WinDsor art gallery "a latest show, Big Doll waits for a Big audience
BIG Doll | XWAT Naaniitus
I Opened the Door But Where are the People?
By Stephen Weir
Visiting an art gallery’s special exhibition has always been a serious business for me. Be it the AGO, the National Gallery, or the Windsor Art Gallery, I prepare myself by mentally reviewing the Four Ws: Who is the artist? When does the exhibition open? Where is the gallery? What’s my time line allowance for touring the show?
I read up online on relevant websites, watch any posted videos, read the media reviews of the exhibition, and scour social media for public comment on the show and artist. Well, last Thursday was the day I went to tour Vanessa Dion Fletcher’s exhibition: Big Doll | XWat Naaulitis at the Windsor Art Gallery. I went with Canadian art scholar and former Windsor Art Galleries educational curator Chris Finn. He and I worked together at the McMichael Canadian Art Collection for decades and did work on a Marilyn Monroe retrospective art show that was well received in Ontario.
Chris was also a Windsor University student (BFA graduate) back in 1978. I was a poor student at the university, and to make money, I worked as a life model for a sculpture class offered by the famed Dr. Dan Bowles. Chris was in that course; that is how we met. He didn’t want to sculpt me, so instead, he had a live chicken in a cage to be his model. We have been friends ever since.
I like to arrive as close to the start of any special exhibition as possible. I want to see who is coming with me. As the doors open, I want to feel the atmosphere that we, the visitors, are bringing to the exhibition. Are people anxious? Is there excitement in the air and in the room?
On Thursday, there was nothing. I had shown up two hours before the 11 a.m. start. We had had coffee on Windsor’s main street and took a cold walk along a slippery Pitt Street past Unwin’s Ferry Street building.
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When we got to the front door, there were two people waiting for the museum on the first floor to open. But for us, on this frigid January morning, there was no one waiting in the icy parking lot or inside the frost-laden air around the admission desk. When our elevator doors opened on the second floor, facing the admission desk and the entrance to the Big Doll | XWat Naaulitis show, there was one employee at the cash register, but no one in the exhibition spaces, the cloakroom, or the two adjoining exhibitions not connected to Big Doll. I stayed in the show for 2 hours and talked to gallery employees but there was not a single visitor, no school groups, downtown city dwellers or visiting American tourists
The show opened November 20th and closes March 1st. Because of my own wonky commuting schedule between Toronto and Windsor, I felt a certain urgency to experience this exhibition. The show may close the next time I have a free morning to tour an art gallery I have been visiting for more than fifty years.
On the second floor I head to the coat rack to store my cane and coat. Again, there is no noise. But the view through the gallery window is a spectacular picture The brightly lit skyline of Detroit, a slow moving tanker sailing past.It is a view worthy of an art gallery.
In my time I have seen the Windsor gallery move from the Willistead Park, to buildings near Dieppe, to that interesting stay at Devonshire Mall to its new building near the Detroit River. It hits home that this is an international gallery showing Canadian Art to the World.
I mention this to Chris. He agrees that the building has a role in the city. “As the largest art gallery in the city of Windsor, “ he says to me ”Art Windsor-Essex has an important role to play in the community. In carrying out its mandate, the institution’s exhibitions and other programming activities provide opportunities for visitor experiences to engage intellectually and interactively with a range of visual
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presentations and/or artmaking designed to stimulate personal curiosity and challenge traditional notions of culture in Canada.”
I am given permission by the Museums to take pictures while I tour the gallery and use images from their website.
“To play in the community. In carrying out its mandate, the institution’s exhibitions and other programming activities provide opportunities for visitor experiences to engage intellectually and interactively with a range of visual presentations and/or artmaking designed to stimulate personal curiosity and challenge traditional notions of culture in Canada” Chris continues.
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“The exhibition Vanessa Dion Fletcher: BIG Doll/XWAT Naanitus presents a body of work by this Lenape and Potawatomi artist which provides a transformational and interactive experience for the viewer”said Chris by rethinking traditional cultural practices of bead working and doll making. …
“This exhibition is both profoundly personal and collaborative, open to audiences of all ages to participate in the design of an artwork.” writes the artist on her website.
Finally, the artist’s work which employs contemporary commercial materials selected for their scale and colour foregrounds the cultural significance of this aspect of a traditional Indigenous artmaking practice at this moment in time “within our society.”
Touring around before entering the exhibition space makes me feel a little dizzy with the wild and crazy sculptures and colourful wall hanging and floor mat constuctions .
