Gail Tremblay was an American writer and artist from Washington State.
13 Facts About Gail Tremblay
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Gail Tremblay is known for weaving baskets from film footage that depicts Native American people, such as Western movies and anthropological documentaries.
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Gail Tremblay received a Washington State Governor's Arts and Heritage Award in 2001.
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Gail Tremblay claimed her father was of Mi'kmaq and Onondaga ancestry, and that her great-grandfather once lived in Kahnawake near Montreal.
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Gail Tremblay never offered any documentation of this and the US Department of the Interior's Indian Arts and Crafts Board determined that she was not Indigenous after a thorough investigation of her claims.
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Gail Tremblay's father was Roland G Tremblay, who was born in Somersworth, New Hampshire, to Peter Tremblay and Bernadette Demers Tremblay.
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Gail Tremblay received her BA in theater in 1967 from the University of New Hampshire and an MFA in English from the University of Oregon, Eugene in 1969.
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Gail Tremblay was a faculty member at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington and taught courses in English, art history, and Native American studies.
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Gail Tremblay began her faculty appointment at Evergreen in 1980 and taught her last class in 2018 in the newly finished fiber studio at the Longhouse.
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Gail Tremblay wrote exhibition catalog essays about other artists, including, "Speaking in a Language of Vital Signs," for the 2008 exhibition catalogue, Joe Feddersen: Vital Signs at the Hallie Ford Museum of Art at Willamette University.
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Gail Tremblay described her work as combining historical Native American techniques and materials with mainstream artistic expression.
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Gail Tremblay says she learned basketry from her aunts, but "update[d] them for a contemporary audience" through the use of modern materials such as film stock and film leader.
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Gail Tremblay created a basket using red and white film leader entitled, And Then There's the Business of Fancydancing, inspired by Sherman Alexie's film, The Business of Fancydancing, in which the main character, a Spokane man, is lovers with a white man.