Bill Reid Gallery of Northwest Coast Art will officially open its doors to the public next Saturday (May 10), following a week of celebration and ceremony that includes an inauguration by Haida and Coast Salish chiefs.

“The mandate [of the gallery] is to commemorate the multiple legacies of Bill Reid, and we really put the emphasis on that because Bill was talented as a writer, a storyteller, a poet—all of these things,” George MacDonald, president of the Bill Reid Foundation, told the Straight.

The gallery will feature work by Bill Reid and his contemporaries, as well as by new and emerging aboriginal artists. Its inaugural exhibit will be a retrospective entitled Bill Reid: Master of Haida Art.

The gallery’s location in the former home of the Canadian Craft Museum, at 639 Hornby Street, makes it a solid draw for tourists, MacDonald said. “We’re within a couple of blocks of where all the cruise ships come in. I think that’s the one thing that’s missing from downtown: a public institution, as opposed to for-sale galleries, with a permanent collection of First Nations art on display.”¦If there are people coming up and they want to look at a representative collection of fine material, they have to go out to MOA [the Museum of Anthropology at UBC], which for people on a cruise ship just isn’t practical.”