The Art Gallery of the NWT-dark bottom.jpg
The humorously titled Art Gallery of NWT at the 2020 Snowking Winter Festival. (courtesy YK ARCC)

Taking a Shot at Art in the Northwest Territories

The territorial government needs to revisit its cultural policy to ensure it supports artists.

Sarah Swan is a Yellowknife-based arts writer and freelance curator. She moved to the Northwest Territories in 2017 from Winnipeg, and has been championing northern art and artists ever since. She is the lead director of YK ARCC, the Yellowknife Artist-Run Community Centre, which she jokingly calls the Yellowknife Artist-Run Centreless Centre. The volunteer organization opened a mobile art gallery in 2019 that is housed in a 16-foot cargo trailer. It’s the only non-commercial gallery in the territory.

In 1970, Yellowknife resident Paul Conroy strode up to a newly installed traffic light – the first in the Northwest Territories – and shot it with a 12-gauge shotgun. Kaboom! Yellowknife became a capital city in 1967, which led to a massive influx of government workers. But for decades prior, this scrappy community was populated by misfits, missionaries and mercenaries. Not military mercenaries, but prospectors and adventurers, swashbuckling characters like Conroy, who opposed both neckties and bylaws. 

In many ways, the tension between nonconformists and bureaucrats continues to play out in Yellowknife. Sometimes, the clash of values feels absurd. For instance, Yellowknife’s annual Snowking Winter Festival, where creative folks erect a sparkling snow castle on a frozen bay of Great Slave Lake, must, by order of the territorial fire marshal, install alarms within its archways.  

If the prospect of a burning snow castle doesn’t seem absurd, how about this smouldering issue? There's no visual art infrastructure in the territory – no post-secondary arts education and no territorial gallery.  

The art world that exists below the 60th parallel shouldn’t be emulated here.

Artists rent churches, retail spaces or tables at craft fairs to show their work. Territorial festivals, like Inuvik's Great Northern Arts Festival and the Open Sky Festival in Łíídlıı Kųę (Fort Simpson) do a great job of showcasing skills but are less adept at communicating the why of the art, its context and significance. Good non-commercial galleries stoke curiosity and facilitate appreciation. Visitors can learn how individual stories are woven into the collective one. And, when artists show in a public gallery or artist-run centre, they get paid.  

A few lucky artists get to show at the Prince of Wales Northern Heritage Centre in Yellowknife – the closest thing to a public art gallery in the Northwest Territories. But the centre is also the territory’s Culture and Heritage division. There’s no board of directors and orders come directly from the government – which historically has shown little interest in art, even though the phrase “works of art” is on the first page of its heritage services policy statement. 

There are no contemporary art curators in the territory. Sadly, no curator has yet explored, in a comprehensive way, the northern aesthetic – the edges of ancient shorelines, the ditches full of fireweed, the sprawl of old pickup trucks, skidoos, tires and rusted junk – and how these rough-hewn haphazard visuals contrast so remarkably with the tidiness and control of dominant art forms like beadwork and moose-hair tufting. No one has yet studied, as a phenomenon, artful arrangements of antlers on sheds, the resourcefulness and waste-not-want-not ethos that marks northern creativity, or the uses of birch bark, fish scales or animal fur, hides and bones. 

Tania Larsson’s land-based art deserves recognition. Her jewelry has graced the pages of Vogue magazine, but she has not been recognized where she lives. Tufting was invented in Fort Providence, west of Great Slave Lake, over a century ago, but where is the exhibition that traces the art form’s evolution? Inuk artist Germaine Arnaktauyok lives in Yellowknife. She won a Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts last February. It’s mind boggling that there’s no place here to properly celebrate this achievement. The Prince of Wales Northern Heritage Centre will show a borrowed suite of her drawings but not for another year. Its own fine art collection is neglected and conservative. As there’s no local capacity, the show was curated outside the territory by Inhabit Media, an Inuit-owned book publishing company based in Nunavut.

The art world that exists below the 60th parallel shouldn’t be emulated here. That world is too coolly rarefied and, despite efforts to decolonize, too Western in its thinking. More than half the Northwest Territories’ 45,000 people are Indigenous. Roughly half the population lives in Yellowknife. Other tiny communities are scattered across a vastness sometimes accessible only by boat, ice road or bush plane. The territorial map looks like a minimalist’s connect-the-dots puzzle.   

We need a uniquely northern solution, one as warm and practical as insulated rubber boots. Our future art centre, and its satellite programming, needs to bridge traditional ways of knowing and the art world’s intellectual curiosity. It needs to foster dialogue and tell stories, without indulging in the excesses of academia.  

