A recent interview with Sealaska
Sealaska Shareholder Wins National Award
Nicholas Galanin is an internationally renowned artist. Galanin learned alongside master artists who inspired him to push the boundaries of Native art. He has shared his knowledge with students as a guest professor at the University of Victoria in BC and through his Sitka gallery and studio. Sealaska celebrates Nicholas’ accomplishment and inspiring works of art.
When artist Nicholas Galanin began apprenticing with his father and uncle, both master carvers, he noticed a societal perception of what indigenous art should be. He’s spent his life dispelling those perceptions. “There are no real rules in the creative world,” he says. An artist of Tlingit-Aleut descent, Nicholas recently received a $50,000 Rasmuson Fellowship from the United States Artists nonprofit organization.
Nicholas studied as a jewelry designer and silversmith in London, and then received his master’s degree in New Zealand. Though he works across all different media, his current focus is on contemporary concept-based art. Says Nicholas, I don’t know what the next project will look like, and that’s exciting.”
The Article
http://www.sealaska.com/object/nicholas-galanin.html
A link to the Q&A
2013 Contemporary Art Fellows
The Eiteljorg Museum of American Indian and Western Art is proud to announce the recipients of the 2013 Eiteljorg Contemporary Art Fellowship. The Fellowship honors four juried artists and one invited artist who excel in the field of Native contemporary art. In addition to a catalog and exhibition, which will be on display at the museum from November 2013-February 2014, each artist receives a $25,000 unrestricted grant and the museum purchases works of their art for the Eiteljorg permanent contemporary collection.
Beat Nation: Art, Hip Hop and Aboriginal Culture
This accompanying publication features the work of the 28 participating artists and texts by co-curators Kathleen Ritter and Tania Willard.
Beat Nation was presented at the Vancouver Art Gallery from 25 February to 3 June, 2012 and at The Power Plant from 15 December 2012 - 5 May 2013.
Product Information
- Publisher(s): Vancouver Art Gallery
- Year: 2012
- ISBN: 978-1-895442-98-4
- Pages: 96
- Illustrations: 62 full-colour reproductions
- Dimensions: 6 in x 9 in
My work made it to the cover of this wonderful publication! Get it online from PowerPlant in Toronto here…
http://sales.thepowerplant.org/auxiliary/Reserve.aspx?p=19781
Featured by Ultra:Extra,
WHO IS THAT? (artist of the moment)
http://ultraextra.org/who-is-that/2013/1/19/nicholas-galanin
“Nicholas Galanin has a similar approach in his grey-scaled, two-channel video work, “Tsu Heidei Shugaxtutaan.” One channel features a nimble breakdancer popping and locking to traditional Tlingit drums and vocals; the second, a Tlingit dancer in full regalia moving to Crystal Castles-esque electronic music in front of a carved and painted Tlingit screen. It’s an exceptional pairing and an icon of the exhibition’s agenda.”
Before you can see it, you can hear it: the video projection by Tlingit artist Nicholas Galanin in the opening gallery of Beat Nation: Art, Hip Hop and Aboriginal Culture, a compendium of new work by indigenous North American artists opening this weekend at Toronto’s Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery. The work, titled Tsu Heidei Shugaxtutaan, translates as “We will again open this container of wisdom that has been left in our care,” and it has two parts. First, you hear the pounding electronic music composed by Galanin, which inspires the performance of traditional Tlingit dancer Dan Littlefield. Masked, dressed in full regalia, and carrying a raven rattle, Littlefield moves to the new beat in the old ways. Next, you hear the drumming and chanting of traditional Tlingit vocals and drums – this could be an archival soundtrack from a hundred years ago – but here a dancer (the electrifying David “Elsewhere” Burnal) is seen in an empty dance studio, dressed in slouchy hip-hop attire, and breakdancing to the old songs in new ways.
Old is new, new is old, African-American breakdancing meets Northwest Coast antiquity, but what stays the same is the power of the beat, that fundamental element found across all cultures and all times, the beat of the mother’s heart, of our own heart beating, that universal sign of life. The pulse of aboriginal art goes on, and survival comes in marvellous new forms.
A recent interview published in this months The Block Mag!
https://ca.zinio.com/checkout/publisher/?productId=500618345&offer=500397865
UVic Art Professor Nicholas Galanin Wins $50,000 USA Fellowship
POSTED: DECEMBER 5, 2012
Nicholas Galanin, the 2012/13 Audain Professor in Contemporary Arts of the Pacific Northwest at the University of Victoria, has received a $50,000 Rasmuson Fellowship from United States Artists, a non-profit organization aimed at investing in “America’s finest artists.”
Galanin’s fellowship was in the Crafts and Traditional Arts category.
Galanin is a Tlingit/Aleut artist from Sitka, Alaska, and he describes his practice as “contemporary multimedia work that transcends the familiar, time-honored iconography of Tlingit and Northwest Coast art.”
