Beau Dick (November 23, 1955 – March 27, 2017) was acclaimed as one of the Northwest Coast’s most versatile and talented carvers. Reaching out beyond the confines of his own Kwakwaka’wakw culture, Dick explored new formats and techniques in his work, including painting and drawing. His work can be found in private collections as well as museums, including the Canadian Museum of Civilization (Gatineau, QC), the Heard Museum (Phoenix, AZ), the Burke Museum (Seattle, WA), the UBC Museum of Anthropology and the Vancouver Art Gallery. Dick’s work has been exhibited most recently in Witnesses: Art and Canada’s Indian Residential Schools (2013) at the Belkin Art Gallery, Sakahan: International Indigenous Art (2013) at the National Gallery of Canada, 75 Years of Collecting: First Nations: Myths and Realities (2006) at the Vancouver Art Gallery and Supernatural with Neil Campbell (2004) at the Contemporary Art Gallery (Vancouver). In 2012, Dick received the Jack and Doris Shadbolt Foundation’s VIVA Award for Visual Arts. (2018)
Linnea Dick was born December 9, 1991 to Pamela Bevan and Beau Dick. She carries the Kwakwaka’wakw name Malidi, meaning to always find a purpose and path in life. She is of Kwakwaka’wakw, Nisga’a and Tsimshian heritage. She spent her early childhood in Alert Bay, later relocating to Vancouver along with her sister Geraldine. Between 2004 and 2005, Linnea spent time experiencing Haida culture and tradition in Haida Gwaii, where her two older sisters live. Her ambitions in life are to help people and she aims to one day establish a wellness centre for women and children. Her creative abilities include writing and painting. (2018)
Born in Masset, BC as Gary Edenshaw, Guujaaw is a traditional Haida singer, carver, environmentalist, activist and leader from the Raven Clan of Skedans. Guujaaw has worked throughout his life for the protection of Haida land, the establishment of the rights of the Haida people and their economic stability and freedom, taking part in the blockades on Lyell Island in the 1980s to protect it from logging. As President of the Haida Nation from 2000 to 2012, he fought to protect Haida Gwaii from logging and offshore drilling, and was instrumental in establishing Gwaii Hanaas National Park Reserve. Guujaaw oversaw the return of the Haida Gwaii forestry into the hands of his people, helped end the black bear hunt on the Misty Isles and successfully got the BC government to legally recognize the Queen Charlotte Islands as Haida Gwaii, the area’s traditional Haida name. Guujaaw means “drum,” a name given to him at a potlatch at the northern village of Kiusta. (2018)
Gyauustees, whose name means “the one who gets things done,” is a member of the tribal people of the Nuu-chah-nulth Snuneymuxw Skokomish Kwakwaka’wakw with strong family ties to Secwepemc. His people are alive and well on the Pacific Northwest Coast of what is now called North America. Gyauustees, through his connection to the Spirit of Unity, Peace and Dignity, has been on an incredible journey of acceptance, forgiveness and personal redemption from what he can only describe as the attempted genocide of his people. Only through peace of heart was he able to overcome adversity and be united – one heart, one mind – and then able to lift others up with dignity and reenter the sacred circle of life. (2018)
Tarah Hogue is a curator and writer of Dutch, French and Métis ancestry originally from the Prairies. She holds an MA in Critical and Curatorial Studies (UBC). Since 2014 Hogue has been the Aboriginal Curatorial Resident at grunt gallery, and is lead curator on #callresponse, a series of site-specific and socially engaged works that will be followed by an exhibition at grunt gallery in October 2016. Current projects include Unsettled Sites at SFU Gallery (May 2016), Audain Aboriginal Curatorial Fellow with the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, writer-in-residence with VIVO Media Arts, and she has forthcoming texts for Inuit Art Quarterly, MICE Magazine and the 2016 MFA Graduate Exhibition at UBC. Hogue has curated exhibitions at the Satellite Gallery, Or Gallery and was co-curator on Witnesses: Art and Canada’s Indian Residential Schools at the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, and NET-ETH: Going Out of the Darkness, organized by Malaspina Printmakers. In 2009 she co-founded the Gam Gallery, a Vancouver exhibition space, studio and boutique. (2018)
