Curator & Collector

As Bill Reid got older, Parkinson’s disease began to take its toll on his body, and consequently, on his ability to produce more artworks. As if in response, Reid’s sense of scale grew to mammoth proportions, a change that required a team of artisans and assistants to help him out. Where Reid had begun alone [...]

See the previous post for information on each pole This post grew out of the preceding one, a brief summary of Hilary Stewart’s excellent book Looking at Totem Poles. The Haida and Kwakiutl poles above feature something that has intrigued me for some time: the presence of multiple presences within the same physical space, a [...]

Today I finally filled a blogging hole I have been wanting to get to for some time: I brought a camera to Bill Reid’s amazing sculpture that stands in front of the Vancouver Aquarium. It is, of course, the Killer Whale, a monumental work sculpted in bronze. The energetic, kinetic vitality of the killer whale [...]

My second edition Shadbolt [see the preceding post] arrived some days ago, and I read the last chapter and admired all the photographs in it. The photographs are much better, for the most part: they are brighter and sharper than in the first edition. As far as I can see, the text in the bulk [...]

In the last few months, I’ve used my lengthy commuting time to get a lot of reading done. Specifically, I’ve read several books about the aboriginal art of the northwest coast. They are, in the order I finished them: -Solitary Raven: The Essential Writings of Bill Reid, edited by Robert Bringhurst -The Raven Steals the [...]

Rear-side view of Bill Reid’s “The Raven and the First Men”* When I took a group of young people to UBC’s Museum of Anthropology some days ago, one of them asked me about the significance of the face at the bottom of the giant yellow cedar version of Reid’s The Raven and the First Men. [...]

Image of Bill Reid’s “Killer Whale (Chief of the Undersea World)” large version at Stanely Park taken from www.theravenscall.ca Via Google alerts, I just found the following fascinating suggestion for what to do with the historic building that currently houses the Vancouver Art Gallery (originally found in context at this forum): My favorite idea for [...]

Detail of promotional poster for www.theravenscall.ca Yesterday I attended at the Bill Reid Gallery of Northwest Coast Art the unveiling, as it were, of a new website produced by the Bill Reid Foundation: the Raven’s Call. The website has over 200 photographs, many of them of Reid’s artworks, many of which are not owned by [...]

Understanding the aboriginal art of the northwest coast is a worthy endeavor; fortunately, the first steps are not difficult. This post functions as a table of contents, or index, to the posts in my series on the formal elements of the aboriginal art of the First Nations of the northwest coast. The series took as [...]

Image of Roy Henry Vickers’ artwork The Westcoasters taken from the reproductions page of the artist. While in UBC’s Museum of Anthropology the other day, I realized that First Nations artist Roy Henry Vickers represents canoes in different shapes. This thought came to me when I took this photograph of a Nuu-chah-nulth canoe* there: The [...]