Carving the new Great Box: Gwaai Edenshaw and Jaalen Edenshaw at the Pitt Rivers Museum

A masterpiece of Haida First Nations art from Canada, the "Great Box" was collected by General Pitt Rivers by 1874 and was part of the Pitt Rivers Museum’s founding collection. As part of the Museum’s ongoing relationship with the Haida Nation, two experienced Haida artists, brothers Jaalen Edenshaw and Gwaai Edenshaw, spent a month at the Pitt Rivers in September 2014 making an exact replica of the box in order to learn from the artist who made it. This video by Robert Rapaport documents the process of carving and painting the replica box and the artists’ reflections on the project.

The project, funded by the ESRC as a Knowledge Exchange Impact Acceleration grant through the University’s Social Science Division, is an innovative way of making the Museum’s historic collections more accessible to members of their communities of origin.

Further information about the Great Box project: http://www.prm.ox.ac.uk/haidabox.html

Videographer Robert Rapaport www.robertrapoport.com