The Native stories behind Raven that led to one man’s glasswork, now on display at the Northwest Museum of Arts and Culture

In the beginning, the world was dark.

Raven, at the time a white bird, was flying around and ended up at the Nass River with the fishermen.

“Where’s the daylight?” he asked them.

The fishermen pointed to the old man who lives at the head of the river and said, “The daylight is in his clan house.”

Raven then met the old man and his daughter and asked to enter the clan house to visit, but the old man shooed him away.

Ever the trickster, Raven devised a plan to get inside the clan house and glimpse the daylight. He first decided to disguise himself as a speck of dirt in the river from which the old man’s daughter drinks, but the daughter’s companions tested the purity of the water, spotted the speck of dirt and threw it out.

Onto Plan B.

Raven decided to transform himself into a hemlock needle, which blended into the rim of the ladle from which the daughter scooped up her water. Now inside the daughter, Raven transformed into a human child who the daughter gave birth to.

Now in the clan house, Raven, as a baby, had all manner of things to play with, including baskets and rattles, but he kept his eyes out for the daylight. First, he found a box containing the stars and the moon. One by one, Raven passed them through the smoke hole in the clan house. From there, they took their place in the night sky.

Finally, Raven found the box of daylight, but the old man, upset but also forgetful about Raven’s sneakiness with the stars and moon, forbade him to play with the box. Raven then threw a temper tantrum of epic proportions, to the extent that the daughter asked her father, “Is there anything more important than your grandson?”

The old man relented and put the box of daylight in front of Raven but told him he couldn’t open it. Raven, of course, didn’t listen. He opened the box, grabbed the sun and tried to fly away. The old man, realizing he’d been fooled, grabbed onto Raven’s tail feathers and told the men in the house to throw pitch on the fire. The black smoke turned Raven from white to black.

Raven eventually got away and gave daylight to the world. Having only known darkness, many were scared and tried to outrun the daylight. Those who ran into the forest became woodland creatures. Those who jumped in the water became sea creatures. Those who jumped straight into the sky became birds.

Those who, you can think of it one of two ways, stood still, bewildered by the daylight, or stood strong and proud, unafraid of the daylight, became people.

To illustrate the Tlingit story of “Raven and the Box of Daylight,” Tlingit glass artist Preston Singletary has crafted glass works, original music, narration, projections and soundscapes which will be on display as part of his exhibit of the same name, which opens Thursday and runs through Jan. 4 at the Northwest Museum of Arts and Culture.

Singletary’s interest in glass art stemmed from his friendship with Dante Marioni, son of glass artist Paul Marioni. Singletary would hang out at the Marioni house and see Paul, a pioneer of the studio glass movement, work in his studio.

At the time, in the late-1970s, glass art was growing in popularity thanks to artists like Marioni and Dale Chihuly and the Pilchuck Glass School in Stanwood, Washington, just north of Seattle.

In 1982, Singletary, who was in between restaurant jobs after high school, got a call from Dante telling him he could introduce Singletary to the owners of Glass Eye Studio. Singletary met with the owners and got a job as a night watchman at the studio, working from 11 p.m. to 7 a.m. filling up furnaces.

The studio was growing in popularity at the time after they started incorporating ash from Mount St. Helens into their production items like paperweights and ornaments, so after about six months as a night watchman, Singletary moved into the production side of the studio. He also began classes at Pilchuck and learned “how artists work with glass.”

While working with Dante, Singletary began making vases and bowls, pieces that were decorative and functional. Singletary found success trying to market those items to galleries and stores, but after several years of that type of work, in 1988, Singletary started working on incorporating Tlingit designs and culture into his glass art.

“There’s a whole system and architecture to Northwest Coast design styles, so I really had to take a deep dive into learning how to create design work and then do the technique that I use is a sandblasting technique, which is carving through the layers of colored glass to create the designs,” he said. “That was also an evolution, and I started receiving attention for what I was doing pretty early on, but it wasn’t really until around ‘97, ’98 that I said, ‘OK, I’m going to place myself on this path, and I’m going to explore this process.’ ”

Early on, on that path, Singletary split his focus between glass work and music, thinking “If my band doesn’t get signed in five years, then I’ll focus on my artwork.” Five years turned into 10, and after getting married, Singletary decided to focus on glass art.

He hasn’t left music behind completely though. Singletary plays bass in Khu.éex’, which will release “Red Cedar in the Hour of Chaos” in the near future.

Singletary put together his first exhibition of work inspired by Tlingit culture and Native design styles in 1998. Part of the preparation for creating the work in that exhibit involved learning about mythologies and art styles of Northwest Coast tribes so his work would be accurate and refined with his sandblasting technique.

Incorporating Native art into his work was, for Singletary, about trying to create his own niche with the material. He had seen Japanese artists incorporate Asian aesthetics into their work and wondered if he could do the same with tribal art.

