Tag Archives: united states

Northwest Coast First Nations Art

Most Northwest Coast First Nations glass art looks like something that belongs in a corporate lobby:

flat glass totem poll projection

But at the Burke Gallery at the University of Washington I came across the work of Preston Singletary, which is actually glass sculpture:

3d mask

He is Lingít, so it wasn’t surprising I saw his work in Washington: museums in Washington and Oregon are obsessed with Lingít art. They don’t seem to like local aboriginal art (to be fair, baskets from the Oregon desert are pretty boring), and Lingít art is almost as crowd-pleasing as Haida while being from the good old U-S-of-A.

I’ve also only ever seen Yup’ik art in the US, which is quite different from both Inuit and First Nations art, and quite awesome:
otter mask
some kind of mask
north wind mask