Greg Staats

Greg Staats is Skarù:reˀ[Tuscarora] / Kanien’kehá:ka [Mohawk], Hodinöhsö:ni’. b. 1963, Ohsweken, Six Nations of the Grand River Territory. A Toronto-based artist whose Hodinöhsö:ni restorative aesthetic employs mnemonics of condolence and performative burdens articulated in visual forms that hold body and place including oral transmission, text works, embodied wampum, photographic, sculpture, installation and video. Staats’ practice conceptualizes Land as monument embodied within a continuum of relational placemaking with his on-reserve lived experience, trauma, and the explorations of ceremonial orality. Staats’ lens-based language documents cycles of return towards a complete Onkwehón:we neha [our original ways] positionality, reciprocity and worldview.

Greg Staats, active since 1981 whose Solo exhibitions include: Art Gallery of Ontario, articule, Mercer Union, Gallery 44, McMaster Museum of Art, Urban Shaman Gallery, Kitchener-Waterloo Arts Gallery, NIIPA, CONTACT Photo Festival. Group exhibitions include; AGYU, NGC, MOCNA, Sante Fe. Staats served as Faculty for two Aboriginal VA Residencies, Banff Centre (2009, 2010). Staats’ works are held in public, private and corporate collections. Upcoming solo exhibitions: Art Gallery of Hamilton, ON (2023) and Agnes Etherington Art Centre, ON (2025). Staats has been awarded the Toronto Arts Foundation’s Inaugural Indigenous Artist Award (2021)