Raymond Mason is an Ojibway activist who campaigns for the rights of residential school survivors and a founder of Spirit Wind, an organization that played a key role in the development of the Indian Residential School Settlement Agreement. This memoir offers a firsthand account of the personal and political challenges Mason confronted on this journey. A riveting and at times harrowing read, Spirit of the Grassroots People describes the author's experiences in Indian day and residential schools in Manitoba and his struggles to find meaning in life after trauma and abuse. Mason details the work that he and his colleagues did over many years to gain recognition and compensation for their suffering. Drawing from Indigenous oral traditions as well as Western historiography, the work applies the concept of two-eyed seeing to the histories of colonialism and education in Canada. The memoir is supplemented by a final chapter in which Theodore Michael Christou and Jackson Pind put Mason's story into a historical and educational context. An essential key to understanding the legacy of Indian residential and day schools, this text is both a documentation of history and a deeply personal story of a human experience.

Spirit of the Grassroots People: Seeking Justice for Indigenous Survivors of Canada's Colonial Education System

Biographies & Memoirs

Mason, Raymond

Community & Culture

McGill-Queen's University Press

The paintings and sculptures of Raymond Mason never fail to attract a crowd. Often conceived on a large scale, his art - including paintings and drawings, colorful high and low reliefs and sculpture - has a universal appeal. He depicts busy street scenes and familiar landscapes, freezing moments from everyday life and creating dramatic and highly effective tableaux. His figures convey a powerful and very real emotion; their forceful gazes confront and challenge the viewer, demanding attention and response. Experimenting unceasingly with new sculptural forms, Mason explores the limits of realism and figuration itself. In a time without beliefs, his art is inspired by a thought "hungry for humanism, and for more". Born in 1922, Mason has lived and worked in Paris since 1946. A friend of Giacometti, Balthus and Bacon he has established an international reputation chiefly through a number of monumental works in Paris, Montreal, New York, Washington, and his English home town of Birmingham. His retrospectives in Britain and France have attracted record-breaking crowds, but his place in contemporary art is only now beginning to be defined, not least because he has always bravely followed his own path in defiance of passing fashions. This book brings together his major works for the first time, illustrated in over 190 superb photographs. Poet and critic Michael Edwards provides a masterly study of the artist and his oeuvre; his friendship with the artist allows him to consider Mason's working life in Britain and France, and to illuminate individual works with new and unusually searching analysis and interpretation. Essential reading for all those concerned with contemporary art, this important book is the definitive study of an artist whose work must surely rank among the most challenging and original of this century.

Raymond Mason

Arts & Photography

EDWARDS, Michael

Individual Artists

Thames&Hudson

In 1946 the young artist Raymond Mason, having already quit his native Midlands for the Royal College of Art and later the Slade School, packed his bags for Paris, then the undisputed artistic capital of the world. There he found himself thrust into the company of some of the greatest figures of 20th-century art, from Balthus to Duchamp, Giacometti and Picasso, and, inspired by their examples, set out making his own distinctive contribution to the history of modern sculpture.

At Work in Paris: Raymond Mason on Art and Artists

History & Criticism

Raymond Mason (French Edition)

Sculpture

Reunion des musees nationaux

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Mason, Raymond. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Mason, Raymond