Haida Prints

Haida Art in Canada is geographically designated. These are the artists of the West Coast from Alaska down through Vancouver into Washington State.

The Haida artistic style can be compared to a formal language based on a kind of visual grammar, with a vocabulary that consists of animals and mythological creatures, depicted in a naturalistic or an abstract style. This vocabulary forms a narrative that could indicate the function of an object, tell a story, identify the lineage of a social group or explore philosophical ideas. Often the design composition is so abstract that the creatures represented are not identifiable, its meaning embedded in oral tradition, ancestral privilege and the cultural knowledge of its maker and owner.

Contemporary Haida artists are constantly exploring this ancient language in their art - it is the foundation on which new endeavours are built and the grammar with which future histories are written.

From the McCord Museum exhibition Haida Art: Mapping an Ancient Language