Planetary: Group Exhibition, January 23 – April 26 2020, Contemporary Calgary, Calgary, AB.

These Gifts, 2020.

This project is Brittney Bear Hat’s most recent work that developed while on the Collider self-directed residency facilitated by Contemporary Calgary at their new space in Calgary’s former Planetarium. Photography and text-based work have been Bear Hat’s most essential mediums when making work, but with the opening of a new space, she wanted to move in a similar trajectory. These Gifts explores the stories and memories attached to the functional gifts passed down to her over the years. The gifts themselves are essential tools for being out on the land, their importance is something Bear Hat wanted to communicate. This project reciprocates the care Bear Hat has received from her family and continues the journey of making identity work through the lessons and skills embedded into these gifts. Bear Hat created a body of work that is a part of Mohkinstsis rich history and that no matter how much we change, this land still needs caregivers.

* Due to unresolved ethical issues and COVID-19 this work was taken out of the Planetary exhibition by Brittney Bear Hat. Please see links page for the full statement.

níchiwamiskwém | nimidet | ma soeur | my sister, May 4 – June 16 2018, Contemporary Native Art Biennial (BACA) – 4th edition

~ adaptation exhibition of Little Cree Women (Sisters, Secrets & Stories) ~

Aura (Oneida), Natalie Ball (Modoc – Klamath), Catherine Blackburn (Dene), Tamara Lee-Anne Cardinal (Cree – Saddle Lake), Jade Nasogaluak Carpenter (Inuvialuit), Uzumaki Cepeda (République Dominicaine), Chief Lady Bird (Chippewa – Potawatomi), Dayna Danger (Metis – Anishinaabe – Saulteaux), Raven Davis (Anishinabe), Lindsay Dobbin (Mohawk), Lita Fontaine (Anishinabe), Brittney Bear Hat (Blackfoot – Cree), Richelle Bear Hat (Blackfoot – Cree), Tsēmā Igharas (Tahltan), Tanya Lukin Linklater (Alutiiq), Caroline Monnet (Algonquin), Sandra Monterroso (Maya Q’eqchi’ – Guatemala), Shelley Niro (Mohawk), Jeneen Frei Njootli (Vuntut Gwitchin), Gilda Posada (Aztec – Xicana), Skeena Reece (Cree – Tsimshian -Gitksan – Métis), Skawennati (Kahnawake Mohawk), Marian Snow (Kahnawake Mohawk), Tasha Spillett (Nehiyaw – Trinidadian), and selected works from the collection of La Guilde.

Guest curators: Niki Little and Becca Taylor.

I Believe in Living: Group Exhibition. The Bows; formerly known as Untitled Arts Society, Calgary, AB.

Basil AlZeri, Rana Bishara, Christina Battle, Richelle Bear Hat & Brittney Bear Hat, Rehab Nazzal, Abdi Osman, Tiffany Shaw-Collinge, Rinaldo Walcott.

I believe in living takes its cue from Assata Shakur’s poem “Affirmation” that begins the activist’s 1987 autobiography. In it, she insists on the gifts of living in spite of the oppressive and violent logics of the state, and writes of the power of loving and imagining as radical counteractions to colonial, racial, sexual, gender and class-based injustices. Accordingly, the artists and contributors in this project carry these actions forward in each their own way, offering tender, caring, creative, poetic and intellectual propositions that examine different forms of living as complicated gestures and lived realities.

Curated by Ellyn Walker.

Lineage, February 23 - March 31 2018. Latitude 53, Edmonton, AB.

Bear Hat continues the study of her background, especially questioning what is “hers” and the meaning of traditions within her indigenous culture. Posing an oil worker against the landscape of Pink Mountain in large-scale prints and objects, Bear Hat weaves together both sides of what she understands of the differences between living off the land and living from the land. This exhibition is part of Change for Climate—Art from Change, in conjunction with the 2018 Cities and Climate Change Science Conference, in Edmonton from March 5–7. This free series explores the potential of visual art to inspire climate change awareness.

Horse Camp, 2017, Emily Murphy Park, Edmonton, AB.

Ociciwan Contemporary Art Collective presents Brittney Bear Hat & Richelle Bear Hat’s "Horse Camp"; a newly created, temporary public art installation to be concurrently exhibited in Edmonton, AB and Saskatoon, SK.

The project creates a narrative of urban Indigeneity spanning over the banners; on language, stories, and survival. "Horse Camp" is Brittney Bear Hat and Richelle Bear Hat’s latest collaborative work, where they recreate and explore a memory of building a fire with their father and youngest sister. The landscape where their family has been gathering and learning skills is the place where the Bear Hat’s education stems from and continues. Being out at camp in the bush offers opportunities to be open to the environment, learn traditions, and share stories.

