FCCS Visiting Artist Series: Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun

This talk will be held in the University Theatre (ADM 026) as part of the CCS 150 Creative and Critical Art Theory class.

Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun Lets’lo:tseltun lives and works on unceded, traditional and ancestral xʷməθkʷəyə̓ m Musqueam), Sḵwxw̱ ú7mesh Úxwumixw (Squamish), and səli̓lw̓ətaʔɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) territories. An artist of Coast Salish and Okanagan descent, he graduated from the Emily Carr University of Art + Design in British Columbia. Influential as both artist and activist, Yuxweluptun merges traditional iconography with representations of the environment and the history of colonization, resulting in his powerful, contemporary imagery; his work is replete with masked fish farmers, super-predator oil barons, abstracted ovoids and unforgettable depictions of a spirit-filled, but now toxic, natural world.

Highly respected locally, Yuxweluptun’s work has also been displayed in numerous international group and solo exhibitions, including the seminal INDIGENA: Contemporary Native Perspectives (1992) at the Canadian Museum of History (then the Canadian Museum of Civilization) and in Sakahàn: International Indigenous Art (2013) at the National Gallery of Canada. In 1998, Yuxweluptun was the recipient of the Vancouver Institute for the Visual Arts (VIVA) Award. He was also honoured in 2013 with a prestigious Fellowship at the Eitelijorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art in Indianapolis.

Other major projects include the 30-year survey Unceded Territories at the Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia, which also produced a full-colour publication and commissioned texts.

(Course Code: CCS 150)