Coastal Art Beat is an online newsletter that has been published every month since its inception in 2007. The site and newsletter was conceived by Ann Cameron, who identified a need for a greater awareness of the indigenous arts scene in BC in particular. The site spotlights a number of different events each month, mostly in the visual arts. Taking a glance at this months spotlights, it’s easy to see that a demand and interest for Aboriginal art is perhaps greater than I had anticipated, and the range of works being exhibited, from traditional to contemporary, is quite diverse.

This month’s lead article spotlights the Charles Edenshaw exhibit at the Vancouver Art Gallery that just opened last week. Edenshaw was a tremendously influential Haida artist around the turn of the century, which for the Haida was a time of great distress due to the number of deaths from diseases and the extremely restrictive colonial policies that attempted to extinguish Haida and other indigenous cultures from the map. With that background context in mind, it will be interesting to see how the exhibit demonstrates the artist’s process, emotions and reactions to the issues that were directly affecting his life and people.