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

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of this fascinating art form Paul Macapia's magnificent color photographs include images of rare and previously unpublished examples of Northwest Coast art.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.