Sto-lo, 1999, serigraph on paper, edition 164/170. SFU Art Collection. Gift of the Salish Weave Collection of George and Christiane Smyth, 2022. Photo: Janet Dwyer
Stan Greene was a significant forerunner of Coast Salish art in the 1980s and is a well-established and highly respected contemporary Coast Salish artist. He is credited with bringing visibility to Coast Salish artistic practice over his long career. Sto-lo is a serigraph illustrating the origin myth of the Stó:lō people, as described by Greene:
“The first people came down from the sky. They were brought by Xaals (HALS) in the form of minks and others, who were later transformed into humans. The oldest of our villages are near ten thousand years old. Our legends tell the stories about the beginning of time, the great flood, and the creation of the sky and all the animals of this land. For many years our people were asleep. Now the Creator has seen to give us back our culture. In this picture, an owl is shown with two carvings. One is a man wearing a mask and the other is a man. These carvings stood beside the Fraser River, where the Sto-Lo are from. (Stó-Lō, in the Halkomelum [sic] language, means river, and we are the People of the River). The owl represents the old people who are gone; they are handing our culture back to us. The fish in the eagle’s wing represents new life. The red circle represents the red road, which to me means the Indian way of life, which is to know who you are, and to be as good as you can be.” (Stan Green from the Salish Weave website)
Stan Greene (b. 1953, Mission, British Columbia) is a Salish artist from Stó:lō, Semiahmoo and Niimíipu (Nez Perce, from the Columbia River Plateau). He works in different media, including printmaking, wood carving, and painting. Greene has been connected to the Coast Salish art community over the past four decades and has been recognized for numerous significant public art works. Greene carved two Salish house posts that were exhibited at the 1986 World Expo in Vancouver, B.C. and in 1987 he carved a pole that was raised in the Kanazawa Park of Yokohama City, Japan. He also exhibited his work at the 1994 Commonwealth Games in Victoria, B.C. His work was part of the exhibition, Changing Hands: Art Without Reservation 2 at the Museum of Art and Design in New York, 2005. Greene’s printed and carved artworks have been collected by the Chilliwack Museum and Archives, UBC’s Museum of Anthropology (Vancouver), SFU Galleries (Burnaby), and the National Gallery of Canada (Ottawa).
Greene currently lives in Chilliwack, British Columbia.