Of Indigenous Abenaki and Québécois descent, Rita Letendre was a Canadian abstractionist known for her large-scale ‘arrow’ paintings. First exhibiting within the male- dominated art movement of Les Automatistes in Montreal, Letendre sought to break away from the group, seeking her own visual identity. Upon travelling to Long Beach, California for a large-scale mural commission, the traditional methods of machismo-impasto surfaces were deemed impractical. Influenced by the California Light & Space movement, Rita employed airbrush acrylics to build luminous, iridescent fields of colour. Making titular notes to the passing of light through space, critic’s suggest that such references may be nod to her Indigenous heritage. Being of Abenaki descent, from the Wabanaki confederacy, often referred to as People of the Dawnland. The 1978 effort, Sau-a-Gan, features her signature ‘arrows’ flaring across the canvas, as if to give the viewer an instantaneous flash, frozen in time, before it leaves the pictorial space for good. The hard-edge geometry of the yellow and black wedges jump up from the picture plane and juxtapose against the silver-grey airbrush gradients ever-fading and dissipating into the foreground. Today, Letendre’s work is widely collected by Canadian institutions such as the National Gallery of Canada and the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, but recent international support, such as the solo presentation at the Rubell Museum which opened in December 2025 are pivotal in her introduction to broader audiences.