is a figurative painter who lives and works in Edmonton. Draney is Cree from Sawridge First Nation, Treaty 8. She grew up near the town of Slave Lake, and much of her work is rooted in upbringing and life in Northern Alberta.
Draney earned both a BFA and a BA in English Literature from the University of Alberta. Influenced by her literary training, Draney paints scenes and characters that emerge as extracts of familiar, and intimate, settings and scenarios. Her works portray fragmented narratives, where stretches of blank canvas frame figures in repose, response and quiet exchange––friends gathered at a bar, a couple in bed, women lounging on floral-print furniture, or a ceiling fan turning above wood-paneled walls.
Often intentionally leaving sections of the canvas blank, Draney creates compositions that speak to the limits of memory as well as the potential for multiple interpretations and untold narratives. The stories that unfold are also drawn from those that circulate in her wider community, especially tales from survivors of natural disasters, including the 1988 flooding of Sawridge Creek and the 2011 wildfire that destroyed a third of the community of Slave Lake. Evidence of ingrained colonialism and systemic socio-economic injustice appears throughout these recollections. Of this, Draney says, “I am the living experience of a Cree person,” and her work is therefore able to go to “hard places, tender places.”
Also working in installation, in 2016 Draney created Trapline , a public art project that traces a family friend’s animal trapping route in bronze, commissioned by the Alberta Foundation for the Arts and on view at MacEwan University. The piece also features a series of associated painting, in which the artist reinterprets the idyllic landscapes of Canada's celebrated Group of Seven—an all male coterie of painters devoted to developing a distinctly national style rooted in depictions of pristine wilderness.
Brenda Draney (b. 1976, Edmonton, Canada) was the subject of survey exhibition, “Drink from the river” at The Power Plant, Toronto (2023); traveled to The Arts Club of Chicago, Chicago (2023) and The Art Gallery of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada (2024). Other recent solo exhibitions include “Brenda Draney: Out of the Woods,” Ortuzar, New York (2025); “Brenda Draney,” McMichael Canadian Art Collection, Kleinburg, Canada (2020); traveled to Walter Phillips Gallery, Banff, Canada (2019); “Smelling Salts,” Fogo Island Arts, Fogo Island, Canada (2019); and “Tell me about yesterdaytomorrow,” NS Dokumentationszentrum, Munich (2019). Draney has been included in group exhibitions at institutions such as the Albuquerque Museum, Albuquerque, New Mexico; Chrysler Museum, Norfolk, Virginia; Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, Quebec City, Canada; Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, Victoria, Canada; Art Gallery of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada, among many others. She won both the 2009 RBC Painting Competition and 2014’s Eldon and Anne Foote Visual Arts Prize in Edmonton and was short-listed for the 2016 Sobey Art Award at the National Gallery of Canada.