Chief Robert Joseph is Hereditary Chief of the Gwawaenuk First Nation and Ambassador for Reconciliation Canada and a member of the National Assembly of First Nations Elders Council. He was formerly the Executive Director of the Indian Residential School Survivors Society and is an honourary witness to Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. As Chairman of the Native American Leadership Alliance for Peace and Reconciliation and Ambassador for Peace and Reconciliation with the Interreligious and International Federation for World Peace (IFWP), Chief Joseph has sat with the leaders of South Africa, Israel, Japan, South Korea, Mongolia and Washington, DC to learn from and share his understanding of faith, hope, healing and reconciliation. (2018)
Wanda Nanibush is an Anishinabe-kwe image and word warrior, teacher, curator, community animator and organizer and arts consultant from Beausoleil First Nation. She is currently Guest Curator at the Art Gallery of Ontario. Recently, Nanibush was Curator in Residence at the Justina M. Barnicke Gallery where she curated KWE: The work of Rebecca Belmore (2014), and the 2013 Dame Nita Barrow Distinguished Visitor at University of Toronto. She has published extensively, including essays in The Winter we Danced (2014) and Women in a Globalizing World: Equality, Development, Diversity and Peace (2013), as well as catalogue essays on artists Jeff Thomas, Adrian Stimson and Rebecca Belmore. Nanibush has over twenty years arts sector experience through working with media arts organizations that include ImagineNATIVE, LIFT, Optic Nerve Film Festival, Reframe Film Festival, the Ontario Arts Council and Aboriginal Curatorial Collective. (2018)
Shelly Rosenblum is Curator of Academic Programs at the UBC Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery where she develops programs that increase outreach and integration of the Belkin Gallery both within the University community and the Vancouver community at large. She is a Peter Wall Institute of Advanced Studies Associate and sits on the Board of Directors at the Western Front. She received her PhD from the Department of English at Brown University and has taught at Brown, Wesleyan and UBC. Her research interests include discourses of the Black Atlantic, critical theory, narrative, performativity and issues in contemporary art and museum theory. (2018)
Charlotte Townsend-Gault is a Professor in the Department of Art History and a Faculty Associate in the Department of Anthropology at UBC. She has published widely on the history and politics of response to Indigenous arts and culture in North America since the early 1980s. Native Art of the Northwest Coast: A History of Changing Ideas, co-edited with Jennifer Kramer and Ki-ke-in, is due in September 2013 from UBC Press. Exhibitions curated include: Land, Spirit, Power: First Nations at the National Gallery of Canada (with Diana Nemiroff and Robert Houle) (1992) and, at the Morris and Helen Belkin Gallery, Yuxweluptun: Born to Live and Die on your Colonialist Reservations (1995); Rebecca Belmore: The Named and the Un-named (2003); and Backstory: Nuuchaanulth Ceremonial Curtains and the Work of Ḳi-ḳe-in (2010). (2018)
2016, Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, Vancouver
95 pages, full colour, hardcover
ISBN 978-0-88865-182-2
Edited by Scott Watson and Lorna Brown, this richly illustrated hardcover book includes essays by Beau Dick, Chief Robert Joseph, Guujaaw, Gyauustees, Linnea Dick, Wanda Nanibush, Charlotte Townsend-Gault, Tarah Hogue and Shelly Rosenblum. The catalogue offers visual documentation of the belongings that were gathered together and displayed in the Gallery during the Lalakenis exhibition, along with images from the two journeys that culminated in copper-breaking ceremonies: Awalaskenis I (February 2013) beginning in Quatsino and ending in Victoria, BC and Awalaskenis II (July 2014) which saw Beau Dick and 21 companions setting out from UBC for Ottawa. The copper-breaking ceremonies marked ruptured relationships in need of repair, and passed the burden of wrongs done to First Nations people from them to the Governments of BC and Canada, reviving a shaming rite that once was central to a complex economic system and symbol of justice, a traditional practice that had all but disappeared. This publication reprints content from the exhibition guide in which Beau Dick comments on the significance and role of coppers and the motivating factors for the journeys; Guujaaw speaks of the Taaw copper he made to be broken in Ottawa; Linnea Dick reflects on instigating, along with her sister Geraldine, the earlier journey from Quatsino to Victoria; and Gyauustees speaks about the ceremonies he conducts as a pipe carrier. Added to these texts are new essays by Wanda Nanibush, Charlotte Townsend-Gault, Tarah Hogue and Shelly Rosenblum.