The installation will appear in Edmonton’s River Valley in Emily Murphy Park (11904 Emily Murphy Park Rd) to mimic the bush of the Bear Hat sister's childhood.

Camp, Summer 2017, Arts Commons, Calgary, AB.

Camp, is a collaborative work from Brittney Bear Hat and Richelle Bear Hat that is a further exploration of their Cree heritage. Moving deeper and with more direction from their first collaboration project, Little Cree Women (Sisters, Secrets and Stories).

Native Pride is a strange phrase and a hard one to understand. This culture is deep with history and ever-adapting, Richelle and Brittney Bear Hat strive to bridge that gap of separation. Together they build conversation and storytelling as the main key to their practices. As sisters growing up in Calgary they have felt the loss and complexity of being Native which in turn has been significant in their own practices but also in becoming adults. They have learned that being Native is about more than one viewpoint and their experiences can help shape their culture.

Maps and Dreams, June 1 - July 29, 2017. Audain Gallery, Vancouver, BC.

~ adaptation exhibition of Little Cree Women (Sisters, Secrets & Stories) ~

Jack Askoty, Brittney and Richelle Bear Hat, Jennifer Bowes, Brenda Draney, Emilie Mattson, Karl Mattson, Garry Oker, Peter von Tiesenhausen

Maps and Dreams is a group exhibition of work by contemporary artists that explores conceptions and implications of land use through cultural and industrial lenses. The exhibition specifically considers the territory of the Dane-zaa people of northeastern British Columbia, now in Treaty 8. Borrowing the title from Hugh Brody's book Maps and Dreams, a 1981 anthropological study of the Dane-zaa, the exhibition includes work by artists who consider how this land and its intersection with human use is articulated, represented and contested.

Curated by Brian Jungen and Melanie O'Brian.

Kokum. January 7th - February 18th, 2017. Alternator Centre for Contemporary Art, Kelowna, BC.

Kokum is about Brittney Bear Hat's on-going exploration of relationships and the value they hold through storytelling, memory, and traditions. Bear Hat collects items that have been passed down to her from her Kokum (Grandmother in Cree). This specific relationship is unique to Bear Hat, she wasn’t able to connect with her Kokum until later in her adult life. Getting to know a part of herself that was so separate from her Blackfoot upbringing is what she wanted to focus on in this solo exhibition. Bear Hat’s Kokum made her look deeper into the simplicity of receiving a gift and the significance that it can hold. Transforming these gifts into more, letting them become images on their own. Bear Hat wants to show the value of these gifts that are just ordinary household items and how they become so much more over time. They live in her home and are apart of Bear Hat’s daily life. Her Kokum was very hands-on and showing her grandkids how to be in the outdoors. This is where Bear Hat’s stories start from, drawing from her own memories, she writes in black ink on the walls alongside the family archive photos, and objects. Bear Hat is looking for that connection that brings all these elements together. Exploring these experiences and memories are what brings Bear Hat to understand what an image is and where it can go. Storytelling for Bear Hat is continually looking for the right time to tell the right story. It is an on-going practice for Bear Hat and Kokum pushes her to tell that story and gives her the right timing for these stories.

Little Cree Women (Sisters, Secrets, and Stories), March 5th - June 12th, 2016. RBC New Works Gallery, The Art Gallery of Alberta. Edmonton, AB.

For Brittney Bear Hat and Richelle Bear Hat, the term “Native Pride” is a strange phrase and a hard one to understand. As sisters growing up in Calgary, Alberta, they have felt the complexity of being Native, which has been significant for their own practices. The artists strive to know their culture, one that is deep with history and ever-adapting. They have learned that being Native is about more than one viewpoint and that experience can be shared as storytellers through image and text, which in turn shapes their culture.

The artists wish to share the confidence instilled in them from family members, who have never doubted their ability to learn about the landscape they themselves so boldly navigate. Little Cree Women (Sisters, Secrets & Stories) presents gathered elements such as willow bark, charred wood, white flowers, and mint leaves – letting them stand alone as quiet mementos, indicators of knowledge received.

Placing these specific materials on display is an act of honouring and showing their importance in our memory. With their mementos, text, and a single image of home, the exhibition is focused on the stories we share and an openness to the stories that have yet to be shared. The Bear Hat sisters state, “There are always going to be lessons and experiences that separate us but in their own time, they will be passed on.”

Brittney Bear Hat & Richelle Bear Hat: Little Cree Women (Sisters, Secrets & Stories) is curated by Kristy Trinier.

Cream, June 16th - August 21st, 2016. Contemporary Calgary, Calgary, AB.

