First published in 1980 as an exhibition catalogue, The Legacy: Tradition and Innovation in Northwest Coast Art, appeared at the end of a decade in which a new generation of native artists redefined the contours of Northwest Coast art, transforming it into a vehicle of cultural renewal and revival, and providing the foundation for a vibrant commercial market that has continued to grow to this day. Over the course of its numerous reprintings, The Legacy has become a standard work on indigenous art from this region, and was the first to contextualize contemporary works, however much the product of revival, as creative responses to cultural disruption that nevertheless belong to the longstanding and innovative artistic traditions of the Northwest Coast.
Produced by what is now the Royal British Columbia Museum (RBCM), the exhibition itself had several incarnations before assuming the form presented in this book. Beginning its life in 1971 as an assembly of ninety objects concentrating exclusively on contemporary works by living Northwest Coast artists, over the next decade the exhibition would travel across Canada and overseas to the UK, eventually expanding to include a number of historical pieces. It was not the first exhibition to feature contemporary works, or to feature them largely as art rather than artifact; the Vancouver Art Gallery’s massive 1967 exhibition Arts of the Raven included about thirty contemporary pieces among the hundreds of historical works on display, and curator Doris Shadbolt was emphatic that they be viewed as “high art” and not simply objects of ethnology (Duff 1967). Unlike The Legacy, however, most of the contemporary works included in Arts of the Raven were by non-Native carvers, including Bill Holm, who approached the art on a primarily formal level. In contrast, The Legacy, while focussing to a great degree on the formal aspects, made a point of featuring artists who were committed to the art on both formal and cultural levels, and the book discusses the new generation of artists with explicit reference to the central role that artistic traditions were playing in cultural revitalization movements among coastal First Nations at that time.
Anthropologist Peter Macnair, who was Curator of Ethnology at the RBCM from 1965 until 1996, wrote the principal catalogue text, which is richly illustrated with over a hundred photographs and broken into five sections that follow a historical trajectory, beginning with a general introduction to the history of the Northwest Coast and ending with a survey of then contemporary artists from various First Nations. The second and third sections reveal most the time period the book was written in, providing formal analyses of various cultural styles in two-dimensional and sculptural formats that rely heavily upon the vocabulary introduced by Bill Holm in his now classic book Northwest Coast Indian Art: An Analysis of Form (1965). While the references to formlines, ovoids, u-forms, and configurative versus expansive and distributive design might seem overdone in retrospect, the formalist approaches which dominated the 1970s were arguably a necessary corrective, for Northwest Coast art was at that time most often experienced by the general public as tourist kitsch or ethnological specimen. Perhaps to provide balance, two appendices, compiled by Alan Hoover and Kevin Neary, provide more specific contextual information for each of the pieces included in the exhibition, and biographies of the artists where known.
The most valuable contribution of The Legacy can be found in the final two sections, which trace the connection between past and present through a discussion of key transitional artists and the return of vibrant artistic traditions in the 1970s. In addition to more widely acclaimed figures, such as Haida carver Charles Edenshaw (ca. 1839–1920), whose works in argillite and silver would later be a major influence on the likes of Bill Reid and Robert Davidson, Macnair pays particular attention to Kwakwaka’wakw artists Charlie James (ca. 1870–1938), Mungo Martin (ca. 1881–1962), and Willie Seaweed (ca. 1873–1967), who all produced small works for sale to non-natives while also actively perpetuating their cultural traditions in their home communities through a period of intense government oppression. Macnair reminds us that Mungo Martin, who was both an artist and a high-ranking hereditary chief, was as pivotal a figure as Reid in the renaissance in Northwest Coast art, working with the Museum of Anthropology and the Royal BC Museum in the 1940s and 1950s, and formally instructing the likes of Douglas Cranmer and Henry Hunt, who would in turn train subsequent generations of artists. The story of this legacy is continued in the concluding section, titled “The Art Today,” which provides an overview of key contemporary artists working at the time of publication, and discusses in some detail the array of individuals, both native and non-native, who contributed to the renewal of Northwest Coast art among various First Nations, including the cultural revitalization movement that resulted in the opening of the ‘Ksan centre in Hazelton, British Columbia, in 1970.
Despite the importance of The Legacy in capturing this historical moment, sadly this republication is a missed opportunity in many respects. Although the present edition boasts updates and revisions, these are extremely brief, appearing as errata at the beginning of each section, and for the most part merely indicating changes in terminology (Southern Kwakiutl = Kwakwaka’wakw), or the years in which particular artists alive at the time of original publication subsequently passed away. A new forward is included, but it is similarly brief, providing little insight into developments that have taken place over the past three decades. Many of the “contemporary” artists discussed here, including Joe David, Beau Dick, Don Yeomans, and Jim Hart, were only in their formative years, and had yet to find a voice within their respective traditions; others virtually disappeared from the scene or, in the case of Ron Hamilton, embraced a more radical politics and quit making any works for sale to non-natives. Coast Salish art, which Macnair (110) comments was then in a tenuous position and awaiting rediscovery, has since been revolutionized almost single-handedly by Susan Point, who works in a wide range of media and has had major public commissions including works for the Vancouver International Airport. Young and upcoming artists like Jay Simeon are nowhere to be found.
Without a substantial new introduction, this republication of The Legacy therefore has numerous shortcomings, foremost being the failure to historically locate the book itself. To those unfamiliar with Northwest Coast art, the significance of the exhibition and its catalogue is not self-evident, and certain aspects of the book have not held up well; Macnair’s (17) dramatic ecological description of the Northwest Coast as an isolated and inhospitable wilderness evokes the heroic narratives of an older anthropology, and the expert stance he adopts in criticizing the work being produced at the time by the Gitanmaax School of Northwest Coast Indian Art comes off as patronizing (93–95). Given the ascendance of co-curatorial models, exemplified recently by the Vancouver Art Gallery’s 2006 exhibit Raven Travelling: Two Centuries of Haida Art (Augaitis et al. 2006), the singular authoritative voice found in The Legacy should have been contextualized, and attention drawn to the absence of First Nation’s perspectives. These shortcomings are of particular concern because this book aims at a wider readership that will not necessarily approach the work critically.
Works Cited
Augaitis, D., N. Collison, M. Jones, and P. Macnair. 2006. Raven Travelling: Two Centuries of Haida Art. Vancouver, Seattle, and Toronto: Vancouver Art Gallery, Douglas & McIntyre, and the University of Washington Press.
Duff, Wilson. 1967. Arts of the Raven: Masterworks by the Northwest Coast Indian; an Exhibition in Honour of the One Hundredth Anniversary of Canadian Confederation. Vancouver: Vancouver Art Gallery.
Holm, Bill. 1965. Northwest Coast Indian Art: An Analysis of Form. Seattle: University of Washington Press.
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[Review length: 1286 words • Review posted on February 2, 2009]