Cador: A new world view through art

For most students, university is certainly an experience. But for art history graduate Jennifer Cador, it’s been literally life-changing.

Cador is this year’s winner of the Victoria Medal, given to the top graduating fine arts student. At 39, she began what she originally thought would be a history degree and then master’s on the British Renaissance.

“My mother had gone back to school at the age of 39. It always seemed to me really possib#8804; you could go at any age and you didn’t have to lock yourself into one career,” says Cador, who left a career in media to take on the new challenge.

In her first year, she discovered the lure of examining history through the lens of visual arts and switched majors to history in art. Not long after, Cador took an Aboriginal art history course with Dr. Victoria Wyatt that changed everything.

“What we talked about was world views—you can’t look at this art without understanding the world view that lies behind it,” she says. “To hear these world views which were so different and so holistic, they just made sense to me immediately.”

Cador is married to an Aboriginal man and said her “incredible” courses with Wyatt and instructor Kerry Mason on Aboriginal art not only changed how she thinks, but impacted her whole family’s approach to Aboriginal culture.

“It changed the way I see the world,” says Cador, and adds that the classes have also encouraged her husband and son to incorporate Aboriginal teachings into their lives.

In addition to the Victoria Medal, Cador has won a prestigious Social Sciences and Humanities Council of Canada scholarship for her master’s work, which will also be at the University of Victoria.

She noticed that heated debates arose in class any time a teacher mentioned the infamous George Southwell murals—large frescos painted on the walls of the legislature, now boarded over, that depict Aboriginal people in what many perceive to be a demeaning manner. Those debates became the beginnings of her master’s thesis.

“I’m interested in investigating Southwell himself as an artist. He was a giant on the BC art scene at the time,” she says.
She also aims to place Southwell’s murals in the context of the larger Canadian mural tradition of the early 1900s.

Cador says support from history in art professors was instrumental in helping her secure the grant—and in inspiring her to investigate the different perspectives held within modern Euro-Canadian and Aboriginal art. 

It’s a far cry from news media, and exactly where Cador wants to be.