Native Visions: Evolution in Northwest Coast Art from the Eighteenth Through the Twentieth Century - Softcover

Brown, Steven C.; Macapia, Paul; Seattle Art Museum

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0295976586 ISBN 13: 9780295976587

Publisher: Univ of Washington Pr, 1998

Synopsis

Masks, bowls, bentwood boxes, and weavings from Native artists of the Northwest Coast grace museums around the world. Northwest Coast art has always been a changing and evolving tradition, as is evidenced by the varieties of style visible in 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. Not a static, rigid, or impersonal tradition, Northwest Coast art is stretched and remolded anew by individuals in each generation. This is a tradition of great antiquity which remain vital and alive today in the work of the best contemporary Northwest Coast Native Artists.

Many pieces by the 19th-century artists Charles Edenshaw, masks and totem pole models by Willie Seaweed, and unusual gold sculpture by Bill Reid are among the extraordinary artworks included in Native Visions.

Steven C. Brown approaches Northwest Coast art as a highly flexible and varied tradition, driven and molded by individual Native artists. In prose that is lively, lucid, and refreshingly free of jargon, he illustrates the means by which the styles and contributions of individual artists have served to evolve the tradition. His application of classic art-historical models of the American art traditions to Northwest Coast art reveals the role played by the inspirations and motivations of these artists in shaping the progressive development of this fascinating art form Paul Macapia's magnificent color photographs include images of rare and previously unpublished examples of Northwest Coast art. The book is based on an exhibition organized by the Seattle Art Museum and traveling to Anchorage, Indianapolis, and Cooperstown, New York.

About this title

About the Author:

Steven C. Brown is associate curator of Native American art at the Seattle Art Museum.

From Library Journal:

Sparkling with over 200 illustrations, 100 of them in color, of the magnificent art of Northwest Coast Native Americans, this book accompanies a traveling exhibition that originated at the Seattle Art Museum. Brown, associate curator of Native American art for the museum, is particularly interested in examining the chronology shown by changes in design forms. He traces the development of the consistent, dramatic style from the prehistoric era through the classic early 19th-century two-dimensional style to the current revival using variations on old themes. His emphasis on details of variation in design makes the text somewhat pedantic; he doesn't define much-used terms like formline and negative space, and he presupposes some knowledge of the culture's history, tribal customs, and mythology. But the art is breathtaking. For college or art libraries or those with collections of Native American materials.?Gay Neale, Southside Virginia Community Coll. Lib., Alberta
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Univ of Washington Pr
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0295976586
• ISBN 13: 9780295976587
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 216