Native American Arts Lecture Series
Bill Holm

The Exploration of Northwest Coast Indian Art: 1774 to 2003

Tuesday, January 14, 2003
7:30-9 pm; 130 Kane Hall, University of Washington Campus
Admission: Free to all

Presenter: Bill Holm, Curator Emeritus of Northwest Coast Indian Art and Professor Emeritus of Art History, UW

Join us for this special event as Bill Holm presents the 27th Annual Faculty Lecture and the first of the Burke¹s Native American Art lecture series. Holm will trace the outsiders' perception of Northwest Coast Indian art from the arrival of the first Europeans through the present day.

In the year 1774 voyagers from the outside world first met Native peoples of the Northwest Coast of North America and returned with examples of their arts. This was a time when Northwest arts and cultures were unknown to Europeans and Euro-Americans. Vast collections of Northwest Coast Indian art spread around the Western world, but its forms and contexts were little understood until serious study began in the late 19th century. That study continues today.

The world of Northwest Coast Indian art and culture opened to 12-year-old Bill Holm when he first entered the Washington State Museum, now the Burke Museum. Befriended by the director, Dr. Erna Gunther, staff, and graduate students, he haunted the ethnological collections. Following army service in World War II, with a Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of Washington, he taught at Lincoln High School in Seattle where he headed the Art Department. His ground-breaking research in the structure of the two-dimensional art of the northern Northwest Coast resulted in his first book, Northwest Coast Indian Art: an Analysis of Form. A close association with Native traditionalists led to participation in ceremonial activities and further research on material culture. Much of this research has been experiential, utilizing Native materials and techniques.

From 1968 to 1985 Bill Holm was a curator at the Burke Museum and taught in Art History and Anthropology, with classes covering two-dimensional, sculptural, and dramatic arts of the Northwest Coast. His photographs of Northwest Coast objects in over 100 museums in 17 countries formed the basis for a research archive published by the Burke Museum in videodisc format, now in the process of rescanning to CD.

Bill Holm has curated exhibits at the Burke Museum, the Vancouver Art Gallery, the Henry Gallery, the Seattle Art Museum, and the Pacific Science Center. He served on the planning committees for the Northwest Coast volume of the Smithsonian's Handbook of the North American Indian, and the exhibit Crossroads of Continents, a joint project of the Smithsonian Institution and the Soviet Academy of Sciences. He has served on the Editorial Board of the American Indian Art Magazine since its inception in 1975 and as consultant to many museums across North America and Europe. Professor Holm has published eight books and many articles. In 2000, Sun Dogs and Eagle Down: The Indian Paintings of Bill Holm, by Steven Brown and Lloyd Averill, was published by the University of Washington Press

Bill Holm has received four Washington State Governor's Writers Awards, a Governor's Writers Day Special Award, and a Governor's Art Award. He was awarded the Native American Art Studies Association Honor Award in 1991, the University of Washington College of Arts and Sciences Distinguished Achievement Award in 1994, and a Certificate of Appreciation from the Sealaska Heritage Institute on behalf of the Tlingit, Haida, and Tsimshian people of Alaska in 2002.

In the fall of 2002, the effort to create the Bill Holm Center for the Study of Northwest Coast Art at the Burke Museum was launched. An endowment campaign is underway to assure the continuation in perpetuity of Bill Holm's remarkable achievements at the University of Washington since 1968 in teaching, in research, and in the enrichment of the Museum's collections.

Presentation co-sponsored by Canadian Studies Center, The University of Washington Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies, The University of Washington Walter Chapin Simpson Center for the Humanities, the Burke Museum and the University Book Store.
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