Roy Henry Vickers

Who is Roy Henry Vickers?

Roy Henry Vickers, CM, OBC is a Canadian First Nations artist. He owns and operates a gallery in Tofino, British Columbia.

Vickers was born on the Nass River but raised in Kitkatla, Hazelton, British Columbia, and Victoria, B.C. His father was a fisherman who was matrilineally Tsimshian, also with Haida and Heiltsuk ancestry. His mother was a schoolteacher whose parents had immigrated from England and who was in the 1940s adopted into the Eagle clan at Kitkatla, B.C.. His grandfather was a Kitkatla canoe-carver. The paintings and works that he has created reflect this mixed heritage as his work has many elements of the traditional art of the First Nations peoples of the Pacific Northwest, but remains quite distinctive.

Vickers became interested in Northwest Coast art partly under the influence of the anthropologist Wilson Duff.

His work has been the official gift of the Province of British Columbia to visiting foreign leaders several times. In 1987 the original of his painting A Meeting of Chiefs was the official gift to Queen Elizabeth II. And in 1993 artist's proofs of his print The Homecoming were the Province's gift to Bill Clinton and Boris Yeltsin.