It makes sense for the territorial government’s Culture and Heritage division to be more proactive (The last time I checked, art was considered an important part of culture). The Prince of Wales Northern Heritage Centre hosts roughly two art exhibitions each year but refuses to add even one more – citing low capacity and a prioritized commitment to archeology and archives.   

This is a shame, because when the centre gets art right, it gets it really right. Its 2017 exhibition of the cosmic-themed beadwork of Margaret Nazon led to a review, which led to Nazon’s inclusion in a group show at the Glenbow Museum in Calgary, and to further articles in prominent publications and her inclusion in a beading symposium at the Manitoba Museum in Winnipeg. One excellent show in Yellowknife put Nazon, and the remote Gwich’in hamlet of Tsiigehtchic, where she lives, on the national stage. Her success should excite the territorial government and create an appetite for more.  

The only space solely dedicated to non-commercial visual art in the territory is a volunteer-run mobile gallery made from a converted cargo trailer. I'm on the gallery's board and while it's a fun project, it’s a mere bandage. We call it the Art Gallery of NWT, and tell people we’ll happily revoke the name if a real territorial art gallery ever materializes. 

Truthfully, the reasons for art’s failure to thrive in the territory are more varied and complicated than the Prince of Wales Northern Heritage Centre's inability to widen its mindset. There’s not as much money in government coffers as artists tend to assume, and extra costs associated with northern construction make shiny new buildings nearly impossible. By way of comparison, 19 homes to be built across the Yellowknives Dene First Nation communities of Ndilǫ and Dettah in the next few years will cost $18.8 million. That’s another reason why adding art programming to an existing cultural building makes sense. 

Art thrives in the Yukon because the territory started investigating how to support its artists 30 years ago.

Despite the fact that the Northwest Territories has a larger population than either Yukon or Nunavut, it spends the least on culture. In 2020, the Northwest Territories allocated about $3 million. Nunavut, by comparison, was at $5 million. Yukon budgeted $4 million. Maddeningly, in the Northwest Territories, that amount includes no Lotteries revenues, which go entirely to sports and recreation.  

Another dilemma: The NWT Arts Council does not jury funding applications. Each applicant gets a little, so few organizations get enough to expand their activities. In the Yukon, four cultural organizations receive core operational funding. In 2002, support for the Yukon Arts Centre was actually legislated into the Yukon Arts Act. There has never been a similar commitment to the arts here. In the Northwest Territories, 15 to 25 organizations compete for funds in any given year. As artistic merit or a growth mindset is not always considered, the same support goes to groups that want to host a yoga workshop as to organizations that want to pay artist fees. 

Art thrives in the Yukon because the territory started investigating how to support its artists 30 years ago. In Whitehorse, the Yukon Arts Centre, which houses a theatre and art gallery, has been championing the arts since 1992. The Yukon School of Visual Art in Dawson City relies on savvy partnerships to deliver its programs. We all know what happened to Nunavut’s art – the territorial collection now lives at the Winnipeg Art Gallery, for better and for worse. I mourn the fact that so much Inuit art lives so far from home, yet often wish Gwich’in, Tłı̨chǫ and Yellowknives Dene artists in the Northwest Territories could be celebrated the same way.  

I recently heard a government employee in Yellowknife say – out loud – that the wording of the territory’s new, yet-to-be-released art strategy was carefully orchestrated to not actually improve anything. A 2014 article that raised similar points as this one was published in Edge magazine, a Yellowknife publication. Nothing much has changed and frustrations in the art community are high. It almost makes you want to shoot out a traffic light.  

We cannot expect the territorial government to spend millions on a new gallery, but we should expect improvements to the system so it functions in ways that are helpful – or at least in ways that don’t actively hinder. Last June, the Department of Industry, Tourism and Investment initiated a summer research project to explore how a territorial-wide arts organization could be established. But the initiative was sidelined. Reportedly, Culture and Heritage felt it was wrong to raise expectations. This attitude is incredibly disappointing, but arts organizations need to do their part too. Groups with similar mandates should amalgamate, and Yellowknife-centric organizations need to remember that other communities exist. And yoga workshops do nothing to help the visual arts grow, although accessing corporate sponsorships and federal support could make a difference.  

One slim ray of light is on the horizon: The City of Yellowknife is planning to renovate a storefront in the city’s economically depressed downtown mall to create a visitor centre and gallery. It remains to be seen if this will actually happen, and if it does, whether it would help revitalize our dying downtown. But here’s hoping the initiative will support the visual arts, at least in this one part of our vast territory. Here’s hoping, too, that it will foster discussion, inform identity, reflect complexity of place, and, perhaps, loosen a few neckties. Kaboom! ■  

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