William Ronald (Bill) Reid (1920-1998) was a Canadian artist who played a pivotal role in the resurgence of Northwest Coast Indian art, particularly that of the Haida.

Bill Reid was born January 12, 1920, in Victoria, British Columbia. He was the son of a Haida mother, Sophie Gladstone, from Skidegate Mission, Queen Charlotte Islands, and a Scottish-German American father, William Ronald Reid (Senior). During his childhood his family made several moves between Victoria and Hyder, Alaska; he later lived and worked in Vancouver, British Columbia.

Reid was the first artist born in this century to master the complex principles of northern Northwest Coast art--the art of the coastal Indian tribes of northern British Columbia. He began his task in the early 1950s, in a period when knowledge of the highly conventionalized formal structure that characterizes this art had largely been lost. The cumulative impact of colonization on the Haida, Northern...