Doug Cranmer, one of the Northwest Coast’s most significant artists, isn’t a well-known name in these parts, but he is a name to be reckoned with north of the border.
Born in Alert Bay, B.C., in 1926, Cranmer, who died in 2006, was the son of a Kwakwaka’wakw chief and the first of nine children. Alert Bay is a place of some 1,300 people on Cormorant Island on the northwest edge of Vancouver Island’s Inside Passage. The village is a First People cultural destination.
A retrospective of his work, “Kesu’: The Art and Life of Doug Cranmer,” is under way at the Museum of Anthropology in Vancouver, B.C. The show, which runs through Sept, 3. displays Cranmer’s radiant, understated, 2- and 3-D creations, ranging from masks, boxes and bowls to prints and paintings on wood. The book accompanying the exhibit, by the same name, may encourage Puget Sounders to head north to take in the artist’s work, which caught on in the 1960s and allowed him to be one of the first Native artists in British Columbia to own his own gallery.
Cranmer was also a teacher and inspiration to generations of Native artists.
The book, written by Jennifer Kramer, curator of the Pacific Northwest at the Museum of Anthropology and assistant professor of anthropology at the University of British, is a closely observed narrative of a vivid life: Cranmer was something of colorful contrarian.
Kesu’ means “wealth being carved,” a name given Cranmer before he was a year old and a marvelous appellation for a man who did things his way.
He was an artist with no fondness for the limelight; his puckish sense of humor was well known. When a busload of tourists approached his University of British Columbia carving shed, he grabbed a broom and began sweeping.
No, he knew nothing about the carvings, he said: He was just the janitor.
Cranmer, as Kramer explains, was a modernist steeped in tradition, who pushed the boundaries of his art. The former logger was also a savvy businessman who made a good living without “’selling’ out his personal integrity and cultural values,” she writes.
Like many serious artists, Cranmer preferred to let his work speak for itself.
He told one interviewer about being questioned by secondary-school kids, one of whom asked what it was like to do carving. His response, Cranmer informed the interviewer: “I have nothing to say other than it feeds me — as simple as that.”
It wasn’t, of course.
“Kesu’: The Art and Life of Doug Cranmer,” by Jennifer Kramer. Published by University of Washington Press. $34.95 paperback. 160 pages; 68 color illustrations.