Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Unknown Artists: Ojibwe
17th-century, 18th-century
Algoma, Ontario: Lake Superior Provincial Park
60%
Agawa Pictographs. 17th-18th century
As with many North American pictograph sites, the drawings at Agawa are quite deteriorated, though you can still make out a handful of forms, notably a striking Mishpesu (mythical water lynx) figure. In its heyday the rock wall was likely a teeming palimpsest of pictures in ochre, but today it's barely a few disconnected tableaus of limited pictorial interest. (Each figure, firmly limned, has some serious graphic power, but there are way too few of them for the amount of wall they take up; they're swimming in space.) What remains aesthetically significant, however, is the location itself: the cliff overlooks Lake Superior, a little archipelago and an inlet to one side of the drawings and nothing but water stretching out towards the horizon on the other. The presence of the pictographs turns this vista into something picture-like itself. It becomes a component of your experience of the drawings in what ultimately seems to have been a futile attempt by the artists to bridle — to make legible or safe — the awful enormity of nature. If what survives of the Agawa Pictographs is not itself great art, they carry the residue of a gesture that is fundamentally artistic. (TFS, 2025)