Barry Herem

Barry Herem is a Seattle artist who has worked in the Northwest Coast Indian style for many years. He has written about the subject as a reviewer, and as an unofficial ethnographer and archaeologist who has done fieldwork collecting and publishing data about the pre-contact Tlingit and Haida of Southeast Alaska. Barry's work is symbolic, animistic, and organic, and has been shown in nearly every major American city and many foreign ones. Barry's taut and harmonious work owes much to the essential forms of Northwest Coast native art, which he has renewed and extended in what he calls "equal parts invention and assimilation." He has created artworks in wood, steel, bronze, fabric, aluminum plate, glass and serigraphic print form. He has created several large sculptures, including two 30-foot aluminum plate whale sculptures for the Portland, Oregon International Airport and a large acrylic sculpture for the Seattle-Tacoma (Sea-Tac) airport. He has created more than 40 limited-edition serigraphs, plus 5x7 art cards based on them. Barry spends every summer exploring the island seascapes of British Columbia and Southeast Alaska in his large sea-going canoe. He also frequently guides a 65-foot schooner, "Crusader," on voyages of adventure through the same magical region.