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In February 2025, the Wexner Center for the Arts presents an exhibition dedicated to the work of Toronto-based artist Maria Hupfield, an active member of the Anishinaabek Nation from Wasauksing First Nation (Robinson Huron Treaty), Ontario. Developing from her commission for the 2024 Toronto Biennial of Art, The Supernatural Powers of Fabulous Panther (Biimskojiwan), she creates for the Wex an environment that focuses on the possibilities of sculptural materials, exploring how live performances resonate with multiple versions of the present. Maria Hupfield’s immersive installations move through sculpture, performance, and video to challenge assumptions that spiral around objects. Her exhibitions are experimental sites where perceptions are tested, shared, and questioned. For Hupfield, artworks are always commas and never full stops: they are never fixed and always in conversation with the time and place that surround them. The Supernatural Powers of Fabulous Panther (Biimskojiwan) is a living sculpture, engaging with living peoples, site, space, ideas, and materials. It is crafted from industrial felt adorned with silver jingle bells and tin cone jingles. Felt is a primary material for Hupfield. She uses it to expose felt’s tactile and sound-dampening qualities, unraveling its material associations with the Western art-historical canon, returning to its practical utility. The gallery spaces will become a sensory exploration of water and place. Whirlpools (biimskojiwan in the Anishinaabe language) anticipate the appearance of Fabulous Panther (miszhibizhiw)—in Anishinaabe oral traditions (aadizookaang) the most powerful underwater being known. In a challenge to colonial conventions for displaying art, Hupfield’s powerful work creates as a site for active bodies that hold, support, and cushion art with generous care.
IMAGE CAPTIONMaria Hupfield activating her work Jingle Scroll.
Maria Hupfield merges performance art, design, and sculpture, drawing from Indigenous storytelling traditions through art, scholarship, collaboration, and social justice. Hupfield was the inaugural ArtworxTO Legacy Artist in Residence with the City of Toronto, a recipient of the Hnatyshyn Mid-career Award for Outstanding Achievement, and Toronto Friends of the Visual Arts Artist Prize, among others. Her work has been exhibited, performed, and collected across North America. She is co-owner of Native Art Department International with her husband, artist Jason Lujan. Hupfield is Martin clan and an off-reservation member of the Anishinaabe Nation belonging to Wasauksing First Nation, Ontario. Since 2019, she is a Canada research chair in transdisciplinary Indigenous art and an assistant professor of Indigenous digital arts and performance in the Department of Visual Studies and the Department of English & Drama at the University of Toronto Mississauga.
EXHIBITIONS 2024–25 SEASON MADE POSSIBLE BY Bill and Sheila Lambert Crane Family Foundation
FREE GALLERIES MADE POSSIBLE BY Adam FlattoPNC Foundation
WEXNER CENTER PROGRAMS MADE POSSIBLE BY Greater Columbus Arts Council The Wexner Family Institute of Museum and Library Services Mellon FoundationEvery Page FoundationOhio Arts Council , with support from the National Endowment for the Arts CampusParc Nationwide Foundation Ohio State’s Global Arts + Humanities Discovery Theme The Columbus Foundation Axium Packaging
ADDITIONAL SUPPORT PROVIDED BYOhio State Energy Partners Ohio History Fund/Ohio History Connection David Crane and Elizabeth Dang Melissa Gilliam and William GrobmanRebecca Perry Damsen and Ben Towle
Maria Hupfield
