'Radical diversity': Hampton makes history at MacKenzie Art Gallery – Regina Leader-Post

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John Hampton remembers viewing a landscape painting exhibition during a childhood visit to the MacKenzie Art Gallery.

Nine-year-old Hampton was interested in art and technology and thought he might grow up to be an artist.

The landscape show steered him away from that idea, as his young brain registered a pattern in the dates of paintings from the 1700s, 1800s and early 1900s.

“‘Wow, so to be an artist, I’m going to have to be able to paint a landscape better than anyone in history … That doesn’t seem very achievable to me,’” he recalled, laughing.

Kids visiting the gallery today should have a different experience.

“That landscape (painting is) really going to resonate for some people but (not) others; we want to make sure that you can see there’s other ways of doing things for representing the world out there too.”

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Hampton, who grew up in Regina, joined the MAG as director of programs in October 2018.

Hampton is “very excited” about leading the MAG, but “also feeling the weight of responsibility too.”

“There’s a lot of intersecting responsibilities there,” Hampton said in a phone interview.

A main goal “is to try and hold space for the many voices, perspectives, cultures, artists that intersect with this institution,” said Hampton, and “trying to hold space for the Indigenous people of this territory.”

That’s important, “for I’m also a migrant here,” said Hampton, a member of the Chickasaw Nation.

“My homeland is down in the southeastern United States, but my reservation’s in Oklahoma, so I’m a guest on this territory as well. So I don’t have illusions of being representative of Indigenous people here in Treaty 4,” said Hampton.

Hampton and his father, Eber Hampton, are the only two Chickasaw people John knows in Saskatchewan.

The family moved here in 1991 for Eber’s job as president of the Saskatchewan Indian Federated College, predecessor to the First Nations University.

John’s mother Mary Hampton was a psychology professor at Luther College.

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From childhood, digital art was John Hampton’s passion — it still is. In 2019, with Hampton as director of programs, the MAG launched a Digital Lab with a focus on digital arts.

With two academic parents, Hampton would find 3D animation books at the U of R bookstore. He attended computer camp and learned to program HTML. As a pre-teen, he built websites and did IT support work.

It wasn’t until university that Hampton dove into “capital-A arts classes,” and that was only after dis-enrolling from the now-defunct New Media Campus.

His goal was to be a 3D animator (nano-technologist was his second choice), but the 3D animation and game design courses he was taking made him realize he’d rather focus on conceiving and creating his own stories.

So, Hampton enrolled in an inter-media class at the U of R, a multi-faceted studio art class; he “immediately fell in love” and switched his major.

“In that space, in this inter-media studio, I found a spot where you could just explore an idea and find the best way to try to investigate that in an open-ended way, and that there were no correct answers but it was just a space to search, to have dialogue, and to build on ideas and experience. So I never looked back after that,” said Hampton.

He attended the University of Toronto for a master’s degree in curatorial studies. In Toronto, he was the curator-in-residence at the U of T Art Museum and artistic director at another artist-run centre, Trinity Square Video.

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His next job took him to Brandon, Man., where he was executive director of the Art Gallery of Southwestern Manitoba.

Hampton “saw some really exciting things and potential meaningful work in Brandon that I wanted to come back to do.” But there was another reason for the “Prairie itch” that brought him closer to home.

“There’s a different relationship to community, and specifically to Indigenous communities, that I was experiencing in Toronto that gave me a desire to get back into the Prairies,” said Hampton.

Growing up in Regina, Hampton experienced “two fairly distinct cultural realities,” the “primarily white schools and neighbourhoods” at Argyle Elementary and Campbell Collegiate, and then the cultural spaces outside of school.

“Of course there were Indigenous people in my schools, but that was not the dominant presence. And my mother being white and my father being Chickasaw, it’s something that I didn’t maybe think about too much as a kid. But it just seemed like those were the two worlds that were here; it existed at school and it existed at the powwow or the pipe ceremony and that’s just the way things are.”

A key memory of those two worlds colliding occurred when Hampton was about 15 years old, at the MacKenzie.

It was the opening reception of The Powwow: An Art History, co-curated by Metis artist Bob Boyer and Lee-Ann Martin — the first Indigenous head curator of a mainstream Canadian gallery.

When Hampton attended that event with his family, “that was the very first time that I really recognized the blending of those worlds, of seeing what I could recognize from Indigenous-specific spaces in a non-Indigenous environment … (and) that blending in the audiences there …”

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“For me, culture is the space where we imagine who we can be as a society,” said Hampton.

Through artists and curators sharing their work, and audiences experiencing that work, “we start to come to some shared understanding and agreement about who we are as a society and as people.”

“And that’s been a very active conversation in the world right now and in art communities, and it’s something that … right now is coming with a lot of discomfort for some people,” added Hampton.

“And it’s embracing that discomfort while also seeing the beauty of existence and of our world and our relations with one another and this world we live in.”

The gallery is a place “to make space for these conversations and for the people that are helping us process.”

For people who feel like they don’t “get” art, Hampton is adamant that the gallery is here for everybody.

“(A person) doesn’t need a specific background in art or a vocabulary in painting. It’s just that the way in which each of us sees this work is the right interpretation for us, for that individual. So everybody coming into the gallery is an expert in their own experience,” said Hampton.

“An art gallery is a little closer to a spiritual space … in that artworks work almost like allegory. That it’s a story being told, it’s an experience that’s being shared that then you need to find your own truth and reaction to it.”

Hampton added, “You’re not going to like everything that you see, and that’s true about the whole world. On Netflix, you’re maybe not going to watch every program and love it, but you’ll hopefully go through and find those pieces that speak to you …”