Jim Schoppert: What Price This Pound of Whale? and Other Unpublished Writings
Jim Schoppert: What Price This Pound of Whale? and Other Unpublished Writings
$10.00
Editor: Christopher Green
57 pp, softcover, saddle-stitch binding
ISBN: 978-1-7339317-6-2
The Tlingit artist Jim Schoppert (1947-1992) was among the most accomplished, innovative, and prolific Alaska Native artists of the twentieth century. His whimsical sculptures and large scale painted wooden carvings reconfigure Tlingit visual motifs, and he challenged the binary categories against which Indigenous artists are so often defined, such as traditional and contemporary, historic and innovative, and artist or craftsperson. While known primarily for his modernist interventions in Tlingit visual traditions, Schoppert was also a prolific writer, an eloquent speaker, and an ardent advocate for Alaska Native artists. This publication brings together a selection of his unpublished poetry and writings from the artist’s personal papers. Presented alongside never before seen sketches and studies, this selection bridges Schoppert’s written and artistic practices in a deeply personal portrait of the artist and Alaska Native life that upsets preconceptions about Native art and unsettles the established narrative of Euro-American and Indigenous aesthetic relations.
Author’s Biography:
Jim Schoppert (1947-1992) was a Tlingit multidisciplinary artist and writer. He was a Taku Tlingit Raven of the Ishkahittaan (Inland Frog) clan from his Tlingit mother and half-German from his father and carried the Łingit name Dom-Yetz. Born in Juneau, Alaska, he earned a BFA in Sculpture and Printmaking from the University of Alaska—Anchorage and an MFA from the University of Washington. In addition to his artistic career, Schoppert was instrumental in promoting Alaska Native arts and organizations. He was Director of Arts and Crafts at the Cook Inlet Native Association, Director of the Alaska Arts in Prisons Program for the University of Alaska Juneau, and organized exhibitions and workshops across Alaska and the Pacific Northwest. He was visiting professor in visual art at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks and directed its Native Art Center. He sat on the Washington State Arts Commission and on the boards of the Alaska State Council on the Arts and the Institute of Alaska Native Arts. His work is held in public and private collections across the United States, including the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, the Anchorage Museum, the Heard Museum, and the Newark Museum, among others. His writing and poetry has appeared in The Greenfield Review and Journal of Alaska Native Arts, among other publications.
Editor
Christopher Green
Christopher Green was born on unceded xwməθkwəy’əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), Stó:lo ̄ and Sə’lílwətaʔɬ / Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) territory presently known as Vancouver, Canada. He is a writer and scholar of modern and contemporary art whose current research focuses on contemporary Tlingit art and the interrelation of Euro-American modernism and twentieth century Northwest Coast Native art. He received his PhD in Art History from the CUNY Graduate Center, and currently serves as Visiting Assistant Professor of Art History at Swarthmore College. He recently curated “Space Makers: Indigenous Expression and a New American Art” at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, April 13-September 30 2024, and the forthcoming exhibition “The sky loves to hear me sing: Woodland Art in Transmotion” at the List Gallery, Swarthmore College (September 2024).”
