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\"When Annie Pootoogook won the Sobey Art Award in 2006, she cracked the glass ceiling for Inuit art, securing its place in contemporary Canadian art discourse and establishing herself as an artist of international importance. Her achievement sparked critical discussion around contemporary art as well as the absence, and growing presence, of Inuit art: an important conversation that continues to this day. The life and death of Annie Pootoogook is a story of national significance. The complex narratives weaving through her short life speak to possibility and heartbreak, truth and reconciliation, the richness of community, and the depths of tragedy. These complexities are recorded in her arresting pencil crayon compositions. Her frank, sometimes challenging, sometimes amusing images of everyday life, acutely observed and marked by a linear control as taut as a wire, declare her as a major contributor to the landscape of contemporary Inuit art. Annie Pootoogook: Cutting Ice accompanies an exhibition organized by the McMichael Canadian Art Collection, the gallery of record for works on paper from Annie Pootoogook's Inuit community of Kinngait (Cape Dorset). Under the direction of Nancy Campbell, this publication and the exhibition serve to commemorate the life and work of a remarkable artist a year after her tragically early death\" -- Provided by publisher's website.

An up-to-date look at the life and work of Pitseolak Ashoona.

While concepts of remoteness have long conditioned the fabulation of alterity, remoteness is not a quality ascribable to distant places and strange peoples “out there”. No one is by nature “remote”. Building from this proposition, this article argues that a heritage of European aestheticization of the “far” north grew out of European ways of imagining the world and contributed to settler social imaginaries of remoteness. Through historical analysis of travelling accounts, colonial exhibitions, and the settler art theorical work of Francis Sparshott about the “cold and remote art” of “far” northerly Inuit peoples, the concept of an aesthetics of remoteness—modes of appreciation and taste that produce a “darkness” not inherent to the Arctic itself but projected by the settler-colonial milieu, which maintains control through the creation of distance. The study shows how Indigenous Arctic art becomes aestheticized through settler sensoria of faraway and incomprehensible forms of beauty that mask histories of colonial extraction and dispossession. The article further contextualises a close, critical reading of Sparshott into relation with the wider history of trade and colonisation, to consider how colonial markets for art objects interface with both European narration of remote peoples and European markets for art from remote parts of the world. The work ultimately argues for a reorientation that refuses this projection of an aesthetics of remoteness and proposes an ethics of recognition that confronts the colonial histories embedded in art circulation and appreciation within Canada and beyond.

This study explores the purposeful interbreeding of Greenland sled dogs and Arctic wolves in Avanersuaq, North Greenland. The paper is based on qualitative data gathered during extensive interviews using North Greenlandic/Polar Inuit dialects and Kalaallisut in North and West Greenland and from relevant literature on the relationships between dog sled driver, sled dog, and Arctic wolf, including genetic studies of Greenland sled dogs. The intent of the study is to understand the human practice of interbreeding sled dogs and wolves in Greenland. Among Greenlanders, it is widely believed that the Greenland sled dog and the Arctic wolf once mated and have had offspring, and that these hybrids have been transformed into Greenland sled dogs. Somehow, today’s storytelling of the wolf-dog is taking the shape of a myth. The question remains: If it did happen, how did it begin and how did it end, and what is the truth behind the story? We thus take a qualitative approach to investigating this phenomenon of the interbreeding of Greenland sled dogs and Arctic wolves. Results show that the Arctic wolf and the Greenland sled dog have indeed crossed paths and have been purposefully interbred, which has resulted in documented cases of wolf-dogs in the sled dog communities of North Greenland.

In this paper, we expand on existing studies of Canadian Inuit art in the international arena by examining ways in which this new art served domestic purposes, focusing primarily on the 1950s and 1960s. The Canadian government developed and promoted Inuit art as part of its project to transform Inuit from semi-independent hunters into modern Canadian citizens. In this effort, Canada took up and assimilated Inuit art as a genuine Canadian cultural product, presenting it as diplomatic gifts and for other forms of international cultural diplomacy. Previous studies of Canadian Inuit art from that era have noted the ways that the promotion of Canadian Inuit art supported the young nation’s claims to a deep history, while simultaneously marking the country’s distinction from both the United States and the United Kingdom. In the context of the Cold War, the promotion of Canadian Inuit art also asserted Canada as an Arctic power. Labelled as “primitive modernist” fine art, Inuit sculpture and prints provided a stark contrast to the contemporaneous socialist realist art of the Soviet Union and its allies. We argue that the success of the Inuit art program sustained a belief among government officials that their programme to remake Inuit lives and livelihoods would succeed. Inuit art likely deflected attention from the many things that were going wrong with that northern modernisation project.

