Shuvinai Ashoona Wins Gershon Iskowitz Prize

Shuvinai Ashoona is the recipient of the 2018 Gershon Iskowitz Prize at the Art Gallery of Ontario.

The award, presented annually to an artist who has made an outstanding contribution to the visual arts in Canada, includes a $50,000 cash prize and a solo exhibition at the gallery within two years.

Celebrated for her large-scale drawings, enigmatic subject matter, and collaborative work with contemporary artists, Ashoona is a third-generation Inuit artist in Kinngait, Nunavut.

The dramatic changes in the North — the shift from life on the land to settled communities and access to popular culture — are reflected in her art, which challenges stereotypical notions of Inuit art.

Increasingly, her constantly evolving work is included in national and international biennales and exhibitions, such as Oh, Canada: Contemporary Art from North America in 2013 at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art.

Jurors included Daina Augaitis, chief curator emerita at the Vancouver Art Gallery; artist Sandra Meigs, the 2015 Iskowitz Prize winner; Robert Enright, professor at the University of Guelph and senior contributing editor to Border Crossings; and Stephan Jost, the Michael and Sonja Koerner director of the Art Gallery of Ontario.

Augautis praised Ashoona's "remarkably bold and vivid imagination," noting that her colourful depictions "brim with hope and possibility.”

Ashoona was born in 1961 in Cape Dorset (now referred to by its original name, Kinngait).

Her father, Kuiga Ashoona (1933-2014), a hunter and master carver who gained international recognition in his own lifetime, was a second-generation Inuit artist, the youngest son of the great first-generation Inuit artist Pitseolak Ashoona (c. 1904-1983).

Shuvinai has worked daily at Kinngait Studios (formerly the West Baffin Eskimo Coop) for more than 25 years.

Her work is in the collections of the National Gallery of Canada, the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Winnipeg Art Gallery, the Canadian Museum of History, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and elsewhere.

Source: Art Gallery of Ontario