Down from the Shimmering Sky: Masks of the Northwest Coast

Patricia Morley is professor emerita of English and Canadian Studies at
Concordia University and an avid outdoor recreationist. She is also the
author of The Mountain Is Moving: Japanese Women’s Lives, Kurlek, and
Margaret Laurence: The Long Journey Hom

Stunning photographs are the prime attraction of this large-format study
of two centuries of masks made by First Nation artists on the Pacific
Northwest Coast. There are 61 color and over 100 black-and-white
photographs of masks from major institutions and private collections in
North America and Europe. In his short but effective introduction, Bruce
Grenville, senior curator of the Vancouver Art Gallery, describes the
masks as a manifestation of powerful ancestral spirits used to make the
supernatural world visible.

Robert Joseph, a Kwakwaka’wakw chief who is also a writer and
curator, has collaborated with Peter Macnair on many exhibitions. His
intimate essay, “Behind the Mask,” addresses both the meaning and
potency of masks for their First Nations creators. “Every mask is
quintessential,” he writes, “to our desire to embrace wholeness,
balance, and harmony. In a simple and fundamental act of faith, we
acknowledge and reaffirm our union through song and dance, ceremony and
ritual.” In all of these activities, masks play a vital role.

Macnair, who served as curator of anthropology at Victoria’s Royal
British Museum for over 30 years, has contributed an authoritative and
insightful text. The photographs draw us into not only another culture
but another world, evoking awe and fear, surprise, anger, sorrow, and
longing. Down from the Shimmering Sky is a deeply spiritual book that is
best absorbed slowly.