Nelson White is an artist and member of the Flat Bay First Nation Band (No’kmaq Village) in Flat Bay, Newfoundland. Canada. He studied Visual Arts at the Bay St. George Community College in Stephenville, NL, and at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax, NS. White exhibits widely across Canada and the United States, participating in both group and solo touring exhibitions, including Tukien (Awaken), which toured five institutional galleries. His work has been featured on CBC's The National and in Visual Arts News, and his paintings are held in major collections across North America — among them the provincial government art collections of Newfoundland and Labrador, Nova Scotia, and Prince Edward Island, as well as the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian. In 2021, White took part in the Fogo Island Arts International Residency, and in 2022 he joined a residency with Ocean Gate and Miawpukek Horizon that brought him on an expedition to the Titanic wreck site. He was named ArtsNL Artist of the Year for 2020 and received the 2022 VANL-CARFAC Excellence in Visual Arts Milestone Award. In 2025, he was longlisted for the Sobey Art Award, was a finalist for the Kingston Prize, and received the ArtsNL Artist Achievement Award. Nelson currently lives in St. John's, NL, with his family.
Portrait of Jeremy Dutcher
At the heart of this residency is a large-scale oil on canvas portrait — 60 × 54 inches — of Polaris Prize-winning musician Jeremy Dutcher. Dutcher is a classically trained operatic tenor and composer of Wolastoq First Nation heritage whose work bridges classical, traditional, and pop music into something distinctly his own. His debut album, Wolastoqiyik Lintuwakonawa, draws on early 1900s wax cylinder field recordings from his community, breathing new life into songs that were nearly lost due to the suppression of Indigenous musical traditions by the Canadian government. With only around a hundred Wolastoqey speakers remaining, Dutcher's work is as much an act of cultural preservation as it is artistic creation.
For White, this portrait is an extension of his broader artistic mission: documenting the evolving cultural landscape of Indigenous peoples and presenting them in a modern context — in positions of beauty and power. Pushing back against the long history of Indigenous people being depicted through a settler lens, White's portraiture asserts a living, 21st-century Indigenous identity on his own terms. The painting will be created from photo references rather than live sittings. True to White's open and community-minded approach — which he describes as his "father's house" philosophy, inspired by the welcoming home he grew up in — the studio will maintain an open-door policy, with visitors encouraged to drop in at any time.
