Native Art of the Northwest Coast: A History of Changing Ideas

About this book

The Northwest Coast of North America has long been recognized as one of the worlds canonical art zones. This volume records and scrutinizes the history of how and why this has come about. A work of critical historiography it makes accessible for the first time in one place a broad selection of the 250 years of writing on Northwest Coast art. The contributors leading scholars writers and artists provide perspectives on the diverse intellectual traditions that have influenced stimulated and clashed with each other. In unsettling the conventions that have shaped the idea of Northwest Coast Native art this book joins the lively often heated and now global debates about what constitutes Native art and who should decide.