Fake Morrisseau paintings? A true crime podcast from the CBC x ABC?

📷 Norval Morrisseau: Artist and Shaman between Two Worlds, at the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. (Joanne Clifford / CC BY 2.0)

2024 was a busy year for the station with tape syncs. Recording them, I always look forward to what happens with the audio I record on my end of the line, with a host or producer on the other end, interviewing the person I’m recording. A “tape sync” for those who don’t know, allows for the radio magic of two people sounding like they’re in the same room—though they may be cities, provinces, states or continents apart.

It was last year we got a inquiry from the CBC about doing a tape sync regarding the late Norval Morrisseau. To be honest, I had refresh my memory of the name and google him. While I went to art school, I went for communication design and did some printmaking and art history. It had been a while since I last thought of fine art.

“Oh, this artist!” I thought. “Didn’t my parents have some prints of a Morrisseau? Round birds or something?”

Reading further on Morriseau, I learned about the fakes, a lucrative art forgery ring in Thunderbay, and a documentary called There Are No Fakes (currently available to watch on TVO).

Fascinating—I’d somehow missed the memo on this whole controversy, and I was going to get to hear a little bit of the inside scoop doing a tape sync on the subject! How cool is that?

From the CBC’s and ABC:

Known as the "Picasso of the North," Norval Morriseau is one of the most celebrated Indigenous artists in the world. But when a rock star gets a tip about the authenticity of his Morrisseau painting, he finds a sinister underworld with thousands of forged paintings, millions of dollars in profits, multiple fraud rings, and even a suspected murder. 

In this six-part series, from CBC in Canada and ABC Australia, host Adrian Stimson, an artist from the Siksika Nation, travels from Thunder Bay to the Northern Territory of Australia, to reveal what's believed to be the largest art crime fraud in the world. 

Adrian questions what this story tells us about how Indigenous art, and lives, matter.

Check out Forged with Adrian Stimson here via the CBC or here via ABC.