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Born in 1952 into the Eagle Clan in Masset, Haida Gwaii, as a member of the Delkatla community, master carver, goldsmith and painter James (Jim) Hart has been a Chief of the Eagle Clan since 1999 when he received the hereditary title of his great-great-grandfather, Charles Edenshaw: 7idansuu (pronounced "ee-dan-soo"). To mark the event, he held a potlatch and raised a 55-foot totem pole in Massett.
Hart is related to Edenshaw (c. 1839-1920)--sometimes dubbed by outsiders as the "Michelangelo" of Haida art--through his mother, Joan Hart. He was spared the privations of the residential school system because his father was Anglo-Canadian. Jim Hart grew up with his grandparents and first worked as a fisherman. Having discerned the importance of Haida art while attending high school, Hart first worked as an apprentice for Robert Davidson in 1978 when Davidson was creating an Edenshaw memorial house in Masset.
In 1979, Hart was commissioned by the Royal British Columbia Museum in Victoria to carve a 7-foot x 9-foot cedar Dogfish Screen. Jim Hart then started working for Bill Reid in 1980 and worked on some of Reid's most important sculptures, as well as smaller works, in Vancouver until 1984. Specifically, he helped complete Reid's world-acclaimed masterworks, The Raven and the First Man and Spirit of Haida Gwaii/The Jade Canoe. Hart credits Reid for his protection and guidance when, as a young man, he had to quickly learn to adapt to urban life in Vancouver in extreme contrast to his upbringing in Masset.
In 1988, Hart oversaw the installation of the Haida house at Canadian Museum of Civilization on Ottawa.
After four years of tutelage under Bill Reid, Hart understood that Reid's presence was so strong it would be necessary for him to learn how to function with complete independence if he could ever hope to develop his own unique style and ideas. Since then, in 2000 Hart carved the replacement to a Bill Reid pole within "the Haida Village" behind the Museum of Anthropology and in 2008 he carved the Respect to Bill Reid Pole now located in The Bill Reid Gallery in Vancouver.
Along with Haida carver Reg Davidson, Jim Hart also authored one catalogue book, Haida Artifacts: An Exhibition (1990), published by the Lowie Museum of Anthropology in Berkeley, California. While steeped in the traditions of his people, very familiar with Haida history as conveyed by oral stories, he has not felt constrained by conventions. As an innovator, for instance, In 1982, he was the first First Nations artist in British Columbia to complete a bronze sculpture of a totem pole, he has imported and incorporated abalone shells from New Zealand and he has dared to generate his own art-form--the stand-alone wall. Hart's art also includes gold, silver and bronze jewelry, and fabrics. He has built numerous Haida houses, given three potlatches and been actively involved in many others. Much of his artwork is in private and public collections worldwide.
It is not always easy to trace the evolution of Hart's major works because they can take more than a decade to reach a permanent home.
In 2003, he initially installed The Three Watchmen, a 14-foot bronze sculpture at the entrance to an apartment residence in Kerrisdale's Quilchena Park in Vancouver. It depicts traditional watchmen figures who guard Haida from dangers, both physical and spiritual. At the time it was his largest work beyond totems, and a career milestone. This experimental, ground-breaking work was commissioned by Polygon Homes Ltd., a condominium housing developer in the Lower Mainland under the direction of Michael Audain. In 2011, this bronze megalith was installed outside the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa as part of their permanent collection.
A 1995 wood sculpture, Frog Constellation, was installed on the campus of Simon Fraser University in 2012.
Between 2012 to 2014, Hart worked on his largest project up until that time, The Dance Screen (The Scream Too), an 11-foot x 16-foot work that was completed on the fourth floor of the Vancouver Art Gallery, but is permanently housed at the Audain Museum. Conceived back in 2009, The Dance Screen was first installed as a temporary exhibit in the Vancouver Art Gallery. For this work, Hart took three years to salvage red cedar from the Haida Gwaii wildfires. Hart then worked for fifteen months with his assistants, John Brent Bennett, Brandon Brown, Carl Hart and Leon Ridley, including a five-week stint at the Bill Reid Gallery in the summer of 2012, enabling visitors to watch him working with his crew.
