Forged

Adrian travels to Australia where he finds eerie similarities to Norval Morrisseau’s story. Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri, an Indigenous artist and Anmatyerre man from the Northern Territory, was a contemporary of Norval’s. Tjapaltjarri walks into a gallery and is surrounded by paintings signed by him…but he didn’t paint them. Bigger questions surface about how Indigenous art – and Indigenous peopl...

Kevin’s court case kicks off a years-long police investigation. But as officers in Thunder Bay, known by some locals as “Murder Bay” because of its high homicide rates, finally look into the forgeries, they see a possible connection with a suspected murder. Finally, there are some answers and arrests.  ----- Features:  Kevin Hearn  Norval Morrisseau, archival  Inspector Jason R...

Kevin Hearn decides to take the dealer who sold him his painting to court. But this is no ordinary court case. The original dealer dies before the trial. And Kevin, along with his lawyer and witnesses, are stalked and harassed by people who stand to lose a lot of money if Kevin can prove his Morrisseau painting is a fake. Kevin needs to hire a bodyguard as the future of the court case teeters. ---...

Norval Morrisseau, who died in 2007, was still alive when forged paintings in his name started appearing. When he saw hundreds of paintings online “signed” by him that he knew he didn’t paint, he started to fight back. To trace the fakes, Adrian goes to Thunder Bay in northern Ontario, the suspected epicentre of the art frauds and a place Morrisseau once called home, to search for who is forging a...

In a brush with death, Norval Morrisseau is given the name “Copper Thunderbird.” He learns to sign it in Cree syllabics, and writes it on his paintings. That artistic signature becomes a clue on the back of Kevin’s painting. There are other clues that lead to a jail where Norval was imprisoned (but still continued to paint) and to an old friend of Norval’s who sheds some light on what makes an aut...

Rock star Kevin Hearn of the Barenaked Ladies is doing rock star things — like buying paintings. And what better painting for an iconic Canadian rocker to buy than one by Norval Morrisseau, one of the most iconic Indigenous artists in Canada? But when Kevin’s Morrisseau painting is featured in an exhibit, it gets taken down because the head curator says it’s “questionable.” Kevin tries to get some...

Host Adrian Stimson, a painter from the Siksika Nation, tells the unfolding story of legendary Anishinaabe artist Norval Morrisseau and how criminal fraudsters copied his work in a scheme that became what is believed to be the largest art fraud in the world. A new six-part series from CBC and ABC Australia.