Seekers and Travellers is the third volume of a trilogy dedicated to highlighting contemporary art from the American Northwest Coast; Spirit Faces: Contemporary Masks of the Northwest Coast, published in 1994 focuses on the aesthetically stunning masks produced by present-day Native artists; Mythic Beings: Spirit Art of the Northwest Coast, published in 1999, looks at the mythology and spiritual world that inspired Northwest Coast artists to create pieces that reflect their heritage in a new context. This third volume, Seekers and Travellers: Contemporary Art of the Pacific Northwest, presents a series of images and biographies of a limited number of NW coast artists, many of them mask makers, but also included are helmets, bowls, bags, robes, rattles, and other pieces from this large cultural area.
The art selected for inclusion in this volume is far from exhaustive; all the work chosen seems to have been assembled on the basis of personal contact, perhaps with artists exhibited at—or represented by—the Spirit Wrestler Gallery Artworks (Vancouver, BC), which the author co-owns; it features the creative work of established artists who have become part of a more public, and more commercial, arts context. The volume’s very brief introduction outlines, with some lacunae, a general context for the sculptural and other work; it includes notes on the peopling of the Americas, trade with outsiders (China and Russia are mentioned), exchanges between Pacific Rim communities, the potlatch, and the factors that have led to changes in not only the physical environment, but also in access to new tools and materials, as well as the impact of urbanization. The information is quite general and fails to give us an accurate portrayal of the significance of government regulations and other political, environmental, and economic factors to traditional practices such as narrative and design and activities such as shamanism and the potlatch.
The materials are organized in three “chapters”: Traditional, Cross-Cultural, and Contemporary; each section contains a number of beautiful photographs of finely crafted objects, each accompanied by personal reminiscences or ethnographic notes contextualizing the object and its maker. The most compelling segments of the book are the very personal artists’ statements about stylistic choices, as well as remarks about tradition and continuity. For example: “My ancestors mastered portraiture in a complete range of characters…for me or any of my contemporaries to strive for anything less would be a weak link in an otherwise powerful and profound chain of human artistic achievements” (Joe David, page 20).Or about ancestral inspiration, as Meghann O’Brien states: “When I started this journey I began to wonder how far back I had to go....Now that I have found what they (my hands) are meant for…my life is spent in a timeless space where the past and future expand into one” (56).
In spite of some valuable information, particularly in the biographical statements of the included artists, the book lacks scholarly analysis, omitting information on individual and distinct Northwest Coast traditions. This book is a good introduction to a range of contemporary aesthetics of Northwest Coast artists, but due to the absence of references to other work on the subject matter, it fails to give us a more substantial view of both older and more recent Northwest Coast art and its makers.
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[Review length: 537 words • Review posted on May 31, 2017]