Beau Dick (November 23, 1955 – March 27, 2017) was acclaimed as one of the Northwest Coast’s most versatile and talented carvers. Reaching out beyond the confines of his own Kwakwaka’wakw culture, Dick explored new formats and techniques in his work, including painting and drawing. His work can be found in private collections as well as museums, including the Canadian Museum of Civilization (Gatineau, QC), the Heard Museum (Phoenix, AZ), the Burke Museum (Seattle, WA), the UBC Museum of Anthropology and the Vancouver Art Gallery. Dick’s work has been exhibited most recently in Witnesses: Art and Canada’s Indian Residential Schools (2013) at the Belkin Art Gallery, Sakahan: International Indigenous Art (2013) at the National Gallery of Canada, 75 Years of Collecting: First Nations: Myths and Realities (2006) at the Vancouver Art Gallery and Supernatural with Neil Campbell (2004) at the Contemporary Art Gallery (Vancouver). In 2012, Dick received the Jack and Doris Shadbolt Foundation’s VIVA Award for Visual Arts. (2018)
Linnea Dick was born December 9, 1991 to Pamela Bevan and Beau Dick. She carries the Kwakwaka’wakw name Malidi, meaning to always find a purpose and path in life. She is of Kwakwaka’wakw, Nisga’a and Tsimshian heritage. She spent her early childhood in Alert Bay, later relocating to Vancouver along with her sister Geraldine. Between 2004 and 2005, Linnea spent time experiencing Haida culture and tradition in Haida Gwaii, where her two older sisters live. Her ambitions in life are to help people and she aims to one day establish a wellness centre for women and children. Her creative abilities include writing and painting. (2018)
Born in Masset, BC as Gary Edenshaw, Guujaaw is a traditional Haida singer, carver, environmentalist, activist and leader from the Raven Clan of Skedans. Guujaaw has worked throughout his life for the protection of Haida land, the establishment of the rights of the Haida people and their economic stability and freedom, taking part in the blockades on Lyell Island in the 1980s to protect it from logging. As President of the Haida Nation from 2000 to 2012, he fought to protect Haida Gwaii from logging and offshore drilling, and was instrumental in establishing Gwaii Hanaas National Park Reserve. Guujaaw oversaw the return of the Haida Gwaii forestry into the hands of his people, helped end the black bear hunt on the Misty Isles and successfully got the BC government to legally recognize the Queen Charlotte Islands as Haida Gwaii, the area’s traditional Haida name. Guujaaw means “drum,” a name given to him at a potlatch at the northern village of Kiusta. (2018)
Gyauustees, whose name means “the one who gets things done,” is a member of the tribal people of the Nuu-chah-nulth Snuneymuxw Skokomish Kwakwaka’wakw with strong family ties to Secwepemc. His people are alive and well on the Pacific Northwest Coast of what is now called North America. Gyauustees, through his connection to the Spirit of Unity, Peace and Dignity, has been on an incredible journey of acceptance, forgiveness and personal redemption from what he can only describe as the attempted genocide of his people. Only through peace of heart was he able to overcome adversity and be united – one heart, one mind – and then able to lift others up with dignity and reenter the sacred circle of life. (2018)
Tarah Hogue is a curator and writer of Dutch, French and Métis ancestry originally from the Prairies. She holds an MA in Critical and Curatorial Studies (UBC). Since 2014 Hogue has been the Aboriginal Curatorial Resident at grunt gallery, and is lead curator on #callresponse, a series of site-specific and socially engaged works that will be followed by an exhibition at grunt gallery in October 2016. Current projects include Unsettled Sites at SFU Gallery (May 2016), Audain Aboriginal Curatorial Fellow with the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, writer-in-residence with VIVO Media Arts, and she has forthcoming texts for Inuit Art Quarterly, MICE Magazine and the 2016 MFA Graduate Exhibition at UBC. Hogue has curated exhibitions at the Satellite Gallery, Or Gallery and was co-curator on Witnesses: Art and Canada’s Indian Residential Schools at the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, and NET-ETH: Going Out of the Darkness, organized by Malaspina Printmakers. In 2009 she co-founded the Gam Gallery, a Vancouver exhibition space, studio and boutique. (2018)
