How can the arts help us examine and engage with social issues? How do our families shape our views, memories, and experience of the world?

From her role as Dr. Lisa Cuddy on the hit Fox series House, to her starring role as Abby McCarthy in Bravo's first scripted series Girlfriend's Guide to Divorce, Lisa Edelstein's range of roles are as diverse talent. Some of Edelstein's feature credits include Keeping the Faith, What Women Want, Daddy Daycare, As Good as It Gets, and Fathers and Sons. She played a Holocaust survivor and adopted mother in the drama television series Little Bird. The story centres on a First Nations woman who was adopted into a Jewish family during the Sixties Scoop, as she attempts to reconnect with her birth family and heritage.

Lisa’s career began by writing, composing, and performing an original AIDS awareness musical Positive Me at the renowned La Mama Experimental Theater Club in New York City. In the wake of COVID, Lisa began to paint using old family photographs as starting points. Her incredibly detailed paintings capture intimate relationships and spontaneous moments with honesty and compassion.

"The Canadian Indian Residential School system was a network of boarding schools for Indigenous peoples funded by the Canadian government's Department of Indian Affairs and administered by Christian churches. Over 150,000 Indigenous children were forcibly taken from their homes and placed in residential schools nationally. From the 1960s until the 90s, the Canadian government was trying to resolve the problem that the residential schools, run by the Catholic Church, were based on the idea that said: you save the child and kill the Indian. So they removed thousands of Indigenous children from their homes and families and erased their culture so they could become 'regular normal people' in the world."

https://lisaedelstein.komi.io/
www.lisaedelsteinpaintings.com/
www.imdb.com/name/nm0249046

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Photo credit: Mitch Stone
Courtesy of the artist