Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas

Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas is an award-winning visual contemporary artist, author and speaker. His work has been seen in public spaces, museums, galleries and private collections across globe. Institutional collections include the British Museum, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Seattle Art Museum and Vancouver Art Gallery. A lot of Michael's art is inspired by the work he does with The Christensen Fund. The Christensen Fund is a private foundation that buttresses the efforts of people and institutions inspired by a bio and culturally diverse world infused with artistic expression and lives and environments that are beautiful, bountiful and resilient.

Early life

Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas was born in 1954 in Masset, Haida Gwaii. He is a descendant of the influential artists, Isabella Edenshaw, Charles Edenshaw. Yahgulanaas was a prolific young artist who soon covered the walls and ceilings of his bedroom with drawings. When those spaces were filled he found the fingernails of schoolmates to be an interesting platte for intricate multicoloured paintings. His artistic passion was curtailed somewhat in the decades that he in elected and volunteer public work including the creation of an multicultural community endowment, the Gwaii Trust.

Art career

Yahgulanaas's work has been seen in public spaces, museums, galleries, and private collections across North America, Europe, Asia, Australia, and the Middle East. His visual practice encompasses a variety of different art forms including: large-scale public art projects, mixed media sculptures and canvases, re-purposed automobile parts, acrylics, watercolours, ink drawings, and illustrated publications. Exploring themes of identity, environmentalism, and the human condition he uses art to communicate a world view that while particular to Haida Gwaii, his ancestral North Pacific archipelago, is also relevant to a contemporary and internationally engaged audience.

The original five–meter long mural that was published in 2009 as RED: A Haida manga is on a multi-year exhibit tour. Another book, Hachidori has sold over 100,000 copies in Japan with a single-day record sale of 20,000 copies. Flight of the Hummingbird, first published in North America and now available in five languages, is also a bestseller and includes essays contributed by the Dalai Lama and Nobel Peace prize winner Wangari Maathai. Declaration of Interdependence by Dr David Suzuki was illustrated by Yahgulanaas.^[1][2]

Yahgulanaas's works in metal include commissions from the British Museum (2010), The City of Vancouver (2011) and the 2010 Winter Olympics organizing committee. In 2015, his sculpture of a sei whale was unveiled at the Vancouver International Airport.^[3]

Since 2009, Yahgulanaas has been a member of the board of the Museum of Anthropology at UBC.

Haida manga

Although Yahgulanaas trained under master carvers, his brief exposure to Chinese brush techniques with Cai Ben Kwan encouraged a departure from the typical expressions of the Haida art form and the development of a new genre of narrative art called "Haida manga."^[4]

Haida Manga blends North Pacific Indigenous iconographies and framelines with the graphic dynamism of Asian manga. Haida Manga is committed to hybridity as a positive force that opens a third space for critical engagement. It offers an empowering and playful way of viewing and engaging with social issues as it seeks participation, dialogue, reflection, and action.

Published works

• A Tale of Two Shamans (2001)^[5]
• The Last Voyage of the Black Ship (2001)
• A Lousy Tale (2004)
• Hachidori (2005)
• Flight of the Hummingbird (2008)
• RED, A Haida Manga (2009)
• The Canoe He Called Loo Taas— illustrations (2010)
• The Little Hummingbird (2010)
• The Declaration of Interdependence— illustrations (2010)
• Red: A Haida Manga, ISBN 978-1-55365-353-0, (2009)
• The Canoe He Called Loo Taas, ISBN 9780978255367, (2010)
• Old Growth: Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas, Liz Park, ed. ISBN 978-1897476963 (2012)

Notes

External links

• Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas, official website
• Haida manga