Native visions: Evolution in Northwest Coast art from the Eighteenth through the Twentieth Century

Sparkling with over 200 illustrations, 100 of them in color, of the magnificent art of Northwest Coast Native Americans, this book accompanies a traveling exhibition that originated at the Seattle Art Museum. Brown, associate curator of Native American art for the museum, is particularly interested in examining the chronology shown by changes in design forms. He traces the development of the consistent, dramatic style from the prehistoric era through the classic early 19th-century two-dimensional style to the current revival using variations on old themes. His emphasis on details of variation in design makes the text somewhat pedantic; he doesn’t define much-used terms like formline and negative space, and he presupposes some knowledge of the culture’s history, tribal customs, and mythology. But the art is breathtaking.