Curator & Collector

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 [...]

See below for information on each pole An introduction already aims to summarize a field, but this post aims to be a particularly short summary of some of the material in Hilary Stewart’s excellent introductory book (reviewed in the previous post) Looking at Totem Poles. This post is in part inspired by a very brave [...]

“Looking at Totem Poles,” by Hilary Stewart. Image taken from the Spirit Wrestler Gallery website Today I finished Looking at Totem Poles, by Hilary Stewart, whose earlier, most excellent book Looking at the Art of the Northwest Coast was instrumental in helping me to understand the traditional forms of First Nations northwest coast art. Looking [...]

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. [...]

Signed advert of Robert Davidson exhibit at the Surrey Art Gallery Today I visited the Surrey Art Gallery’s exhibition “Eagle Transforming: The Prints of Robert Davidson,” which was “organized and circulated by the Vancouver Art Gallery.” (The exhibition is circulating around the province.) Today’s event was titled “Robert Davidson in Conversation with Ian Thom,” the [...]

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 [...]

Solstice 2001 image from Roy Henry Vickers’ “Copperman: The Art of Roy Henry Vickers” Solstice 2001 belongs to a period in Roy Henry Vickers’ art long after the highly traditional forms of Raven and Whale, and yet there is still much to be appreciated in terms of traditional forms and subjects, quite apart from Vickers’ [...]

The Westcoasters, taken from Roy Henry Vickers’ book “Solstice: The Art of Roy Henry Vickers” Roy Henry Vickers’ 1982 work The Westcoasters is an early transitional work. In the book Solstice, it is, in fact, the first work not to make more or less exclusive use of the traditional shapes of northwest coast aboriginal art. [...]

Raven and Whale, taken from the 2010 Roy Henry Vickers calendar In the previous six posts, we looked at the various formal elements of the aboriginal art of the northwest coast. These included shapes: ovoids, U-forms, split U-forms, and S-forms. We also saw how the form lines (in black) create negative white shapes, often crescents, [...]

Bill Reid’s Mythic Messengers This is the sixth post in my series–inspired by Hilary Stewart’s book Looking at Indian Art of the Northwest Coast–on the isolated forms of aboriginal northwest coast art. Each of the five previous posts has focused on the lines, shapes, or spaces used in the First Nations art of the Northwest [...]