When I ask Adrian Stimson if he is surprised where life has taken him, he smiles, then laughs. “Always,” he says. Then his smile widens. “But it’s all good.”

Good is an understatement. Stimson is one of Western Canada’s most in-demand installation and performance artists. With recent and upcoming exhibitions and works at Calgary’s TRUCK gallery, Saskatchewan’s Mendel and Dunlop Art Galleries, and the Canadian Cultural Centre in Paris, he is earning accolades from critics, curators, and collectors alike. This past winter Stimson participated in a Visual Arts residency at The Banff Centre, completing a new series of paintings, Transformation, which will exhibit at the Art Gallery of Southwestern Manitoba this summer.

What is surprising about Adrian Stimson is that he started his professional life as a politician and community activist. Born in Sault Ste Marie, he grew up on the Siksika (Blackfoot) Reserve east of Calgary, and for eight years in the 1990s he served as a tribal councillor for the Siksika Nation. In 1999 he left politics to complete a BFA at the Alberta College of Art and Design, and later an MFA at the University of Saskatchewan.

For Stimson, art and politics are not so far apart. “Art is, in a sense, about leadership,” he says. “Artists are visionaries who can take a hard and honest look at society, and give that back to the viewer. Art can have multiple layers, revealing different emotions, different contexts. It can speak truth when words cannot.”

Stimson’s art plays with notions of identity and gender, and with the real and imagined histories of Aboriginal peoples. His best-known performance works are as Buffalo Boy, a gender-shifting parody of Buffalo Bill. Outfitted in a campy cowboy hat, buffalo hide corset, and black fishnet stockings, Buffalo Boy exists on the margins — a trickster who exposes cultural and societal truths. “I think the margins are a place of real power,” says Stimson. “Margins are a place of possibility. They allow you to look in, to evaluate and critique — to influence institutions and systems without being immersed in them.”

While Buffalo Boy uses humour and satire to question colonial stereotypes of Aboriginal peoples, works such as Transformation force viewers to confront contemporary issues head on. The paintings focus on the reality of Aboriginal women missing from cities across Western Canada. Close examination of the dark canvasses reveals the names of individual women, reminding us that each has a personal story, a life lived, and loved ones left behind. Similarly, Stimson’s Old Sun installation explores layers of meaning and emotion around the residential school system experience.

His intent, he explains, is not to change people’s minds or to construct a didactic viewpoint. “I see art as a trigger and a method of self-reflection and discovery…. when someone looks at my work I expect them to bring their own history to the experience. Transformation speaks in a hard, but also a gentle way about missing women, allowing viewers to find their own place in that reality.”

Stimson says he is amazed at the amount of work he produced during the seven-week Archive Restored residency. “There is so much room for creativity in Banff, and opportunities to make connections with other artists from across Canada and internationally. It has been hugely valuable.” Working with Visual Arts director Kitty Scott, Stimson will return to the Centre in the coming year as a visiting artist and faculty member.

That return will bring Stimson’s connection to the Centre full circle. His Banff roots stretch back to when he was fully immersed in the political world as a Siksika councillor. He attended several Aboriginal Leadership and Management programs at the Centre in the 1980s and 90s, first as a participant and later as a faculty advisor.

“Those programs emphasized accountability — to yourself and to your community,” he recalls. “I learned to rely on my inner compass, to take risks outside my comfort zone.” They also helped Stimson find the courage to make the transition from politics to art. It was around that time, he says, that he first heard someone quote the words of Louis Riel: “My people will sleep for one hundred years, when they awake it will be the artists who give them their spirit back.”

“I have a sense that art and politics are coming together,” Stimson says. “In the art world there is a ‘red renaissance’ — a proliferation of Aboriginal artists who are influencing mainstream culture. We are reclaiming our space and voice.”

Riel’s one hundred years, he points out, end now.

Adrian Stimson, Shaman Extermination Sunrise 2 (2005).