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Maria Hupfield: The Endless Return of Fabulous Panther (Biimskojiwan)

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A wooden plinth with a yellow geometric pattern supports three gray felt and jingle sculptures; a fourth hangs and spirals down onto the platform.

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Feb 08, 2025–Jun 29, 2025

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Enter a dynamic sculpture that engages with living people, architectural space, ideas, and materials.

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 Endless Return 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. Through use, she exposes its tactile and sound-dampening qualities, unraveling its material associations with the Western art-historical canon, returning to its practical utility. The exhibition will also include new performances and documentation of past performances.

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.

"At this critical juncture, Maria Hupfield’s work is a much needed disruption, to hold institutions accountable and in doing so help them stay relevant."

Hyperallergic

Spring 2025 Learning Guide

Maria Hupfield, The Supernatural Powers of Fabulous Panther (Biimskojiwan), 2024. Industrial felt, bells, tin jingles, cotton fabric, and polyester thread; dimensions variable. Installation view at the Toronto Biennial of Art: Precarious Joys at 32 Lisgar St and Park, 2024. Courtesy of the artist; Galerie Hugues Charbonneau, Montreal; and Patel Brown, Toronto. Photo: Toni Hafkenscheid.

Closeup of spiral shaped lengths of gray felt edged with large and small jingle bells sitting on a plinth painted with a yellow geometric pattern.

Maria Hupfield, The Supernatural Powers of Fabulous Panther (Biimskojiwan), 2024 (detail). Industrial felt, bells, tin jingles, cotton fabric, and polyester thread; dimensions variable. Installation view at the Toronto Biennial of Art: Precarious Joys at 32 Lisgar St and Park, 2024. Courtesy of the artist; Galerie Hugues Charbonneau, Montreal; and Patel Brown, Toronto. Photo: Toni Hafkenscheid.

Closeup of a hanging spiral shaped length of gray felt edged with tin jingles that drapes onto a patterned plinth supporting three other felt pieces.

A hanging, spiral-shaped length of gray felt edged with tin jingles drapes onto a patterned plinth supporting three other felt pieces.

A wooden wall shelf painted with angled yellow lines displays pyramid-shaped and circular gray felt sculptures decorated with with tin jingles.

A wooden wall shelf painted with angled yellow lines displays a hollow, bracelet-shaped gray felt sculpture decorated with with tin jingles.

Maria Hupfield, dressed in black, performs wearing a long, gray felt scroll with silver bells attached along one edge.

Maria Hupfield activating her work Jingle Scroll. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: LF Documentation.

Maria Hupfield supports a long gray felt scroll with silver bells attached along one edge. It drapes over her left shoulder and right forearm.

Maria Hupfield activating her work Jingle Scroll.

About the artist

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 and a recipient of the Hnatyshyn Mid-Career Award for Outstanding Achievement and the 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.

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Exhibitions

THIS PRESENTATION IS MADE POSSIBLE BY
Ohio State Energy Partners

EXHIBITIONS 2024–25 SEASON MADE POSSIBLE BY
Bill and Sheila Lambert
Crane Family Foundation

FREE GALLERIES MADE POSSIBLE BY
Adam Flatto
PNC Foundation

WEXNER CENTER PROGRAMS MADE POSSIBLE BY
Greater Columbus Arts Council 
The Wexner Family
Institute of Museum and Library Services 
Mellon Foundation
Every Page Foundation
Ohio Arts Council, with support from the National Endowment for the Arts
CampusParc 
Nationwide Foundation 
Lois S. and H. Roy Chope Fund of The Columbus Foundation
The Columbus Foundation
Axium Packaging