(Audain Art Museum & Figure1 $60)

When James Hart was a young boy growing up in Masset on Haida Gwaii—long before he became one of the most acclaimed and accomplished artists working on the Northwest Coast—he spent a lot of time with his maternal grandfather, his “Chinni” Geoffrey White. White was, Hart has written with unabashed pride, “the greatest fisherman on the coast for many years.”

White was also an accomplished builder of fishing boats and the shed in which he worked with his sons was a place of fascination and inspiration for his grandson. There was no electricity in their village until the early 1960s, Hart recalls, and the wood planking for the boats had to be hand-planed. “I grew up with that energy, the smells of the wood, white lead, oakum, woodchips, sawdust, the boats being finished, the launchings, the big excitement.” It’s hard to encounter these words or to see photos of one of White’s early seiners, now “dry docked” near Hart’s home in Old Massett, without thinking portent. The eager kid who swept up the woodchips and the sawdust in his Chinni’s boatshed, who loved the scent of freshly cut wood and the energy as it was being hand-worked, grew up to be a renowned carver of memorial poles, story poles and mortuary poles, of relief panels and dance screens, of shamanic figures and ceremonial masks—and, by the way, a prolific creator of woodchips.

Hart’s son Gwaliga recounts that during his own childhood in the Hart household, his father carved compulsively—everywhere and all the time. He and his siblings were, Gwaliga says, “grounded among woodchips … in the living room, on the kitchen table, on the sofa.” Outside, he adds, the woodchip piles from all the poles Hart and his teams created near the family home were an essential element of the kids’ playground.

Gwaliga Hart’s tribute to his father forms the afterword to an ambitious and richly illustrated new book, 7IDANsuu James Hart: A Monumental Practice. Helmed by Curtis Collins, director and chief curator of the Audain Art Museum, with a forward by businessman, philanthropist and art collector Michael Audain, an overview of Haida history by cultural anthropologist and ethnobotanist Wade Davis and a memoir chapter by the artist himself, the publication is, unexpectedly, Hart’s first. That is, it’s the first monograph wholly dedicated to Hart’s art. This, Collins explains, is because Hart has focused most of his career on creating towering poles and large-scale sculptures, impossible to gather together to show inside an art gallery or museum and therefore not productive of an exhibition catalogue or companion publication.

In a sense, this book takes the place of a retrospective exhibition, spotlighting nineteen of Hart’s monumental works in wood and bronze while also juxtaposing them with references to his gold and silver jewellery and other smaller pieces. Arranged chronologically, the survey runs from his 1979 Dogfish Screen to his 2023 Tllgidgaaya Carl Hart Memorial Pole, created and raised in honour of the Harts’ youngest son, who died tragically in 2015 at the age of 25. Accompanying photos of these works are Collins’ essays examining the circumstances and, often, ceremonies around which each came into being, with discussions about thematic, material and formal elements and recurring motifs. Collins has also written a comprehensive overview of Hart’s career, including the impact on his creative practice of his assumption of the hereditary title 7IDANsuu (pronounced ee-DAN-soo) and with it, a profound sense of responsibility to his culture and his community.

Among the outstanding works featured here are Hart’s 2008 Celebration of Bill Reid Pole, on display at the Bill Reid Gallery of Northwest Coast Art; his 2015-17 Reconciliation Pole, which stands on the Main Mall of the University of British Columbia; and what is probably his most political and at the same time best known accomplishment, The Dance Screen (The Scream Too), completed in 2013 and permanently installed at the Audain Art Museum in Whistler. Other poles and major commissions are situated in Ontario, Quebec, California, New York, Sweden and Switzerland. One of the revelations of the book is how many of Hart’s memorial and mortuary poles stand on Haida Gwaii. Hart’s devotion to his family, his clan and his broader community is reiterated throughout the book through both photos and texts.

Full disclosure: i was involved in the hart book project in its early stages. When invited to write a short biography of the artist to close the book with, however, I suggested that it would be more interesting and insightful if he recounted the early years of his life in his own words as its introduction. I met with Jim a couple of times when he was visiting Vancouver, conducted a few lengthy interviews with him by phone when he was at his home on Haida Gwaii, and gave him my edits of the transcripts of those interviews. He then took over the telling, which was and is how it should be. Still, I am sorry that some of the stories Jim related to me weren’t included in the final version of this hefty publication.

In his memoir chapter, titled “early days,” hart, gives us a conversational account of the years between his 1952 home birth in Delkatla, a small community near Masset, and his resolution in the mid-1980s to free himself from working on other people’s projects and historical re-creations in order to pursue the design and creation of his own artworks. His story is enlivened with fond memories of family, friends and community, of his Haida mother, Joan Hart, and non-Indigenous father, James Hart, Sr., of halibut fishing with his Chinni, of odd jobs taken here and there, of feeling his way as a teenager into making art without being sure what form of expression this impulse could take until discovering in high school the immensely rich heritage of historic Haida art.

“[W]ith the realization that we had an art form, something to be proud of, this put me on a beautiful natural high,” Hart writes. “I floated about for three full days; it was surreal.” While supporting himself with manual labour jobs, Hart educated himself in the art of his ancestors through books and museum visits. Along this path, he also encountered the brilliant work of his great-great-grandfather, Charles Edenshaw, the most famous Haida artist of the 19th century. Edenshaw, a hereditary chief, worked prolifically and tirelessly in the aftermath of the 1862 smallpox epidemic—a near-apocalypse that killed 93% of the Haida population. (His masterful carvings in wood and argillite visually preserved the creatures and supernatural beings that populate Haida oral histories, including creation and transformation stories.)

There were also successive apprenticeships with the most prominent exponents of the emerging contemporary Haida art movement, Robert Davidson and Bill Reid. Hart did the finishing work on Reid’s famous sculpture, The Raven and the First Men, and assisted the elder and frequently ill artist on a number of subsequent projects. Reid, Hart writes, “hung on to me when he could have let me go many times. I guess he saw my potential.” Then he adds, “Bill taught me a few carving tricks, but mostly how to survive the city.” Arriving in Vancouver in 1979 from the small village of Masset, Hart recalls, he was entirely ignorant of escalators, elevators, rental housing, crowded beaches—and parking regulations.

There is a collage quality to the way the various written and photographic contributions to the book come together. Collectively, the authors situate Hart within both the ancient culture of his Haida ancestors and the demands and discourses of the contemporary art world. Anthropologist Davis traces the geomorphology and evolving natural environment of Haida Gwaii, the emergence of Haida culture some 10,000 years ago, its “essential connection to place,” its brief florescence and then almost total extinguishment following European contact, and its powerful re-emergence in the latter half of the 20th century. Art, Davis writes, “is at the very heart of Haida social, spiritual, and political life.”

Collins brings what he describes as a “curatorial” rather than anthropological view to Hart’s art, arguing that although superficially resembling historic Haida art, it reveals subtle innovations and the evolution of Hart’s own distinctive style, his own artistic expression. “James Hart,” he writes, “has developed a visual language that reaches back from Haida time immemorial to a cosmopolitan twenty-first century on the Northwest Coast.” 9781773272276