New Ottawa Program to Promote Northern Artists

Nordic Lab — a new initiative at Ottawa's SAW Gallery — is hoping to empower artists from isolated communities in Northern Canada by offering them a platform to show their work, reports CBC.

The newly expanded artist-run centre hosts artists in residence, exhibits Nordic art and provides educational programs geared toward Inuit youth — while promoting cultural exchanges between Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities in Canada, Norway and other circumpolar nations.

Curator Jason St-Laurent says the Nordic Lab is both a program and a physical space that offers facilities for screen printing  and an artist residency, named after Annie Pootoogook, an Inuk artist who died in Ottawa in 2016.

"We're all about being the social lubricant of the art world," says St-Laurent. "We're not your grandmother's art institution."

Source: CBC