A confiscated Morrisseau forgery (courtesy of the Ontario Provincial Police)
A Canadian court has sentenced one of the ringleaders of the forgery ring that produced countless fakes and forgeries in the style of the Indigenous artist Norval Morrisseau.
When I first started writing about the discovery of the Norval Morrisseau forgery ring in Canada, I wasn’t anticipating that I would be writing about it over a year and a half later. But as a brief update on how things got this way: in March 2023, police in Ontario arrested the forgers and their conspirators for creating thousands of fake paintings. Morrisseau was an incredibly influential artist who was credited with bringing Indigenous art into the mainstream in Canada. He has been dubbed by many “the Picasso of the North”. Before he died in 2007, he founded the Norval Morrisseau Heritage Society (NMHS) to counteract forgeries. In 2019, a lawsuit against the Maslak McLeod Gallery in Toronto over a fake Morrisseau painting piqued detectives’ interest. In the end, they uncovered a forgery assembly line, with conspirators recruiting Indigenous artists to create works in Morrisseau’s style. Some estimate that, partially because of the group’s work, there are probably ten times more forgeries than legitimate Morrisseau works on the market today. Gary Lamont, the main organizer of the forgery conspiracy, pled guilty to forgery, making false statements and defrauding the public, and received five years in prison.
In June of this year, one of the other ringleaders, David Voss, pled guilty to the charges against him and just recently received his sentence. While Lamont was considered the enterprise’s overall leader, Voss worked out the details, such as organizing the assembly line and directly overseeing the production of the Morrisseau forgeries. Like Lamont, he received five years in prison for his activities. Judge Bonnie Warkentin stated that Morrisseau’s artistic legacy has been “irrevocably damaged” due to Voss’s crimes. Corey Dingle, executive director of the NMHS, called Voss’s activities “a cultural crime that goes beyond financial losses, reaching into the heart of Indigenous heritage.” Dingle also notes the NMHS has faced many challenges during this difficult time for the organization. The scandal has made Morrisseau a third rail in the Canadian arts. Both academics and gallerists are hesitant to study or exhibit work attributed to the artist, resulting in the NMHS slowly becoming a pariah organization.
Police have confiscated over 1,600 forgeries so far, with many more still unidentified. Despite the damage done by the forgeries, not only to buyers and collectors but to art lovers, scholars, and Canada’s Indigenous peoples, prosecutors decided they would not pursue a restitution order for Voss and his co-conspirators due to the complexity of the case. Four others still have charges against them. Two other individuals, Linda Tkachyk and Diane Marie Champagne, were initially arrested with the others involved, but later their charges were dropped. The next update in the case we will likely hear is the court date set next month for Benjamin Morrisseau, nephew of the artist who had a hand in the scheme.