Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas has completed his City of Vancouver steel sculpture project. The title has changed from Bracelet of Abundance to Abundance Fenced. The work is currently being installed at Fraser and 33rd Avenue east in Vancouver. READ MORE...

Haida artist Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas is preparing a new public sculpture for the city of Vancouver The Bracelet of Abundance. The stainless steel work will be placed on a retaining wall on Knight Street at 33rd Avenue East in Vancouver. “The bracelet is inspired by the unexpectedly abundant migration of salmon into the Fraser River in 2010. The Clark-Knight corridor links Vancouver to this river, one of the world’s most significant salmon runs,” says the artist. READ MORE...

Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas recalls stories he heard as a child of Haida fishermen pursuing northern fur seals across the Pacific Ocean on hunts that would last months at a time and take them as far away as the shores of Japan. They would make port of calls in Hokkaido or Hakodate, and, unlike the persecution they faced in Canada, there the men could "walk through the streets just like an ordinary human. They could go to the restaurant, could use public restrooms, they could shop and move freely and live freely as regular humans. Of course, that [was] not the situation here in British Columbia, in Canada, where if you're even allowed in the movie theatre you had to sit in the Indian side." READ MORE...

Take Off is the first time Haida manga has been turned into public, outdoor art.

It is anchored to the ground by three steel pipes that arc to the west. They’re meant to mimic the motion of a mallard duck that quickly lifts up from the water as it takes flight. The birdlike part of the sculpture is made from recycled Volvo fenders and door with the profile of a hockey player painted in black acrylic in Haida-manga style. READ MORE...

If you visit the Museum of Anthropology this month you'll be bumping into a parked Pontiac Firefly with a canoe tied to the roof. The piece, a part of artist Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas's new Meddling in the Museum exhibit, is more than just a fusion of the old and the new, though. Instead the exhibit is highly symbolic, dealing with the individual and cultural conciliation of settlers and indigenous peoples.

On the carpet sits the gutted, copper-foiled, argillite-dusted Pontiac Firefly. Strapped to its roof is the traditionally designed and decorated Haida canoe. READ MORE...

The man who invented Haida Manga is standing in an improvised studio at the UBC Museum of Anthropology. Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas is positioned between his sculptural works in progress - two large, copper-coated "shields," which he will install outside MOA's front doors - talking about meeting places, middle places, and margins. "I'm trying to play the edge between the neighbourhoods," he says, indicating the way the interface between First Nations and colonial culture has shaped his current project - and his life. "I grew up that way. I was the only pale-looking Haida in the whole village... the only green-eyed, light-haired kid." READ MORE...

Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas is a bird of many feathers. Formally trained in classical Haida design, the Vancouver resident has taken his considerable artistic talents along new paths with his unique form of "graphic narrative" called Haida Manga, essentially part-Haida and part-Asian. He takes Haida design and narratives and transforms them into socially relevant art. The object is to advance the Haida design traditions "to combat the simplistic narratives perpetrated about indigenous people of the Pacific Coast." He is already a big hit in Japan and Korea where manga - Japanese for comic - is a multi-billion-dollar-a-year business. And greater commercial success may just be around the corner. READ MORE...

One needn't be a high-powered business guru to succeed in the export industry - just ask Haida artist Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas, who values artistic challenge far above sales charts and market analysis. That's not to preclude success, though - in the past two years, his sales have grown from zero to 100,000 units, earning him top-three ranking (August 2006) in Japan as an art importer. READ MORE...

It was a typical day at Vancouver's Museum of Anthropology. Patrons gazed at the west coast totem poles, the painted masks and carved feast bowls. Bill Reid's depiction of the Haida creation story, with Raven perched atop a clam shell, the first people crawling out below was in the background, and artist Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas explained how he was about to turn things upside down.

"See this 27-foot canoe," he pointed at a boat carved in 1985 by Reid and others. "We're flipping it over and tying it to the top of an 11-foot Pontiac Firefly." READ MORE...

Amid the usual flurry of pre-exhibition activity at the Vancouver Art Gallery, painters, preparators, curators, all working in quick concert to prepare Raven Travelling for its public opening this Saturday (June 10), unusual cross-cultural elements emerge. Billed by the VAG as the most comprehensive exhibition of Haida art ever assembled, it is also a ground-breaker for that institution in terms of cooperation with a First Nations community. READ MORE...

In front of a fire pit in the Performance House at the old village site of Qay'llnagaay or Sea Lion Town, near Skidegate on Haida Gwaii, direct and indirect contributors to Raven Travelling gathered to celebrate the launch of the lavish coffee table book that coincides with a national touring exhibit of the same name that celebrates two centuries of Haida art. The celebration commenced when the Haida version of a wild man of the woods slipped into the room, two women screamed and the creature was ceremonially drummed out of the hall. READ MORE...

The 50-or-so pieces of paper taped to the wall of Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas' Kerrisdale apartment flutter as he walks down the hall. It's the skeleton of a massive work; a comic that combines Japanese-manga art with Yahgulanaas' Haida roots. When finished it can be read either as a comic, or - arranged as it is now - as a single powerful image. He calls it the War of the Blink. READ MORE...

Be prepared. Tales of Raven will rock your world view. These are not the powerful, shamanistic images of artists such as Bill Reid or Robert Davidson. But neither are they the all-too-common media images of Indians living lives of poverty and pain on reserves or in inner cities. The stories of the trickster Raven, as told by Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas, are something different. For one thing, they're not images carved into cedar -- they're drawn on paper. They're what most people would call comics, and they're fun, humorous and sometimes just plain rude. In one episode, for example, a pompous Raven gets his comeuppance when he's served dried salmon softened in urine. In another, Raven gets to be a hooker and wear fishnet stockings and high heels. READ MORE...

How does a tale well-told transform into one well-read? First Nations artist Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas came up with a unique way of meeting the challenge of making oral culture contemporary. He calls it Haida Manga, after the Japanese graphic novel and animated film genre. "I never wanted to use the word 'comics' because they are, generally speaking, simple mainstream stuff designed to entertain adolescent males suffering from hormone toxicity," says Yahgulanaas. READ MORE...

A Haida artist in Vancouver is using comic books to tell traditional aboriginal myths. Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas calls his work "Haida Manga." Manga are the highly stylized comic books popular in Japan. The word "manga" means "whimsical pictures." But Yahgulanaas' creation, Rock 'n' Raven, is not exactly whimsical. "Rock 'n' Raven is morally ambiguous. It's not about good versus evil. It's about things we experience as everyday people," he says. "It speaks to our common humanity." READ MORE...

"For the Haida," he says, "a smudged cloud on an ocean horizon carried a message that could mean the difference between a safe or a final crossing. There was a time when this system of signs was displayed in every town inland for many hundreds of miles—all along the Pacific Ocean from Alaska to Washington State." On Haida Gwaii (a.k.a. the Queen Charlotte Islands), Yahgulanaas adds, even houses are placed in "relationship to their cosmological and physical world, not positioned helter-skelter based on how many metres of sewage pipe they happen to have." READ MORE...