JAAD KUUJUS: EVERYONE SAYS I LOOK LIKE MY MOTHER To Make World Premiere At The Museum of Anthropology at UBC

The Museum of Anthropology at UBC (MOA) will present the world premiere of Jaad Kuujus: Everyone Says I Look Like My Mother, on view December 4, 2025–March 29, 2026.

The exhibition marks the first solo show by celebrated Northwest Coast weaver Jaad Kuujus–Meghann O’Brien (Haida, Kwakwaka’wakw, Irish). Co-curated with Kate Hennessy (Simon Fraser University) and Hannah Turner (University of British Columbia), the exhibition places intricately handwoven naaxiin (Chilkat) regalia in dialogue with the artist’s digital translations, exploring repetition, regeneration, and return.

“This exhibition is an expression of respect and love towards my ancestors and their ways of making, while looking forward to how new technologies can be used to represent our stories,” O’Brien says. “My hope is that visitors will experience the strength of the lands and cultures these works are connected to. I believe that how we see can change the world.”

More than a dozen works spanning O’Brien’s career will be featured, united by the presence of mountain goat wool, a material central to Northwest Coast weaving traditions. Early work such as Clouds (2010) highlights the transformation of raw fleece into spun yarn—a process the artist first learned from SGaan Jaad–Sherri Dick (Haida/Kootenay) and later deepened through historical sources including Lieut. George T. Emmons’ The Chilkat Blanket.

A key work, Everyone Says I Look Like My Mother (2020), centers the show’s themes by combining mountain goat wool and yellow cedar bark into a handwoven T-shirt. The piece honors matrilineal strength while confronting the dissonance between sacred materials and mass-produced forms.

The exhibition also includes The Burden of Being an Echo (2025), a series of five digital-jacquard robes created in collaboration with SFU’s Making Culture Lab and woven at EE Labels in the Netherlands. These robes reference O’Brien’s seminal works Sky Blanket and Wrapped in the Cloud (2018), and incorporate rows of two-strand twining that connect digital production with ancestral technique.

Other works on view include The Spirit of Shape (2015–2018), an intricate recreation of a historical Chilkat apron made during O’Brien’s apprenticeship with master weaver Tsamiianbaan–William White, and Kuugan Jaad I & III (2015), fine weavings inspired by a 19th-century Haida bentwood dish housed in MOA’s Multiversity Galleries.

The exhibition installation features curving, petal-pink textile softwalls by Vancouver designers Todd MacAllen and Stephanie Forsythe (molo). O’Brien notes, “Placing my artworks in a circular shape encourages a relational rather than hierarchical understanding of the works. This space evokes the themes of repetition, regeneration, and return at the heart of the exhibition.”

Born in Alert Bay, BC, and now based in Vancouver, O’Brien is recognized for weaving practice that bridges ancestral knowledge and contemporary technologies, illuminating the continuity between handwork, landscape, and machine.

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