“In the beginning, I started looking at cultural objects like a hat form or a basket form or a bowl form, then I would say, ‘Well, how would I make that in glass?’ and then I would apply the design work to it,” he said. “The more I got into it, the more intriguing it became. It drew me right in, and a challenge to see ‘What can I come up with next?’ ”

At this time, there were few Native glass artists working who used their glass work to showcase elements of their culture. While learning how to incorporate his Tlingit culture into his work, Singletary heard people comment that the work was too modern.

In his artist’s statement, Singletary alludes to that feedback, saying, “My work challenges the notion that Native artists must only use traditional materials.”

“Native culture should be allowed to evolve,” he said.

The studio glass movement made glass art more accessible and has led Singletary to work with Indigenous artists from around the world, including New Zealand, Australia and Hawaii.

“Raven and the Box of Daylight” was meant to be a collaboration between Singletary and the late Walter Porter, a Tlingit mythologist and storyteller who worked to find symbolism and metaphor in Tlingit stories while also finding parallels between those stories and theology and mythology from around the world.

Porter wrote an essay for an exhibit of Singletary’s called “Echoes, Fire and Shadows” and as the exhibit toured around the country, the two would give presentations during which Porter would speak about a few Tlingit stories, including “Raven and the Box of Daylight.”

“I learned a lot from him, working with him and downloading the information, because he wasn’t a writer. He was a speaker, a traditionalist, which is the hallmark of culture is that he would speak eloquently about this story,” he said. “I had to take lots of notes and think about the story itself and how I would illustrate it.”

Singletary planned to work with Porter on this exhibit before he passed away. He then reached out to Miranda Belarde-Lewis (Zuni/Tlingit) to help curate the exhibit.

“Raven and the Box of Daylight,” the exhibit, divides the story into sections. Pieces include Raven in his original white form, a rattle and Tlingit baskets Raven, as a human baby played with in the clan house, the box of daylight itself and a black Raven with a red orb in his mouth representing when he stole the sun. Larger pieces include a glass screen that mimics the painted screens typically found in clan houses and a canoe form illustrating part of the story when Raven is speaking to the fishermen.

The final part of the exhibit represents the origin of the clan system and features figures with hats representing a selection of clans from different realms. From the forest, there is the bear, frog and wolf. From the sky, there is the raven, and the shark and killer whale are from the ocean.

“That’s got video behind it that enhances the installation,” Singletary said. “It goes from dark to lighter, the idea that the daylight has come to the worlds.”

As well as the videos, “Raven and the Box of Daylight” features original music, coastal Pacific Northwest soundscapes and projections. Singletary said he’s dabbled in presentation and how his work is experienced since 2001, working to make sure the story he’s telling is being told in the best way possible.

In the clan house, for example, cedar shelves, each with objects displayed on them, act as stairs leading the viewer’s eye down to a central fire pit.

“I’ve always been experimenting with ways of creating exhibitions that have a little bit of an element of surprise to it,” he said.

Speaking of surprises, Singletary’s career comes as a bit of a surprise to him. When he first started working with glass, he didn’t anticipate that so much of his work would incorporate Tlingit culture and stories.

He’s proud to be advocating for new materials to be used to tell ancient stories and feels as if “a genetic memory was awakened” in him when he placed himself on, or as he sometimes sees it, was called to, this artistic path.

“Once you become a keeper of cultural knowledge, it becomes somewhat of a responsibility, and that’s what my mentors have impressed on me,” Singletary said. “The deeper that I get into it, and the more people that I interact with, Indigenous people from around the world and the native people of North America, I hear their stories and we have this common, shared experience. Those of us who are working with these cultural arts, it takes on a different meaning because of the world that we live in today and it really becomes the motivations for making work.

“I’m always thinking about how can I elicit this kind of feeling or this idea around what it is that I’m doing?”

The answer became clear to Singletary a year or so ago, when he started working with Tlingit writer Garth Stein, known for “The Art of Racing in the Rain,” on a series of stories about what figures like Raven are up to today.

At some point, Singletary said, Tlingit stories stopped being invented, but the figures in those stories didn’t disappear. Raven, for example, might be trying to protect missing and murdered Indigenous women or maybe he found the residential school grave sites.

Elements of natural history created the original stories, and now aspects of history in contemporary society, like killer whales attacking boats or swimming with dead salmon on their heads, is leading to new stories.

“Presumably, the whales are angry with mankind because they’ve created this garbage patch in the center of the ocean,” Singletary said. “They’re destroying the habitat. It becomes this form of making social commentary and political commentary through these stories, so creating this whole universe of new stories is where I’m currently at. We’re going to try to publish it in a book that would incorporate the objects that are made to illustrate the story like the ‘Raven’ exhibition.”