Author Description

Masks, bowls, bentwood boxes, and weavings from Native artists of the Northwest Coast grace museums around the world. Northwest Coast art embodies a highly flexible tradition, reinterpreted by individuals in each generation, as is evidenced by artifacts collected from the area over the last two centuries. This richly informative book includes photographs of more than 160 objects from Seattle area private collections and the Seattle Art Museum, grouped chronologically to illustrate evolutionary changes within the Northwest Coast art tradition. This is a tradition of great antiquity which also remains vital and alive today in the work of the best contemporary Northwest Coast Native artists. Among the extraordinary artworks illustrated in Native Visions are archaeological artifacts and the earliest documented Northwest Coast objects, collected in the eighteenth century, along with numerous pieces by the nineteenth-century artist Charles Edenshaw, masks and totem pole models by Willie Seaweed, and an unusual gold sculpture by Bill Reid.