Susan Point is a MusqueamCoast Salish artist from Canada, who works in the Coast Salish tradition. Her works include public pieces installed at the Vancouver International Airport, Stanley Park, the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington D.C., the U.B.C. Museum of Anthropology, the Penn Museum in Philadelphia, and the city of Seattle. Point was born in Alert Bay while her parents, Edna Grant and Anthony Point were salmon fishing. She grew up with her family in their home on the Musqueam Indian Reserve. In the early 1980s, she joined a group of artists interested in reviving the traditions of Coast Salish art and design, including artists such as Stan Greene, Rod Modeste, and Floyd Joseph. Little research had been done on Salish art, so Point taught herself the Salish traditions. She studied the collections of Coast Salish art at the University of British Columbia's Museum of Anthropology and the Royal British Columbia Museum. There is broad agreement that Point's works were critical to the current efflorescence of contemporary Coast Salish art. She was a leader in expanding the audience for Salish art to a market that was heavily biased towards Northwest Coast artworks produced in northern Northwest Coast formline design principles. Her close study of the formal characteristics of historical works of Salish art laid the foundation for her contemporary productions - some based closely on new renderings in print form of historical spindle whorls in museum collections, and later expanding out into original forms in new media, such as glass, concrete, and bronze. Much of her art practice has involved the adaptation of traditional spindle whorl carvings into the medium of screen printing. Her work helped revive Coast Salish design and brought new scholarly attention to her culture. She has produced more prints than any other artist on the Coast, with over 360 prints in her oeuvre by 2016. For several decades in the late 1990s and early 21st century, she completed a major public work in B.C. or Seattle, a series of prints and works in glass each year. A major retrospective of her work was shown by the Vancouver Art Gallery in 2017, Susan Point: Spindle Whorl.
Works
Her works include Salish Footprint in the Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia, Musqueam house posts at the American Museum of Natural History, and carvings installed at the Vancouver International Airport and at Brockton Point in Stanley Park. In 1995, Susan Point's "Flight " was installed at the Vancouver International Airport. It is the largest spindle whorl in the world at 4.8 meters in diameter. The piece is set against a stone waterfall to symbolize the connection between land and sky. Since 2014, the Penn Museum of the University of Pennsylvania has displayed a glass whorl by Susan Point, made in 1994, in its "Native American Voices: The People – Here and Now" exhibit. In 2008, Point created "Buttress Runnels" for the Olympic Oval in Richmond, B.C.. The runnels move water from the roof of the building away from the site. The runnels include cast images of the life of the Fraser River, including fish, sand, herons. Herons are the symbol of the City of Richmond and figure prominently in stories and histories of the Musqueam people. In 2009, Point’s “Tree of Life” stained glass window was installed in Christ Church Cathedral in Vancouver. The design represents the Salish belief in the interconnectedness of all forms of life, uniting Christian theology with First Nations culture and merging the traditional with the modern. Point was commissioned by the church to design the windows after winning a competition.
