Born in Moose Factory, Ontario, Canada, Linklater now lives in North Bay.[1] He is married to artist-choreographer, Tanya Lukin Linklater.
Linklater attended the University of Alberta from 2000-2005 and was awarded a Bachelor of Native Studies and a Bachelor of Fine Arts. He also studied at Bard College's Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts from 2010 and completed a Master of Fine Arts in video and film in 2012.[1]
In 2018, Linklater installed pêyakotênaw—a public artwork comprising three large teepee sculptures—along the High Line in New York.[7] In an exhibition shown in 2021 in Seattle and in Chicago in 2023, Linklater employed a range of mediums -- sculpture, video and textile -- in order "to address the contradictions of contemporary Indigenous life within—and beyond—settler systems of knowledge, representation, and value."[8] Linklater was featured in the 2022 Whitney Biennial: Quiet as It's Kept, at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.[9] In 2023, the Art Gallery of Hamilton exhibited Duane Linklater: they have piled the stone / as they promised / without syrup which explored the architecture of the Bishop Fauquier Memorial Chapel in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, a small Gothic and Tudor style sandstone chapel built in 1881.[1] Also in 2023, the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) organized Duane Linklater: mymothersside, the artist’s first major survey exhibition which included large-scale structures, sculpture and video that focused on enduring ancestral practices as well as digital translations of tribal objects held in institutional collections.[10]
Distances, Origins, and Other Concerns, an open letter to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City critical of the institution's display of a Cree object from the mid-1800s that was commissioned for Art in General by curator Laurel Ptak.[13]
Mikikwan (2018), a concrete reproduction of a hide scraper.[14]
Tautology (2011-2013), a neon bird appropriated from a prominent painting by Norval Morrisseau.[15]
Cape Spear, a five-year intervention editing the Cape Spear Wikipedia page to add the words "At 6:24am NST 3/10/2011, Duane Linklater watched the sunrise. He traveled there to see the sunrise, to be the first one before anyone else."[16]
Learning, an exhibition in the Susan Hobbs Gallery, Toronto, organized by Althea Thauberger.[17]
What Then Remains, a permanent installation inside the longest wall in Mercer Union, Toronto.[18]
Monsters for beauty, permanence and individuality, 14 cast concrete sculptures at Don River Valley Park in Toronto.[19]
In 2013, Linklater won the $50,000 Sobey Art Award.[21]
In May 2016, along with Geoffrey Farmer, Linklater was the inaugural recipient of a Be3Dimensional Innovation Fund grant of $50,000 for a 3D printing project.[22]
In July 2016, Linklater won the $15,000 Victor Martyn Lynch-Staunton Award for Media Arts, awarded by the Canada Council for the arts.[23] In 2017, Linklater was awarded a public commission for the Don River Valley Park, Toronto.[24][19]
