GRAHAM PETTMAN 38
CREE CULTURE BROUGHT TO LIFE IN STONE
Twenty years ago, Graham Pettman walked into Apache sculptor Allan Hauser’s, studio in Scottsdale, Arizona, and jokingly announced to the gallery curator: “ In twenty years, I will be as technically good as Allan Hauser.” The gallery curator took one look at Graham’s portfolio, and concurred very seriously that indeed, Graham Pettman would be as good a sculptor as Allan Houser in twenty years.
Today, twenty years later, Graham Pettman is still sculpting at his studio in the Okanagan Valley, British Columbia, Canada. While Hauser is known as one of the first modernist Apache sculptors, Graham Pettman has established his reputation as one of Western Canada’s first post-modern Metis sculptors. And with Graham’s completion of his sculpture Mother and Child for the Westbank First Nation at the Okanagan Thompson International
Sculpture Symposium (OTISS) in 2002, he will most likely come to be known as one of the premier Cree sculptors carving large stones in Western Canada.
Graham Pettman was born in 1938 to a Cree mother and an English father at Fort Vermillion, Alberta. Although Graham spent time in his early years with his grandfather, a herbalist and trapper who continued to live in the traditional Cree way, like many native children of his generation, Graham (along with a sister) was taken away to a residential school in Peace River. By 1946, when Graham’s brother Clifford was born, his mother had contracted tuberculosis, and had to be sent to a sanatorium in Calgary to recuperate. While in Calgary, their mother had to adopt Clifford out to relatives. Because of the residential schools, as well as his mother’s absence in Calgary, Graham
“Sleeping Culture”, 2000
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