Chief Robert Joseph is Hereditary Chief of the Gwawaenuk First Nation and Ambassador for Reconciliation Canada and a member of the National Assembly of First Nations Elders Council. He was formerly the Executive Director of the Indian Residential School Survivors Society and is an honourary witness to Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. As Chairman of the Native American Leadership Alliance for Peace and Reconciliation and Ambassador for Peace and Reconciliation with the Interreligious and International Federation for World Peace (IFWP), Chief Joseph has sat with the leaders of South Africa, Israel, Japan, South Korea, Mongolia and Washington, DC to learn from and share his understanding of faith, hope, healing and reconciliation. (2018)
Wanda Nanibush is an Anishinabe-kwe image and word warrior, teacher, curator, community animator and organizer and arts consultant from Beausoleil First Nation. She is currently Guest Curator at the Art Gallery of Ontario. Recently, Nanibush was Curator in Residence at the Justina M. Barnicke Gallery where she curated KWE: The work of Rebecca Belmore (2014), and the 2013 Dame Nita Barrow Distinguished Visitor at University of Toronto. She has published extensively, including essays in The Winter we Danced (2014) and Women in a Globalizing World: Equality, Development, Diversity and Peace (2013), as well as catalogue essays on artists Jeff Thomas, Adrian Stimson and Rebecca Belmore. Nanibush has over twenty years arts sector experience through working with media arts organizations that include ImagineNATIVE, LIFT, Optic Nerve Film Festival, Reframe Film Festival, the Ontario Arts Council and Aboriginal Curatorial Collective. (2018)
Shelly Rosenblum is Curator of Academic Programs at the UBC Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery where she develops programs that increase outreach and integration of the Belkin Gallery both within the University community and the Vancouver community at large. She is a Peter Wall Institute of Advanced Studies Associate and sits on the Board of Directors at the Western Front. She received her PhD from the Department of English at Brown University and has taught at Brown, Wesleyan and UBC. Her research interests include discourses of the Black Atlantic, critical theory, narrative, performativity and issues in contemporary art and museum theory. (2018)
Charlotte Townsend-Gault is a Professor in the Department of Art History and a Faculty Associate in the Department of Anthropology at UBC. She has published widely on the history and politics of response to Indigenous arts and culture in North America since the early 1980s. Native Art of the Northwest Coast: A History of Changing Ideas, co-edited with Jennifer Kramer and Ki-ke-in, is due in September 2013 from UBC Press. Exhibitions curated include: Land, Spirit, Power: First Nations at the National Gallery of Canada (with Diana Nemiroff and Robert Houle) (1992) and, at the Morris and Helen Belkin Gallery, Yuxweluptun: Born to Live and Die on your Colonialist Reservations (1995); Rebecca Belmore: The Named and the Un-named (2003); and Backstory: Nuuchaanulth Ceremonial Curtains and the Work of Ḳi-ḳe-in (2010). (2018)
On July 2, 2014, renowned Kwakwa̱ka̱’wakw artist Chief Beau Dick along with 21 companions set out from the University of British Columbia on a journey to Ottawa which they called Awalaskenis II: Journey of Truth and Unity. Intending to raise awareness about the plight of the environment and to challenge elected officials to attend to the relationship between the federal government and First Nations people, the group brought with them many objects including a copper shield known as Taaw made by Giindajin Haawasti Guujaaw, the Haida carver and former president of the Haida Nation. Guujaaw had encouraged Dick to make this journey, having been inspired by the 2013 Awalaskenis I journey from Quatsino on the northern tip of Vancouver Island to Victoria.
