Curator & Collector

A Blog about the Art, Museums, and Numismatics of the Northwest Coast

Understanding Native Art of the Northwest Coast

Filed under: Formal Elements of Northwest Coast Aboriginal Art,Northwest Coast Aboriginal Art — Tuesday, January 26th, 2010 @ 11:09 pm

Looking at Indian Art of the Northwest Coast

An essential book: Looking at Indian Art of the Northwest Coast

During the past few years, I have begun to be more interested in understanding the native art of the northwest coast as art; some months ago, I found this little treasure of a book that has helped me to take steps towards doing just that. A number of my forthcoming posts will summarize what I have been able to learn of this fascinating art form from this short volume by Hilary Stewart.

By way of background, I should mention that Stewart’s book, which concentrates on two dimensional art, has already been summarized on the internet at Native Online, so I will not be doing a detailed summary here. An excellent personal essay on the appreciation of northwest coast native art can be found at Bruce Byfield’s blog.

3 Comments »

  1. Curator & Collector » How to Understand the Art of the Northwest Coast First Nations:

    [...] I: Understanding Native Art of the Northwest Coast Part II: The Ovoid Part III: U-forms Part IV: S-forms and Split U-forms Part V: The Negative Space: [...]

  2. Curator & Collector » Robert Davidson at the Surrey Art Gallery:

    [...] been for me the most difficult. This is probably because the weight of the examples of his work in Looking at Native Art of the Northwest Coast tends towards the more abstract and “chopped [...]

  3. Curator & Collector » The Face in the Raven’s Tale, and Other Faces:

    [...] The ovoids to which Reid refers, including the central body ovoid which contains the face are “compressed into circles” as Hillary Stewart remarks in her remarks about this artwork in her book Looking at the Indian Art of the Northwest Coast. [...]

RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URI

Leave a comment

Line and paragraph breaks automatic, e-mail address never displayed, HTML allowed: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>

(required)

(required)