The Dance Screen (The Scream Too) has since been accorded pride of place as arguably the most striking work in the permanent collection of the Audain Museum in Whistler, British Columbia. Few know the work was instigated as a much smaller, private work. Michael Audain originally commissioned Hart to carve a plaque that would hang on the wall of his cottage in Pender Harbour. Hart was inspired to keep expanding this commission until it went far beyond the bounds of its initial conception.
One hundred guests at the museum named for its founder and chief benefactor attended a one-hour, inaugural dance performance for the work by Hart and his troupe of Haida dancers on September 22, 2018 at the Audain Museum. Dancers wore ceremonial regalia that now belong to the National Gallery of Canada. About halfway through the performance Hart called Audain to come forth from the audience and honoured him with a song. "It comes from one of my old grandfathers who just about drowned," Hart said, "and people composed a song for him because they realized, if he drowned, how sad they'd all be, because he did so much work for the people. So this song means, 'Where would we be today if it wasn't for you?'" Hart then adorned Audain in an eagle mask, covering him with a blanket and bringing him into the dance.
Both a barrier and a doorway, this imposing. stand-alone work (or wall) emphasizes the role of the salmon within Haida society and ecosystems. The carvings depict an eagle, a bear, orcas, a raven and human figures all rimmed by swimming salmon, adorned with glimmering turquoise shell tails. "The screen says to me, all of us, whether we have two feet or four, whether we have hair, scales, fur or feathers, we're all related to one another in one way or another in the great cycle of birth, life and death," Michael Audain, the museum founder who commissioned the piece, said after the ceremony. Therefore, it's surely incumbent (on) us to treat each other with mutual respect." Jim Hart has reiterated: "The salmon has taken care of us for thousands of years and it's up to us to take care of them."
In 2016, Hart and his son Gwaliga worked together finalizing the patina and paint on another bronzed Yellow Cedar Pole, supervising the casting at the Tallix Art Foundry in Beacon, New York, after two years of work.
On April 1, 2017, Jim Hart raised his Reconciliation Pole, honouring a time before, during and after Canada's Indian Residential Schools, at UBC's Main Mall, between Agronomy Road and Thunderbird Boulevard. Also commissioned by Michael Audain, two years in the making, this 55-foot pole was carved by Jim Hunt with the assistance of his son, Gwaliga, as well as fellow Haida carvers John Brent Bennett, Brandon Brown, Jaalen Edenshaw, Derek White, Leon Ridley and Hart's late son, Carl (who died in 2015), from an 800-year-old red cedar (ts'uu). At the base are a co-existing canoe and a longboat, side by side; the former represents all First Nations with different styles of paddles and the latter represents all Canadians.
There were no residential schools on Haida Gwaii. Many of Hart's relatives--including his grandfather, great aunts and uncles--were sent to the Coqualeetza Residential School in Chilliwack. Hart grew up with an understanding that many died as a result, or many were never able to overcome their trauma. The pole depicts a Coqualeetza student without any feet, unable to run escape. "We’re here today, we’re still here, and we want to go forward," Jim Hart told Georgia Straight. "This pole is about understanding what has taken place, and the depth of all of that, because you can’t smooth the edges on it."
By 2017, Jim Hunt had carved more than 25 Haida totems. He lives in Masset, while maintaining a home in Vancouver. He received the Order of British Columbia in 2003 and the Queen's Diamond Jubilee Medal in 2013. He has honorary doctorates from Emily Carr University of Art and Design and from Simon Fraser University (2017).
BOOKS:
Haida Artifacts: An Exhibition (Berkeley, California: Lowie Museum of Anthropology, University of California, 1990). Co-author with Reg Davidson.
