Benjamin Chee Chee

Benjamin Chee Chee was born in 1944 in Temagami, Ontario, and was largely self-taught. He was a prominent member of the second-generation artists of the Woodlands School — an Indigenous art movement that began in the early 1960s, and has remained one the most important art movements in Canada.

Unlike many of his contemporaries, Chee Chee painted in a style influenced by modern abstraction. Most young Woodlands School artists were content to follow the lead of the movement’s founder, Norval Morrisseau, depicting myths and legends in the bold colours of the style known as Primitive Art. Chee Chee painted in a more economical way, reducing line and image in keeping with mainstream international modern art.

At the age of 32, at the height of his newfound success as an artist and printmaker, Chee Chee tragically committed suicide.