Stepping into the Fletcher’s show is like walking into another world. The different colours from the exhibition dazzle visitors as you step off the elevator into the small gallery space. Wall hangings,
floor sized braids sculptural forms make you want to run from here to there on tippy toes to explore the ever-changing art that forms Fletcher’s vision as it spills over into every corner.
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BIG Doll is an exhibition that shows the process of making and creating from the heart, not the head. This exhibition is both
profoundly personal and collaborative, open to audiences of all ages to participate in the design of an artwork. Dion Fletcher is inviting us to reflect on how our education systems are limiting our creativity. Our minds, bodies, and hearts are not uniform; we bruise when forced into prescriptive learning models.
Working and doll making Fletcher lives and works in Toronto but has been coming to Windsor to support the show and give impromptu tours to school groups that are dazzled by giant fun constructions of plastic noodles and a skeletal hung man with a. beating heart you can feel
The curatorial staff tell me that younger visitors seem to want to put candy-coloured parts of her work in their mouth. “ Oh No!” I think. The artist statements on her website and inthe QRL codes on the wall say that the artist uses her own menstrual blood to add colour throughout the show.
In my experience assisting the Curve Lake Reserve Whetung Art Gallery, Beadwork and doll making were done as a cultural past time and as a traditional craft money making job.
I do find the BIG Doll show too much of a theatrical exhibit rather than a contemporary art exhibtion. But given her background it is not a shock//Vanessa Dion
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Fletcher is a contemporary Indigenous artist of Lenape (Lunaapeew) and Potawatomi heritage. She identifies as neurodiverse, and this perspective informs much of her creative practice. She holds a Master of Fine Arts (MFA) in Performance from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2016). Vanessa Dion Fletcher graduated from York University in 2009 with a Bachelor of Fine Arts.
This exhibition is curated by Julie Rae Tucker, a Lunaaweewi from Munsee, Delaware First Nation, and of settler descent. For the past five years, Vanessa and Julie have been learning Huluniixsuwaakan, the language of the Lunaaweewi in the Munsee dialect.
Two hours later my walking tour with Chris Finn and my encounters with Windsor Gallery staff have ended.
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Happy that I saw this mildly entertaining exhibition I still marvel that the gallery is empty. As the child’s rhyme says, “I open the door but where are all the people?”
In prepping for my visit, I looked for media reports of the show in the Canadian media. Aside from a CBC video I couldn’t open am thinking art goers in Windsor didn’t know about the show and if there was a buzz about it, maybe that was on Windsor social media sites.
Looking at the half full donation box at the end of the show, I see that most of the money is in American currency and a knuckle full of nickels and Canadian coins, So maybe there is a big buzz in the social media of Detroit about Big Doll
I am disappointed with the show. It looks more like Lego land with all of its plastic constructs and not wild beadwork, where is the indigenous angle to the show?
Well, there is an indigenous angle, a sculpture show by Mary Anne Barkhouse called Ndishnikaaz | Nugwa’am | My name is on the same floor at the same time (although it stays a few weeks after Big Doll leaves.)
Mary Anne Barkhouse is a Canadian contemporary artist and sculptor of Kwakwaka’wakw (Nimpkish band) heritage, Her work — which spans sculpture, jewellery, and installations like this one shown below:
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“often uses animal imagery to explore ecological concerns, Indigenous culture, history, and the interconnectedness of humans and the natural world” explained Chris Finn explains to me.
The animal imagery begins at the start of the exhibition, Currency is a sculpture of a bear cub and a wolf looking at a lit neon sign that spells out glowing red “Gifts, Guns, Snack Bar”
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My favourite piece sits in a corner near an open doorway. It is a life-size hunk of granite titled Succession II.According to the wall text beside the work, it features “a cast stoneware chainsaw — modelled on a traditional Pioneer chainsaw — resting on a cross-section of a tree stump taken from Barkhouse’s family farm in Nova Scotia.” I am drawn to the piece because it expresses concern for Canada’s endangered forest canopy. The disappearing trees, sacrificed to forestry practices, are represented by a smoking gun placed deliberately within a gallery that faces the United States.
IN CONCLUSION
I opened the door, stood in the middle of the gallery, and wondered if the real absence on that winter morning was not people at all, but the conversation this exhibition was meant to begin.
After fifty years of walking into art galleries, I left BIG Doll | XWAT Naaniitus thinking less about what I had seen than about who had not come to see it.
In the end, BIG Doll | XWAT Naaniitus asks important questions about participation and community, yet the quiet rooms of Art Windsor-Essex suggestthose questions are still waiting for an audience. When I finally closed the door behind me, the colours remained loud, the room remained empty, and the question lingered: where are the people?
Stephen Weir
January 25, 2026
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