Review of the author's work by BC Studies:
Charles Edenshaw
[Alan Twigg / BCBW 2019] ILMBC2
***
James Hart at work:
Hart is related to Edenshaw (c. 1839-1920)--sometimes dubbed by outsiders as the "Michelangelo" of Haida art--through his mother, Joan Hart. He was spared the privations of the residential school system because his father was Anglo-Canadian. Jim Hart grew up with his grandparents and first worked as a fisherman. Having discerned the importance of Haida art while attending high school, Hart first worked as an apprentice for Robert Davidson in 1978 when Davidson was creating an Edenshaw memorial house in Masset.
In 1979, Hart was commissioned by the Royal British Columbia Museum in Victoria to carve a 7-foot x 9-foot cedar Dogfish Screen. Jim Hart then started working for Bill Reid in 1980 and worked on some of Reid's most important sculptures, as well as smaller works, in Vancouver until 1984. Specifically, he helped complete Reid's world-acclaimed masterworks, The Raven and the First Man and Spirit of Haida Gwaii/The Jade Canoe. Hart credits Reid for his protection and guidance when, as a young man, he had to quickly learn to adapt to urban life in Vancouver in extreme contrast to his upbringing in Masset.
In 1988, Hart oversaw the installation of the Haida house at Canadian Museum of Civilization on Ottawa.
After four years of tutelage under Bill Reid, Hart understood that Reid's presence was so strong it would be necessary for him to learn how to function with complete independence if he could ever hope to develop his own unique style and ideas. Since then, in 2000 Hart carved the replacement to a Bill Reid pole within "the Haida Village" behind the Museum of Anthropology and in 2008 he carved the Respect to Bill Reid Pole now located in The Bill Reid Gallery in Vancouver.
Along with Haida carver Reg Davidson, Jim Hart also authored one catalogue book, Haida Artifacts: An Exhibition (1990), published by the Lowie Museum of Anthropology in Berkeley, California. While steeped in the traditions of his people, very familiar with Haida history as conveyed by oral stories, he has not felt constrained by conventions. As an innovator, for instance, In 1982, he was the first First Nations artist in British Columbia to complete a bronze sculpture of a totem pole, he has imported and incorporated abalone shells from New Zealand and he has dared to generate his own art-form--the stand-alone wall. Hart's art also includes gold, silver and bronze jewelry, and fabrics. He has built numerous Haida houses, given three potlatches and been actively involved in many others. Much of his artwork is in private and public collections worldwide.
It is not always easy to trace the evolution of Hart's major works because they can take more than a decade to reach a permanent home.
In 2003, he initially installed The Three Watchmen, a 14-foot bronze sculpture at the entrance to an apartment residence in Kerrisdale's Quilchena Park in Vancouver. It depicts traditional watchmen figures who guard Haida from dangers, both physical and spiritual. At the time it was his largest work beyond totems, and a career milestone. This experimental, ground-breaking work was commissioned by Polygon Homes Ltd., a condominium housing developer in the Lower Mainland under the direction of Michael Audain. In 2011, this bronze megalith was installed outside the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa as part of their permanent collection.
A 1995 wood sculpture, Frog Constellation, was installed on the campus of Simon Fraser University in 2012.
Between 2012 to 2014, Hart worked on his largest project up until that time, The Dance Screen (The Scream Too), an 11-foot x 16-foot work that was completed on the fourth floor of the Vancouver Art Gallery, but is permanently housed at the Audain Museum. Conceived back in 2009, The Dance Screen was first installed as a temporary exhibit in the Vancouver Art Gallery. For this work, Hart took three years to salvage red cedar from the Haida Gwaii wildfires. Hart then worked for fifteen months with his assistants, John Brent Bennett, Brandon Brown, Carl Hart and Leon Ridley, including a five-week stint at the Bill Reid Gallery in the summer of 2012, enabling visitors to watch him working with his crew.