Contemporary Calgary and Sled Island Music and Arts Festival are proud to present Cream, featuring work by Brittney Bear Hat, Wednesday Lupypciw, MT JR., Heather Kai Smith, and Sarah van Sloten.

Cream brings together six artists whose works explore a transition between two forms or ideas, bridging often-divergent conceptual spaces in order to develop a broader understanding of each. Past and present; memory and reality; physical and digital; boundaries found between disciplines, between artist and audience, or between artwork and gallery space. Whether the intention is to develop a deeper understanding of one’s history, surroundings, or society, each artist in Cream demonstrates that these forms are greater than the sum of their parts by employing elements of each to explore themes ranging from gender and identity to materiality, and using diverse mediums including installation, drawing, painting, video, and sculpture.

curated by Ginger Carlson and Nate McLeod.

Home; Future Station: 2015 Alberta Biennial of Contemporary Art, January 24 - May 3 2015, Art Gallery of Alberta, Edmonton, AB.

Future Station: 2015 Alberta Biennial of Contemporary Art is an examination of the creative practices at work with Alberta artists and ultimately an expression on what it feels like to be an artist in Alberta. The title is derived from an abandoned transit platform located under the civic centre of the province’s capital, Edmonton. Future Station is in reality both a physical and allegorical place of transition and stasis: part urban mythology and part monument to the banality of dormant infrastructure. It serves as a metaphor for the status of contemporary visual culture in Alberta – it exists and functions as a potent vacancy awaiting due recognition.

Curated by Kristy Trinier and organized by the Art Gallery of Alberta.

Blackfoot, 2015. Billboard in SE Calgary, AB.

Atlas Sighed: The 2014–15 Calgary Biennial is a guerrilla exhibition of contemporary art. Comprising numerous infiltrations into public space, this endeavour appropriates commercial vernaculars of the urban landscape in order to challenge conservative status quos.

Working monumentally and secretly, the following artists will be taking over billboards, bus shelters, telephone poles, newspapers, alleyways, administrative offices, cellphones, and the sky itself to realize this project: Dick Averns, Brittney Bear Hat, Steven Beckly, Victoria Braun, Bogdan Cheta, Alannah Clamp, CONSULTANCY GROUP, the Ladies Invitational Deadbeat Society, Natalie Lauchlan, Yvonne Mullock and Mia Rushton, Sans façon, Dan Zimmerman, and others.

The Biennial will be dispersed throughout Calgary and its suburbs from December 1, 2014, through to March 31, 2015, with support from the Alberta Foundation for the Arts, Pattison Outdoor, and anonymous sponsors.

Curated by Steven Cottingham.

Ours, May 2 – June 14, 2014, Latitude 53, Edmonton, AB.

In this new project, Calgary-based artists Brittney Bear-Hat and Jennifer Tellier explore what it means to call a colonized land home. Building on a previous drawing-performance collaboration, in OURS the artists test themselves and the trust that they have built their collaborative relationship on. Their new installation, made with personal artifacts and family histories, explore the ways that looking at someone else can help us to see ourselves, as they bring their experiences of the land they belong to into the gallery from where they discovered it—around campfires, in canoes, and out under the stars.

Deadly Lady Art Triumvirate: Group Exhibition, February 8 -April 27 2014, Contemporary Calgary, Calgary, AB.

Remember, 2014;

My Lineage, 2014;

Niitsitapiisini, meaning “our way of life”, 2014.

~excerpt~ Refuse Silence / an essay by Angela Marie Schenstead -- In discussion: a conversation with Tanya Harnett, Brittney Bear Hat, and Amy Malbeuf.

“Brittney Bear Hat’s work is personal and poetic and speaks directly about family, land, memory, and identity. Niitsitapiisini, meaning “our way of life”, is a self-portrait video projection of ghostly photographs of her mother (now deceased) and father that fade in and out of focus. Brittney stresses the importance of remembering as a means for understanding her own self. She furthers this sentiment in her Remember series, where she shares short stories tinged with sadness and longing. In one of the works she shares, “My dad showed us his family trapline. He told us you can still find arrowheads there. I still haven’t found one,” and in another work, “I could always find my kokum out in the bush, tanning or scraping hides.” These statements are punctuated with plastic miniatures fastened to the paper just above the text, as though they were storybook illustrations. They emphasize her desire to belong.”

That's What She Said, April 5 - May 31 2013. Truck Contemporary Art, Calgary, AB.

Both residents of Alberta, Brittney Bear Hat, and Jennifer Tellier question what it means to call a colonized land home. Through weekly drawing performances, the artists explore tensions associated with land, identity, and belonging. The artists will deconstruct stereotypes currently informed by appropriation, romanticism, and indifference, in an effort to begin a new dialogue. The two artists, similar in style, will merge in an installation of whose is who.