I was a very young street nurse when I first heard about Sam Ash. Every Thursday night my Street Health colleagues, and I ran a nursing clinic at 30 St. Lawrence, a barebones men’s shelter run by Dixon Hall that was doing harm reduction before it became a thing. The staff were caring and welcoming and devised a practice where if someone was drinking they could still enter the shelter, and staff would hold their bottle until the morning when the person exited.
The shelter was in a building that was essentially a hollowed out old warehouse. There was one area in the shelter that stood out. The lower part of a concrete wall was covered in paintings, drawings really. They were done by Sam Ash, an Ojibway man who stayed at the shelter. Sam had lost his hearing at a young age and over the years I would see Sam at various drop-ins and shelters, his hands flying in sign language and bright eyes communicating a message or question. He was funny and very popular. I later learned more about his paintings, widely attributed to be in the Woodlands style influenced by Norval Morisseau. After Sam died, a “Lives Lived” column by Danielle Koyama in the Globe and Mail described his artistic accomplishments.
Koyama, a front-line worker and long-time friend of Sam’s wrote that he once donated a painting to the Toronto Reference Library saying he wanted it where “it can be viewed by the public for free.”
So that brings me to my story.
In 2009 I purchased one of Sam Ash’s paintings to give as a token of deep appreciation to the Atkinson Charitable Foundation for their support of my work over many years. The foundation had also been a supporter of the Toronto Disaster Relief Committee that I had co-founded and had appointed me as one of their Economic Justice Fellows, a position I held for close to six years. That appointment allowed me to work locally and nationally on issues related to homelessness and housing.
I was liberated by the constraints of the health centre I had been working at, something that doesn’t often happen to nurses who are often constrained to purely clinical work. Not only did I give speeches and work with communities across the country, tour local shelter and housing projects but I made several films on family homelessness with filmmaker Laura Sky. I wrote my first book Dying for a Home, an oral history of activists who were homeless, and kick-started work on the need for palliative care for people who are unhoused.
The Atkinson Foundation, then led by the renowned and admired Charles Pascal who was known to have the best ‘rolodex’ in the city, was a renowned hub for thinkers, dreamers and activists of all kinds who regularly caucused and worked on homelessness, progressive economics, Indigenous rights, fair work, childcare, healthcare, food security and more. Unique to the foundation was its animation of the issues by dynamic staff who themselves were dreamers and activists with sound policy experience.
The Sam Ash painting I bought is titled “Sit And Be Quiet At Good Day” but it has a subtitle “Wait for our friend to come and join us.” I thought not only was the title appropriate, but I was pleased that so many visitors to the foundation would experience it. It depicts two loons amidst magical colours of yellow, blue and green.
Sam died in 2021, and Koyama wrote in the Globe and Mail: “His death is a great loss, but his art and his memory remain. Sam has paintings at the Royal Ontario Museum, the McMichael Canadian Art Collection, the Government of Ontario Art Collection, the Thunder Bay Art Gallery and the Canadian Museum of History, the Heritage Center at Red Cloud School in South Dakota and the Dennos Museum Center in Michigan.”
Add the Atkinson Foundation to this list? Sadly, no.
I’m still not quite over my disappointment on visiting the foundation in 2022 and not seeing “Sit and Be Quiet At Good Day” on the walls. The saga of the missing Winston Churchill “Roaring Lion” portrait by Yousuf Karsh, stolen from the Chateau Laurier but now recovered, stirred memories of my disappointment.
I only discovered the painting’s absence when I stopped by the new Atkinson headquarters to drop off copies of my latest book Displacement City which I had co-edited with Greg Cook. The foundation had been a supporter of its publication, in part because dozens of homeless people had contributed to both writing and art in the book. Foundations like Atkinson have been and continue to be at the heart of social justice struggles in our city.
It’s important to note that the foundation I visited that day is a refreshed entity. The offices themselves had moved from the old Toronto Star building to another waterfront high-rise. There is new staff, a new board. To my surprise, no one was aware of the Sam Ash painting.
Puzzled and worried, I contacted former staff and board members. Not a single person could tell me for sure what had happened to the painting.
Where the painting went to remains a mystery. Is it in storage? Was it sold? Was it given away? Is it in a place where as Sam would have wished “it can be viewed by the public for free?” Perhaps more importantly, how can such an important work by an Indigenous artist vanish into thin air?
As Greg Iven of the Thunder Bay Centre of the Deaf has said, “Even though we can’t see Sam, we can see him every day through his art.”
I can think of a few places this painting could “sit and be quiet at good day”: The Rekai Centre, a long-term care centre where Sam lived until he died. The Good Shepherd Ministries shelter, or perhaps the Thunder Bay Art Gallery that is clearly taking good care and respecting Sam’s art. They hosted a show of his work titled Sam Ash: People of the Eyes, accessible for the deaf, deafened and hard of hearing.
It will be a good day, and perhaps a lesson learned when this mystery can be solved.
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