This documentary shows how an Inuit artist's drawings are transferred to stone, printed and sold. Kenojuak Ashevak became the first woman involved with the printmaking co-operative in Cape Dorset.

Seven Inuit artists reflect their lived experience of disappearing sea ice and climate change in their artworks. Living in Pangnirtung and Cape Dorset, Nunavut, for five months in 2013 and one month in 2015 enabled me to build relationships with artists and to initiate collaborations for this project. I examine how the artworks and artists use symbolism, metaphor, and other aesthetic devices to convey messages about their lived experience of sea ice and climate change. Stories told by artists about their artworks emphasize the importance of adaptation and interconnectedness and embrace themes about transformation and renewal. The insights provided by the artists participating in this research are crucial in the context of bridging knowledge systems to enhance our understanding of and potential responses to environmental change. Connecting with the intangible aspects of knowledge systems, such as emotional response, values, and identity, is an ongoing challenge; yet, accounting for these aspects of knowledge is a critical component of salient and legitimate environmental governance. Artists and their artworks can illuminate the less tangible aspects of knowledge about change and hence have an important role to play at the interface of diverse knowledge systems. Sept artistes inuits illustrent, par le biais de leurs œuvres, leur expérience vécue en ce qui a trait à la glace de mer en train de disparaître et au changement climatique. Parce que j’ai vécu à Pangnirtung et à Cape Dorset, au Nunavut, pendant cinq mois en 2013 et pendant un mois en 2015, j’ai réussi à nouer des liens avec des artistes et à entreprendre des collaborations en vue de ce projet. J’examine comment les œuvres et les artistes recourent au symbolisme, à la métaphore et à d’autres moyens esthétiques pour transmettre des messages sur leur expérience vécue en ce qui a trait à la glace de mer et au changement climatique. Les histoires que racontent les artistes au sujet de leurs œuvres font ressortir l’importance de l’adaptation et de l’interconnectivité, et portent sur les thèmes de la transformation et du renouvellement. Les points de vue exprimés par les artistes prenant part à cette recherche revêtent une importance primordiale dans le contexte du rapprochement des systèmes de connaissances permettant de mieux comprendre nos réponses au changement climatique et nos réactions éventuelles. Se rapprocher des aspects intangibles des systèmes de connaissances, comme la réponse émotionnelle, les valeurs et l’identité, présente un défi constant. Pourtant, rendre compte de ces aspects des connaissances constitue une composante critique de la gouvernance environnementale saillante et légitime. Les artistes et leurs œuvres peuvent jeter de la lumière sur les aspects moins tangibles des connaissances sur le changement et par conséquent, ils jouent un rôle important dans l’interface de systèmes de connaissances variés.

Despite the critical and commercial success of Inuit art, which has flourished since the beginning of the modern Inuit art movement in the mid-twentieth century into an internationally recognized art form and multimillion-dollar industry, the research, study, and dissemination of Inuit art has largely been the work of Qallunaat (non-Inuit) scholars, curators, critics, and museum staff. Inuit art—including everything from the earliest archaeological findings to contemporary works—has been almost entirely interpreted by Qallunaat. Therefore, despite the rich literature, often written by those who have worked closely with Inuit artists over the last seven decades of the modern and contemporary arts industry (since 1948), the existing scholarship still represents a deep imbalance between who is being written about and who is writing. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the lack of Inuit scholars has meant that Inuit perspectives and knowledge have been conspicuously absent from much of the research and writing on Inuit art as well. In this short essay, I outline some new directions in my own research and curatorial practice, including an exhibition I recently curated, which may offer a new model for curating and thinking about Inuit art.

When Canada was preparing to welcome the world to Expo 67 in Montreal, two artists who contributed their talents were Inuit stonecarvers Kumukluk Saggiak and Elijah Pudlat. They decorated a giant mural in the Canadian pavilion, Katimavik (the meeting place). This film shows the two carvers at work on their wall and also conveys some of their impressions of life in suburbia.