Early Northwest Coast Print Innovators

Printmaking is definitely not a traditional art form amongst First Nations cultures in the Pacific Northwest. Steam-bending wood, painting, and carving have always been common activities within Native communities here on the West Coast but lithographs, silkscreening, and etching...not so much. In the early 1960s - as artists such as Robert Davidson (Haida), David Gladstone (Heiltsuk), and Earl Muldon (Gitxsan) were completing major projects to revitalize their cultural art forms - screenprinting was introduced to First Nations artists as an affordable way to encourage aesthetic experimentation and market the art. Northwest Coast Native design is two-dimensional and based on formline composition to begin with, so the transition from traditional forms to printed paper was logical. The early years of Northwest Coast printmaking were incredibly successful as artists were producing both formal, conventional works and progressive, unconventional works. These prints were often made as limited editions of several hundred, so they entered the market at reasonable price points as well.

Native Art Prints makes an effort to acquire these early and innovative prints, as they are becoming rarer and rarer. Here are some of our favourites:

This print is titled Robin's Egg and was produced by Gitksan artist Phil Janze in 1981. Still producing to this day, Janze is an innovator in design and jewellery who works with unusual motifs and materials. In this charming piece, Janze has used both an atypical symbol and colour. Breaking away from strict Northwest Coast formline design, he has illustrated the baby robin in negative space and confined the design within the shape of an egg. This creates a spatial tension in the piece, which is deceptively complex.

This print by Donnie Yeomans is from 1979 and is enigmatically titled A White Finger Pointing to the Moon. One initially views the shape of the design as a whole to be the so-called 'finger' in the title of the piece...but this finger is black. We view the black in this piece to represent the night sky, with the small white tri-neg at the bottom of the piece to be the finger pointing upwards. The moon is in blue and red, and has been personified as is common with sun and moon figures in Northwest Coast art. This classic print is priced at $300.00 at Native Art Prints.

Now deceased, Carrier artist Larry Rosso is perhaps best known for his deeply-carved and carefully-crafted bentwood boxes. However, he also produced a variety of sophisticated and abstracted limited edition prints. This piece, Elements II, is open to interpretation: it can be read as an eagle figure (with the red u-form representing the beak), a large angular salmon head design, or simply shapes from the Northwest Coast lexicon. This piece is from a small edition of 107 and acts as a wonderful reminder of Larry's great contributions to this art form.