[more]Join us at Macaulay & Co. Fine Art to celebrate the publication of Lalakenis/All Directions: A Journey of Truth and Unity. Edited by Scott Watson and Lorna Brown, this richly illustrated hardcover book includes essays by Beau Dick, Chief Robert Joseph, Guujaaw, Gyauustees, Linnea Dick, Wanda Nanibush, Charlotte Townsend-Gault, Tarah Hogue and Shelly Rosenblum. The catalogue offers visual documentation of the belongings that were gathered together and displayed in the Gallery during the Lalakenis exhibition, along with images from the two journeys that culminated in copper-breaking ceremonies: Awalaskenis I (February 2013) beginning in Quatsino and ending in Victoria, BC and Awalaskenis II (July 2014) which saw Beau Dick and 21 companions setting out from UBC for Ottawa. The copper-breaking ceremonies marked ruptured relationships in need of repair, and passed the burden of wrongs done to First Nations people from them to the Governments of BC and Canada, reviving a shaming rite that once was central to a complex economic system and symbol of justice, a traditional practice that had all but disappeared. This publication reprints content from the exhibition guide in which Beau comments on the significance and role of coppers and the motivating factors for the journeys; Guujaaw speaks of the Taaw copper he made to be broken in Ottawa; Linnea Dick reflects on instigating, along with her sister Geraldine, the earlier journey from Quatsino to Victoria; and Gyauustees speaks about the ceremonies he conducts as a pipe carrier. Added to these texts are new essays by Wanda Nanibush, Charlotte Townsend-Gault, Tarah Hogue and Shelly Rosenblum. Beau Dick and exhibition co-curators and editors Scott Watson and Lorna Brown will be in attendance. Special launch pricing will be in effect.
[more]Once again, we are pleased to welcome the UBC Contemporary Players to the Belkin Art Gallery for a concert inspired by the exhibition Lalakenis/All Directions: A Journey of Truth and Unity. Led by Directors Corey Hamm and Paolo Bortolussi with support from Aaron Graham, this graduate and undergraduate student ensemble from the UBC School of Music will animate the Gallery for an afternoon program celebrating themes from the exhibition. And on TUESDAY, APRIL 12 at 2:30 pm, please join us for a once-in-a-lifetime performance of Alexander Scriabin’s Complete Piano Sonatas, Nos. 1-10 performed by piano students of Corey Hamm.
[more]Join leading UBC scholars, artists, curators and critics in a series of midday conversations. We invite two prominent, disciplinarily distinct voices into the Gallery to discuss productive intersections of their own work and the current exhibition, followed by a discussion that includes the audience. In this series, guests will address Lalakenis/All Directions: A Journey of Truth and Unity, an exhibition that remembers Kwakwaka’wakw carver Beau Dick’s 2014 journey from UBC to Ottawa, which culminated in a ceremonial copper-breaking on the steps of Parliament Hill.
[more]Join UBC Artist in Residence and Kwakwaka'wakw Hereditary Chief Beau Dick, community members, elders and activists on select Thursday afternoons at the Gallery, where they will share their knowledge, experiences and discuss the themes of the exhibition Lalakenis/All Directions: A Journey of Truth and Unity.
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