The major retrospective of one of Canada's most important and original contemporary artists Unceded Territories is a major and timely review of the work of Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun, spanning thirty years of his painterly and polemical practice. It places the artist's concerns in dialogue with this moment in our shared histories. An artist of Cowichan and Okanagan descent, Yuxweluptun lives and works on unceded Coast Salish territories in Vancouver, British Columbia. He calls himself a history painter, a monumentalist, a modernist. Impassioned in his commitment to advance First Nations rights to the land and effect change, Yuxweluptun fuses art with political action — he “paints freedom and equality?.

This retrospective includes brilliant commentary from Michael Turner, Lucy Lippard, Marcia Crosby, Glenn Alteen, a short-story by Jimmie Durham. In an extensive dialogue, curators Karen Duffek and Tania Willard discuss the meaning of Yuxweluptun's practice and place it in the context of the First Nations struggle for autonomy, justice, and environmental preservation. In a searing and powerful artist's statement, Yuxweluptun himself explains the essence of his painting and the forces that drive his artistic and political life.

Published to accompany the exhibition at the University of British Columbia Museum of Anthropology this volume includes 65 of Yuxweluptun's paintings from the last three decades and will be a lasting document of his art and activism.

Karen Duffek is the Curator of Contemporary Visual Arts and Pacific Northwest at the Museum of Anthropology (MOA) at the University of British Columbia. Her research focus lies both in the history of MOA's Northwest Coast Aboriginal collections — including connecting and documenting historical objects with descendants and originating community members — and in the relationship of twentieth-century and contemporary art to cultural practice. Her publications include the books Bill Reid and Beyond: Expanding on Modern Native Art (co-edited with Charlotte Townsend-Gault, 2004) and The Transforming Image: Painted Arts of Northwest Coast First Nations (co-authored with Bill McLennan, 2000).

Karen Duffek's profile page

Tania Willard's profile page