From the early 1960s until 1989, the Canadian Eskimo Arts Council decided what drawings and prints produced in the Arctic could be sold in the South. For the first 12 years of the council’s life, there were no Inuit members helping make those decisions.
The pressure on Inuit artists to produce “saleable” works meant endless depictions of shamans, dogsleds or igloos rather than other, more relevant, aspects of contemporary Inuit life such as Christianity, snowmobiles and pre-fab homes. The Inuit, as seen in the South, were frozen in time.
Nevertheless, the artists continued to create “unsaleable” works that were not turned into prints, nor marketed. To view scores of these drawings, and essays about many of the artists, check out the newly published book Worlds on Paper: Drawings from Kinngait and an exhibition of the same name at the McMichael Canadian Art Collection In Kleinburg, Ont., near Toronto. The lead author is Emily Laurent Henderson, McMichael’ associate curator of Indigenous art and culture; the exhibition is on view through Aug. 24.
The McMichael is the custodian of 90,000 drawings from Kinngait (formerly Cape Dorset) an Arctic hamlet in which one-quarter of the adult population are working artists. The overwhelming majority of these drawings were never turned into prints and have remained all but invisible in the South for decades.
So, expect some surprises, including an untitled work by Kananginak Pootoogook from 1981 depicting an Inuit man in traditional dress kneeling before a living Jesus Christ or a later work by the same artist showing a couple in traditional parkas standing in an igloo while a robed clergyman baptizes their new baby.
Kinmgait artists especially created scores of portraits of friends and family that rarely headed south. Many are what the book calls “affectionate depictions of specific loved ones.” The drawings vary from Western-style portraiture to far more fanciful interpretations influenced by Arctic legends.
In the late 1990s, Inuit art broke free of its fetters. Annie Pootoogook, a young up and coming artist in Kinngait, started drawing compelling domestic scenes of modern Inuit life, including the plagues of alcoholism and partner abuse. Pootoogook’s drawings became hot properties, She won the prestigious Sobey Art Award in 2006 but fell victim to the very social ills she portrayed and died tragically in 2016. But she remains in our hearts as the artist who blazed the trail for Inuit stories to be told as they really exist. ■
OTHER ART BOOK REVIEWS YOU MIGHT HAVE MISSED
- Bookmark: Memorable Murals
- Bookmark: Outsider Art of Canada
- Jack Bush Paintings: A Catalogue Raisonné
- Bookmark: New Book about Bertram Brooker
- Bookmark: All the Beauty in the World
- The Role of Textiles in Relation to Art
- The Quest for the Meaning of Art
- Quick Pick - J.E.H. MacDonald: Up Close
- Mary Pratt: A Love Affair with Vision
- The Role of Textiles in Relation to Art
- Surreal Spaces: The Art and Life of Leonora Carrington
- Early Days: Indigenous Art from the McMichael
- Bianca Bosker: The Quest for the Meaning of Art
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