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When Bill Reid, one of North America's great artists, died on March 13, 1998, he left behind a legacy of magnificent art that drew deeply on that of his Haida ancestors. His work continues to be exhibited internationally and is in many private and public collections around the world. This book celebrating the artist and his work was first published in 1986. For the updated edition, Doris Shadbolt has written a new chapter covering Reid's last years from 1987 to 1998, including his masterwork, the great bronze sculpture titled The Spirit of Haida Gwaii, as well as the moving details of his ceremonial Haida burial on Haida Gwaii. In a long career, Reid embraced many art forms, driven always by a passion for the well-made, well-crafted object. This impulse, combined with his gradual rediscovery and rekindling of a rich Haida cultural heritage, informed and inspired his development as a visual artist of tremendous power and brilliant accomplishment.
A seminal collection of writing from one of Canada's most revered artists, spanning forty years of his life. When Haida sculptor and Canadian icon Bill Reid died, in the spring of 1998, he was more widely and more fervently admired than any other Native artist in North America. Although Reid attained his greatest fame in the visual arts, words were his first professional medium. Until he received his first large carving commission, in 1958, he made his living as a radio announcer and script writer. This work earned him the Haida name Kihlguulins, the "One with the Beautiful Voice." In his later years, Parkinson's disease curtailed his public speaking, but it did not prevent him writing. His ...
According to eminent French anthropologist Levi-Strauss, Reid "brought Northwest Coast art to the world scene, into dialogue with the whole of mankind." In this artistic biography, Karen Duffek gives an account of Bill Reid's life and work and of his role as artist, innovator, and ambassador of Haida art. After describing the processes by which Reid came to reconstruct the formal rules of a complex artistic tradition, Duffek focuses on his mastery of new techniques, particularly in making jewellery, techniques which others now emulate. In the key chapter "Beyond the Essential Form," she uses Reid's own categories of his work as "copies, adaptations and explorations," to give a candid appraisal of his artistic achievements -- from massive poles to gold boxes, from intricate bracelets to the great bronze Killerwhale statue.
Few twentieth-century artists were catalysts for the reclamation of a culture, but Iljuwas Bill Reid (1920-1998) was among them. The first book on the artist by an Indigenous scholar details Reid's incredible journey to becoming one of the most significant Northwest Coast artists of our time. Born in British Columbia and denied his mother's Haida heritage in his youth, Iljuwas Bill Reid lived the reality of colonialism yet tenaciously forged a creative practice that celebrated Haida ways of seeing and making. Over his fifty-year career, he created nearly a thousand original works and dozens of texts, and he is remembered as a passionate artist, community activist, mentor, and writer. Reid wa...
Part biography, part art history -- a thoroughly engaging look at one man’s life and his phenomenal influence on the world of contemporary art. Bill Reid was at the forefront of the modern-day renaissance of Northwest Coast Native art; but his art, and his life, was not without controversy. Like the raven -- the trickster and principal figure in countless Haida myths -- Bill Reid reinvented himself several times over. Born to a partly Haida mother and a father of German and Scottish descent, his public persona as a Haida Indian seems to have been as much a product of journalists, art patrons, museum curators and others in the non-Native establishment as of Bill Reid himself. It is clear th...
A seminal collection of writing from one of Canada's most revered artists, spanning forty years of his life. When Haida sculptor and Canadian icon Bill Reid died, in the spring of 1998, he was more widely and more fervently admired than any other Native artist in North America. Although Reid attained his greatest fame in the visual arts, words were his first professional medium. Until he received his first large carving commission, in 1958, he made his living as a radio announcer and script writer. This work earned him the Haida name Kihlguulins, the "One with the Beautiful Voice." In his later years, Parkinson's disease curtailed his public speaking, but it did not prevent him writing. His ...
Over his lifetime, Bill Reid created many historic pieces of art including the large bronze sculpture The Spirit of Haida Gwaii, nicknamed the Jade Canoe and displayed at the Vancouver International Airport, and The Raven and the First Men, a yellow cedar carving. Both are featured on the Canadian $20 bill. In addition to the immense praise for his artwork, Reid received the National Aboriginal Achievement Award for Lifetime Achievement in 1994. He continued to create stunning sculptures up until his death in 1998. Bill Reid Collected features the largest chronological collection of memorable works of Reid’s career in full-color photographs and images to date. Along with an introductory essay by Dr. Martine J. Reid, this collection pays tribute to one of Canada’s most renowned First Nations artists.
Part biography, part art history -- a thoroughly engaging look at one man's life and his phenomenal influence on the world of contemporary art. Bill Reid was at the forefront of the modern-day renaissance of Northwest Coast Native art; but his art, and his life, was not without controversy. Like the raven -- the trickster and principal figure in countless Haida myths -- Bill Reid reinvented himself several times over. Born to a partly Haida mother and a father of German and Scottish descent, his public persona as a Haida Indian seems to have been as much a product of journalists, art patrons, museum curators and others in the non-Native establishment as of Bill Reid himself. It is clear that...