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Metro Toronto Convention Centre, Toronto, ON
Don Yeomans has spent more than five decades pushing the possibilities of Northwest Coast formline through experimentation, humour, and an unmistakably avant-garde sensibility. His practice demonstrates that tradition is not static, but a living visual language capable of absorbing new ideas, technologies, and perspectives while remaining deeply rooted in Haida knowledge and storytelling. Across this presentation, Yeomans brings familiar forms and narratives into unexpected territory. In Raven and the UFO (2019), the Haida creation story of Raven discovering the first humans becomes a playful cosmic proposition, imagining that their emergence may have origins beyond our earthly world. In Raven in the 20th Century, first released in 1979, the front of an automobile is seamlessly transformed into Raven’s face—its grille becoming teeth and headlights becoming eyes. Considered too unconventional when it was first released, the work now reads as remarkably prescient and undeniably contemporary Bringing together works spanning different moments in Yeomans’ career, this presentation highlights an artist who has consistently refused to treat Northwest Coast art as fixed in the past. Through abstraction, unexpected imagery, unconventional colour, and humour, Yeomans has continually expanded what the formline can do—and in doing so, helped shape its place within contemporary art. He is incredibly important to art history in British Columbia, having been part of all major Bill Reid works when he was younger, and his own successful career spans decades of international exhibitions. – Don Yeomans (b. 1958, Prince Rupert, BC; Haida) is one of the most respected and renowned Northwest Coast artists. Born of a Haida father from Masset and a Métis mother from Slave Lake, Alberta, Yeomans has studied and worked in the Haida Style since he was a youth. Yeomans first apprenticed under the expert guidance of his aunt Freda Diesing in the early 1970's. Shortly after studying fine arts at Vancouver Community College in 1976, Yeomans worked under Robert Davidson on the Charles Edenshaw Memorial Longhouse. He also studied Fine Arts at Langara College, where he met Bud Mintz, who was to become an important friend and mentor. For a two-year period he studied jewelry with Phil Janzé, a renowned Gitksan artist. Don Yeomans has mastered the traditional forms of art making, from two-dimensional design to wood carving to gold and silver jewelry-making. Yeomans' many apprenticeships have resulted in an artist and craftsman who can produce exquisite artworks in any medium. Yeomans' work can be found in numerous private and public collections worldwide, such as the University of British Columbia's Museum of Anthropology, the Royal British Columbia Museum in Victoria, BC, the Canadian Museum of Civilization in Hull, QC, the Glenbow Museum in Calgary, AB, and the Museum of Northern British Columbia in Prince Rupert.
