on experiences within colonial art institutions and strategies for change; and the creation of new artworks, films, and exhibitions. Together, these projects advance Indigenous-led approaches to research, creativity, and institutional transformation.

Hill also received an award of 100k USD from the John R. Evans Leaders Fund, associated with her CRC, to support Facing Away Making Studio, a custom lab here at the SCA. The lab will provide space for the experimental research that informs her sculptures, drawings, and video works. It will also serve as a hub for collaboration with artists and art-workers, student mentorship, and the organization of land-based residencies and symposiums focused on movement, connection, and collaborative knowledge-building rooted in relationships to the land. 

Biography
Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill is an artist and writer. Hill’s sculptural practice explores the history of found materials to enquire into concepts of land, property, and economy. Often, her projects emerge from an interest in capitalism as an imposed, impermanent, and vulnerable system, as well as in alternative economic modes. Her works have used found and readily-sourced materials to address concepts such as private property, exchange, and black-market economies. Hill is a member of BUSH gallery, an Indigenous artist collective seeking to decentre Eurocentric models of making and thinking about art, prioritizing instead land-based teachings and Indigenous epistemologies. Hill is Cree and English, with maternal roots in the Michel Band and Papaschase. She lives on the unceded territories of the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, xʷməθkʷəy̓əm and səlilwətaɬ Nations.