![]() ![]() Hill explained that during the show’s curatorial process, what kept coming to his mind was the way Davidson speaks about there being a kind of alphabet of forms in the Haida visual language. The exhibition, which draws on the Vancouver Art Gallery’s collection of Davidson’s work as well as paintings from private collections, takes its title from Davidson’s Haida name, Guud san glans, meaning Eagle of the Dawn, and from the suggestion that Davidson is so at home within the stylistic conventions of traditional Haida art that he is able to “bend” those mores without breaking with them. “I feel that they did something that made the world better for me and for my generation, and so I have enormous gratitude for that,” Hill explained at the preview. A critic and art historian, Hill is of Cree heritage and holds a Canada research chair in Indigenous studies at Emily Carr University of Art and Design. “I feel similarly about his generation,” said Richard Hill, the Smith Jarislowsky Senior Curator of Canadian Art at VAG and co-curator, with Mandy Ginson (VAG associate curator), of Guud San Glans Robert Davidson: A Line That Bends But Does Not Break. Spend any time in Davidson’s presence and at some point he will tell you about how important the older people in his community were to him. One of Davidson’s mentors was acclaimed goldsmith, carver, and sculptor Bill Reid, who was strongly influenced by Edenshaw’s work and who guided Davidson in sculpture and design. So that’s how much we were controlled by the Indian Act.” “I didn’t hear that story until, actually, just recently. ![]() “And when I carved the totem pole in 1969 in Masset, I didn’t realize there were a lot of people of my parents’, my grandparents’, generation who were afraid to have the totem raised for fear of going to jail,” he adds. ![]() There was no mention of any of our Haida songs at all from the schools. “There was no art in the village I come from in Masset on Haida Gwaii. One of the first Native songs we were taught in elementary school was ‘One Little, Two Little, Three Little Indians’. “When I look back at seeing the old masters’ masterpieces in museums for the first time, I was absolutely blown away by the quality because I was born into a void,” Davidson said at the preview. And the totem pole he carved for his home village in 1969 initially brought up almost as much anxiety for people in his community as joy. He had never seen a single piece of art until after he moved to Vancouver to finish high school and stepped foot inside a museum some of the works that grabbed him were by his aforementioned famed great-grandfather. What makes this all the more remarkable is hearing from the affable artist himself-the great-grandson of legendary Haida carver Charles Edenshaw-just what little connection he had to his roots for so many years while growing up in Masset in Haida Gwaii.ĭuring a media preview of Guud San Glans Robert Davidson: A Line That Bends But Does Not Break-a monumental career-spanning exhibition of the artist’s prints, drawings, and paintings now showing at Vancouver Art Gallery-Davidson explains that it wasn’t until he was 16 years old that he heard a Haida song for the first time in his life. He’s also revered for the role he has played in revitalizing Northwest Coast art and, by extension, his culture. NORTHWEST COAST VISUAL ARTIST Robert Davidson, who is of Haida and Tlingit descent, is renowned for several reasons, not least of which are the fine technical and innovative aspects of his work. ![]()
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