Many North American Indigenous cultures—from the Haida First Nations on Canada’s West Coast to the Hopi in the American Southwest—incorporate masks in their ceremonies, legends, and other cultural practices. So, confronted with the reality of the pandemic, in which masks have taken on a very different cultural and political significance, two Indigenous artists in Canada, Nathalie Bertin and Lisa Shepherd, decided to make them part of a global art practice. “Masks have really freaked some people out,” Bertin says. Art, they posit, is one way to confront to the negative…
