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Library | Material Type | Shelf Number | Child Count | Shelf Location | Status | Item Holds |
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Searching... Branch | Book | 709.011 DAV | 1 | Non-fiction Collection | Searching... Unknown | Searching... Unavailable |
Searching... South | Book | 709.2 DAVIDSON | 1 | Non-fiction Collection | Searching... Unknown | Searching... Unavailable |
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Summary
Summary
Photographs and discussion of the work of Native American artist Robert Davidson. Supplies a good overview of the artist's sculptures, paintings, drawings, and jewelry. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.
Reviews (2)
Booklist Review
Contemporary Native American artists are both blessed and burdened by their proud artistic heritage. On the one hand, a profound connection to the past inspires a respect for traditional art and a desire to emulate it. On the other, like all creative individuals, modern Indian artists are driven to express their own unique visions. Davidson, a Haida born in Alaska and raised on Haida Gwaii (the Queen Charlotte Islands off the coast of northern British Columbia) and Vancouver, has succeeded in achieving a balance between these needs. In both his life and his art, he has strived for both the preservation of his culture and the evolution of his own artistic statements. Many of Davidson's pieces are carved masks and totem poles that reflect the influence of past Haida artists but also possess a decidedly fresh fluidity and distinctive personality. By mastering traditional techniques, Davidson has grounded, and therefore legitimized, his innovations. This articulate and well-designed volume combines illuminating biographical essays with excerpts from interviews with Davidson and presents some 110 of his powerful sculptures, paintings, and prints. This book will greatly enrich any American art collection. ~--Donna Seaman
Choice Review
This account of the work of the Haida artist Robert Davidson (Guud San Glans) at mid-career brings into play the major questions being asked of Native American art in the 1990s and illustrates them profusely with color and black-and-white photographs of work spanning the artist's career from 1959 to the present. The three essays by Aldona Jonaitis, Ian Thom, and Marianne Jones (Jaa-daa Guulx) analyze Davidson's work from the perspective of an anthropologist, a curator, and a Haida dancer. A recurring theme is the importance of innovation in tradition and of reclamation and renewal in Haida (and more generally, Native American) art. Thom provides a genealogical and biographical account of the artist's development. Jonaitis, reflecting the recent discourse on commodification in Native American art, situates the issue of Haida artists selling their work for money within a colonial collecting context, which privileged "pre-contact" art as authentic and relegated all other artistic production, such as argillite carving, to an impure status seen as cultural decay. In contrast to this, Jones and Davidson himself stress the major role that Haida art has played in cultural renewal: "a lot of these [Haida] people didn't know what a totem pole looks like" (Davidson, p.6). While not necessarily in conflict, these are very different ways of approaching the question of what is "real" Haida art. Jonaitis questions the idea of cultural authenticity itself while Davidson takes it as given. Highly recommended. Undergraduate; graduate; faculty; general. S. L. Kasfir; Emory University