Evelyn Vanderhoop comes from a long line of Haida weavers, including her grandmother Selina Peratrovich and her mother, Delores Churchill. She has also studied weaving with Cheryl Samuel.
An accomplished weaver in the Naaxiin (more commonly called Chilkat) tradition, Evelyn studied the origin of this technique by reading journals of the early explorers and their accounts of the first contact with the Haida as well as learning from the stories of her ancestors. She has studied the old robes in museums around the world and learned their complexities. Evelyn has mastered the art of Naaxiin technique where weaving not only moves across horizontally, but vertically as well, creating curves, slopes and circles with multiple braids enclosing the formline shapes.
Parallel careers as a weaver and watercolour artist have marked Evelyn’s success. She studied watercolour painting in Europe, and one of her paintings was chosen by the United States Postal Service as a reference for a stamp to commemorate Native American dance. Evelyn has also been chosen as an artist in residence at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C.