His work was featured in the Vancouver Art Gallery’s recent survey of artists who connect Aboriginal identity and urban youth culture, titled “Beat Nation.” A touring version of the show will open at Toronto’s Power Plant on December 15.
Galanin’s work was also featured in group shows at Vancouver’s Grunt Gallery and Bill Reid Gallery over the past year, while Trench Contemporary Art (his Vancouver dealer) recently wrapped a solo show titled “I LOOOOOVE YOUR CULTURE.” His work was also in Montreal gallery Art Mûr’s “A Stake in the Ground,” curated by Nadia Myre, in January.
According to a release from Trench, Galanin plans to buy a house or build a studio with the funds.
What a wonderful honor it is to be a 2012 USA Rasmuson Fellow!
Hit the link for more information.
http://www.usafellows.org/fellow/nicholas_galanin
Also a recent article in Businessweek -
“…The list of winners includes such emerging talents as Alaska-based multi-genre artist Nicholas Galanin, Sarajevo-born fiction writer and MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant winner Aleksandar Hemon, filmmaker Lee Issac Chung and edgy performance artist Guillermo Gomez-Pena…”
http://www.businessweek.com/news/2012-12-03/proulx-m-dot-butterfly-author-drummer-win-50-000-grants
Article in Adn
http://www.adn.com/2012/12/03/2711998/sitka-artist-wins-50000-national.html
KCAW Interview
http://www.kcaw.org/2012/12/04/sitka-artist-wins-a-50000-fellowship/
AlaskaPublic.org
http://www.alaskapublic.org/2012/12/05/sitka-artist-wins-50000-fellowship/
UVIC
http://finearts.uvic.ca/blog/?p=2156
BlouinArtInfo
http://ca.blouinartinfo.com/news/story/845956/alaska-based-canadian-favorite-nicholas-galanin-wins-50000
Alaska Dispatch
http://www.alaskadispatch.com/article/alaskan-artist-nicholas-galanin-wins-prestigious-fellowship
SFGate
http://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Sitka-artist-wins-50-000-grant-4101783.php
My Dick Bernanin Ties are onsale today only (Cyber Monday) at BBB!
Bowties
http://shop.beyondbuckskin.com/product/i-looooove-your-culture-hipsters-in-headdresses-rust-bowtie
Neckties
15 December 2012 - 5 May 2013 | Beat Nationdescribes a generation of artists who juxtapose urban youth culture with Aboriginal identity to create innovative and unexpected new works that reflect the current realities of Aboriginal peoples today.
CO-CURATED BY KATHLEEN RITTER, ASSOCIATE CURATOR, VANCOUVER ART GALLERY
& TANIA WILLARD, A SECWEPEMC ARTIST, DESIGNER AND CURATOR
PARTICIPATING ARTISTS
Jackson 2bears, KC Adams, Sonny Assu, Bear Witness, Jordan Bennett, Raymond Boisjoly, Corey Bulpitt & Gurl 23, Kevin Lee Burton, Raven Chacon, Dana Claxton, Nicholas Galanin, Maria Hupfield, Mark Igloliorte, Cheryl L’Hirondelle, Duane Linklater, madeskimo, Dylan Miner, Kent Monkman, Marianne Nicolson, Skeena Reece, Hoka Skenandore, Rolande Souliere
I will have work in this important upcoming exhibition… details here!
Sakahàn: 1st International Quinquennial of New Indigenous Art
17 May 2013 - 02 Sep 2013
Sakahàn, meaning “to light a fire” in the language of the Algonquin, is the National Gallery of Canada’s first survey of recent Indigenous art. It will feature over 100 works by more than 70 renowned and emerging artists from around the world. Poetic, unexpected and challenging, these works of art document and interrogate distinct cultural, political, and social moments while making the link with parallel histories and the evolving relationship between the legacy of colonialism and the cause of cultural autonomy. Sakahàn, one of the NGC’s most ambitious exhibitions of contemporary art to date, extends to partnering sites in and outside of Ottawa and unveils impressive new works created specifically for this project.
Organized by the National Gallery of Canada.
This bowtie is titled “I Looooove Your Culture: Hipsters in Headdresses” and was designed by Nicholas Galanin (Tlingit/Aleut) for Dick Bernanin Menswear. It features the faces of white hipsters wearing Native American headdresses.
The bowtie was launched on October 18, in conjunction with Galanin’s “I Looooove Your Culture” exhibit opening at the Trench Gallery in Vancouver, and will be sold exclusively through Beyond Buckskin Boutique.
Galanin’s work is a highly charged mix of beauty, material knowledge, politics and contemporary cultural representation. Navigating both the Native American art world as well as the contemporary global art world, Galanin continuously challenges the aesthetic and cultural perceptions of Native identity.
http://shop.beyondbuckskin.com/artist/dick-bernanin-menswear
