Skip to content

Forgotten sculpture to be displayed

A sculpture by Old Massett master carver Jim Hart is finally being displayed after languishing in storage since 1995.The piece, named Frog Constellation was commissioned for a building in California, but never installed. It was stored in Vancouver until the director of the Bill Reid Foundation and the Bill Reid Centre for Northwest Coast Art Studies at SFU retrieved it."Chief Hart is one of the pre-eminent Aboriginal artists of our time," said CEO of the Bill Reid Trust and executive director of the Bill Reid Gallery of Northwest Coast Art, "and we are so happy that through the collective donation of these three organizations (Ivanhoe Cambridge, Westminster Management Corporation and the Bill Reid Foundation) its beauty will be shared with students, faculty and community members for generations to come."The sculpture is cedar, five meters high and depicts a man and woman straddling a huge frog. Mr. Hart carved it in tribute to a small shamanic piece from the 1870s."The frog is quite powerful in our thinking," said Mr. Hart. "It's one of the creatures that can go between two worlds, in the water and in the upper world, our world... The frog is one of my family crests."Mr. Hart led a blessing of the installation at a ceremony at Simon Fraser University on Monday.