April Mercredi

BiographyApril Mercredi is an artist whose ancestral background is Cree, French Metis and Chinese. At an early age, her family moved from Calgary into the forest near Rocky Mountain House. The move provided Mercredi with diverse life experiences including going to a one-room school house, living in poverty and with starvation, and interacting with her mother's extended Indigenous family. The cultural shock of the move and her experiences during that time later influenced her art. Her brightly coloured paintings in oil, acrylic or encaustic with mixed media and her use of natural forms and found materials relays Mercredi’s childhood connections to both her positive and negative life experiences and her Indigenous heritage. Her Indigenous spirituality emanates from her art.

Mercredi came to art very late in life. While living in Yellowknife, NWT she decided to market a few of her artworks to sell to tourists. This led her to seek formal training and she attended Red Deer College (AB), where instructors advised her to express her life experience. After graduating in 2000 with a Visual Arts Diploma and additional art studies, Mercredi exhibited in several art shows and received numerous awards and certificates of excellence as an emerging artist. Her painting, The Dancer, was acquired for the collection of Alberta Foundation for the Arts (Edmonton, AB). Soon after, she won second place at an annual Peace Hills Trust Native Art Contest. Her work was featured in the Western Showcase Art Gallery, Calgary Stampede, AB from 2009-2011.