Carved Posts at Alert Bay
Plate 330 · Portfolio 10 · Nimkish
“The figure at the bottom of the column in the foreground represents a raven. When a feast or a dance is to be held in this house, the guests enter through the raven’s beak, the lower mandible of which swings up and down on a pivot.”
— Edward S. Curtis, The North American Indian, Volume 10Kwakiutl · Alert Bay, British Columbia
Alert Bay is a Kwakiutl (Kwakwaka’wakw) village on the coast of British Columbia. Curtis documented the Kwakiutl in Volume 10 of The North American Indian — his fullest study of the peoples of the Northwest Coast.
Most of what the world pictures when it thinks of Curtis is a face — a portrait. This is not that. It is architecture: the carved posts and crest figures of the great houses, monumental and totemic, worked with hand-adzes of primitive form. The raven, the eagle, and the ancestral figures stood at the fronts of the houses, and the doorway itself could open through the beak of a carved bird.
This is a Portfolio plate from Portfolio 10 — the large-format exhibition series. The plates for Volumes 12 through 20 and the later work were engraved by the Suffolk Engraving Company, a different hand and a later era than the early Southwest volumes. For the collector whose eye goes to structure and form before it goes to a face, this is the plate.
With $1,250 contributed in your name to a Native American cause of your choosing.
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