The Dance Screen (The Scream Too) has since been accorded pride of place as arguably the most striking work in the permanent collection of the Audain Museum in Whistler, British Columbia. Few know the work was instigated as a much smaller, private work. Michael Audain originally commissioned Hart to carve a plaque that would hang on the wall of his cottage in Pender Harbour. Hart was inspired to keep expanding this commission until it went far beyond the bounds of its initial conception.
One hundred guests at the museum named for its founder and chief benefactor attended a one-hour, inaugural dance performance for the work by Hart and his troupe of Haida dancers on September 22, 2018 at the Audain Museum. Dancers wore ceremonial regalia that now belong to the National Gallery of Canada. About halfway through the performance Hart called Audain to come forth from the audience and honoured him with a song. "It comes from one of my old grandfathers who just about drowned," Hart said, "and people composed a song for him because they realized, if he drowned, how sad they'd all be, because he did so much work for the people. So this song means, 'Where would we be today if it wasn't for you?'" Hart then adorned Audain in an eagle mask, covering him with a blanket and bringing him into the dance.
Both a barrier and a doorway, this imposing. stand-alone work (or wall) emphasizes the role of the salmon within Haida society and ecosystems. The carvings depict an eagle, a bear, orcas, a raven and human figures all rimmed by swimming salmon, adorned with glimmering turquoise shell tails. "The screen says to me, all of us, whether we have two feet or four, whether we have hair, scales, fur or feathers, we're all related to one another in one way or another in the great cycle of birth, life and death," Michael Audain, the museum founder who commissioned the piece, said after the ceremony. Therefore, it's surely incumbent (on) us to treat each other with mutual respect." Jim Hart has reiterated: "The salmon has taken care of us for thousands of years and it's up to us to take care of them."
In 2016, Hart and his son Gwaliga worked together finalizing the patina and paint on another bronzed Yellow Cedar Pole, supervising the casting at the Tallix Art Foundry in Beacon, New York, after two years of work.
On April 1, 2017, Jim Hart raised his Reconciliation Pole, honouring a time before, during and after Canada's Indian Residential Schools, at UBC's Main Mall, between Agronomy Road and Thunderbird Boulevard. Also commissioned by Michael Audain, two years in the making, this 55-foot pole was carved by Jim Hunt with the assistance of his son, Gwaliga, as well as fellow Haida carvers John Brent Bennett, Brandon Brown, Jaalen Edenshaw, Derek White, Leon Ridley and Hart's late son, Carl (who died in 2015), from an 800-year-old red cedar (ts'uu). At the base are a co-existing canoe and a longboat, side by side; the former represents all First Nations with different styles of paddles and the latter represents all Canadians.
There were no residential schools on Haida Gwaii. Many of Hart's relatives--including his grandfather, great aunts and uncles--were sent to the Coqualeetza Residential School in Chilliwack. Hart grew up with an understanding that many died as a result, or many were never able to overcome their trauma. The pole depicts a Coqualeetza student without any feet, unable to run escape. "We’re here today, we’re still here, and we want to go forward," Jim Hart told Georgia Straight. "This pole is about understanding what has taken place, and the depth of all of that, because you can’t smooth the edges on it."
By 2017, Jim Hunt had carved more than 25 Haida totems. He lives in Masset, while maintaining a home in Vancouver. He received the Order of British Columbia in 2003 and the Queen's Diamond Jubilee Medal in 2013. He has honorary doctorates from Emily Carr University of Art and Design and from Simon Fraser University (2017).
BOOKS:
Haida Artifacts: An Exhibition (Berkeley, California: Lowie Museum of Anthropology, University of California, 1990). Co-author with Reg Davidson.
Review of the author's work by BC Studies:
Charles Edenshaw
[Alan Twigg / BCBW 2019] ILMBC2
***
7IDANsuu James Hart:
A Monumental Practice
by 7IDANsuu James Hart and Curtis Collins
(Audain Art Museum & Figure1 $60)
Review by Robin Laurence (BCBW 2026)
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
Robin Laurence is an award-winning writer and critic based in Vancouver.
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James Hart at work:
