Martha Black

Martha Black (18 July 1945 – 7 January 2024) was a Canadian art historian who specialized in Northwest Coast art and issues in museum management and repatriation. Black authored a number of articles and a book on Heiltsuk and Nuu-chah-nulth art, and issues related to repatriation outside of the treaty process. She was the curator of the Indigenous Collection at the Royal British Columbia Museum.

Biography Black received her MA in interdisciplinary studies from York University in Toronto, Ontario, and a PhD in art history from the University of Victoria in British Columbia. Both degrees were focused on Heiltsuk art and museum collections. Black worked with the Heiltsuk community, both in her research and in the collaborative museum exhibit Kaxlaya Gvilas at the Royal Ontario Museum. As she wrote: "The Royal Ontario Museum holds a major but little-known collection of Northwest coast native art and artifacts acquired by the Reverend Dr. Richard Whitfield Large at Bella Bella, British Columbia between 1899 and 1906. Although the R. W. Large Collection is one of the most important Heiltsuk collections in existence because of its unique documentation, there had never been a comprehensive study of it".

Black undertook a study of the collection in her 1997 book Bella Bella: A Season of Heiltsuk Art and worked with the Heiltsuk to produce an art exhibit based on the collection with a number of contemporary pieces. She described the collection gathered in Bella Bella by the Missionary doctor R. W. Large. The collection, unusual for its associated information allowed Black to provide biological information about five named Heiltsuk artists.

The exhibit Kaxlaya Gvi'ilas was a partnership between the Heiltsuk, the Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia, the Royal Ontario Museum, and Black. A collaborative exhibit, it contained a combination of historical works from the Royal Ontario Museum's R.W. Large Collection and contemporary artwork from the Heiltsuk village of Waglisla (Bella Bella). The exhibit traveled after its initial showing in the Royal Ontario Museum to Vancouver (MOA 2002), to Montreal at the McCord Museum, followed then to Owen Sound, Ontario.

Black curated a number of exhibitions at the Royal British Columbia Museum, including Nłuut’iksa Łagigyedm Ts’msyeen: Treasures of the Tsimshian from the Dundas Collection (2007), Huupukwanum · Tupaat: Out of the Mist, Treasures of the Nuu-chah-nulth Chiefs (1999), Nisga’a: People of the Nass River (2001) and Argillite: A Haida Art (2001), and was co-curator of the Royal Ontario Museum's travelling exhibition, Kaxlaya Gvilas: "the ones who uphold the laws of our ancestors" (2000).

Black died from cancer in Victoria, British Columbia, on 7 January 2024, at the age of 78.