Two artwork fraud rings in a distant Canadian metropolis produced 1000’s of work offered in galleries as works by Norval Morrisseau, Canada’s most celebrated Indigenous artist.
By Norimitsu Onishi
Images by Brett Gundlock
Reporting from Thunder Bay, Ontario
Jan. 26, 2025
Tim Tait put two and two collectively when he went to promote a few of his work to a regulation agency in downtown Thunder Bay twenty years in the past. He noticed considered one of his different works already there — however with someone else’s signature on it.
And never simply anyone’s. It learn “Copper Thunderbird,” a.okay.a. the “Picasso of the North.” Actual identify Norval Morrisseau, Canada’s most well-known Indigenous artist whose unique type shattered the nation’s thought of artwork and elbowed its approach into its most necessary museum.
“I called the cops,” stated Mr. Tait, a neighborhood artist in Thunder Bay, Ontario, who can be Indigenous. “All they did was laugh at me and ridicule me on the phone.”
“And I said, ‘When it comes out, I’ll be singing like a bird.’”
By the point all of it got here out — a long time later — two prison rings in Thunder Bay had knocked off 1000’s of bogus Norval Morrisseaus that collectively fetched hundreds of thousands of {dollars} throughout Canada. The fakes, which included rebranded work by Mr. Tait and different Indigenous artists, made it onto the partitions of the nation’s high galleries and universities. They have been bought by retired schoolteachers, billionaire artwork collectors and even a rock star.
The leaders of the Thunder Bay rings have pleaded responsible to fraud up to now yr and are actually imprisoned. Thunder Bay — an remoted metropolis on Lake Superior’s north shore that drug sellers from Toronto have became Canada’s murder capital — has additionally emerged because the epicenter of the most important artwork fraud within the nation’s historical past.
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