February 9th, 2024

Ceremonial/Art is honoured to present a solo exhibition of watercolour paintings by Chief U’dziztalis (Henry Speck) from the late 1950s and early 1960s. His unconventional use of colour and naturalistic rendering of texture and volume depict masked dancers, supernatural beings, and traditional Kwakwaka’wakw motifs.  Speck worked as a fisherman, dancer, song writer and visual artist. In the early 1960s he became artistic director of the Kwakiutl House Project in Alert Bay, where he also pursued his artistic skills and taught carving and dancing. 

Specks paintings are both documentary and abstract; figures from Kwakwaka’wakw cosmology and myth are recorded, but float weightlessly in the white picture plane. Drawing from a long history of graphic painting on house screens, blankets, masks, boxes etc they represent a new era of art history developing alongside existing traditional knowledge and cultural histories. 

His work was declared by the Haida artist Bill Reid to be “far beyond anything attempted before in Kwakiutl art.”, and this unique approach to Kwakwaka’wakw design opened a new range of possibilities for generations of artists. Renowned Hul’q’umi’num Coast Salish and Okanagan (Syilx) artist Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun noted his influence on his own practice “Speck was the first rule breaker, breaking out the traditions into a modern expression.”