Kinngait: An Artistic Centre on the Periphery

Marie Leduc

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After writing the essay on the Art World, a Globe & Mail article pointed me to an example that I thought might help to illustrate the dynamics of exchange that occur between centres and peripheries, and how the cultural field of the Art World is woven into the “state of play” between geographical locations. The activities are never universal and the flows of capital are often unevenly distributed. My point in this post is not to draw conclusions on the moral implications of these dynamics, only to point out how such dynamics work and shift everything: personal lives, economic growth, and artistic production.

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If any place can be described as a geographic and artistic periphery, it is Kinngait, Nunavut (formerly Cape Dorset) in Canada’s Arctic region. This small community of less than 1,500 people is located on an island in the Northwest Passage and much closer to Greenland than it is to any Canadian city. Yet, this tiny community, only accessible by air or by boat in the summer months, is known as the Centre of Inuit Art.

Kinngait Print Studio, 1961, National Film Board

In the 1950s, an artist from Toronto, James A. Houston, was sent north by the government to initiate projects that would assist the Indigenous population to generate income from their artistic production. The Inuit were already celebrated in the south for their sculptures and carvings on stone, ivory, and bone. Houston showed them how they could take the same images of humans, animals, birds, and marine life, and transform them into two-dimensional copies through printmaking, an artistic practice new to their culture. In 1958, Houston travelled to Japan to study traditional wood block printing and returned with examples of what printmaking could do.¹ The artists set up a workshop in two small wooden buildings. There they produced drawings and printed images using the printmaking techniques that they learned from Houston and other teachers from the south. Under Houston’s guidance, they also established a co-operative, the West Baffin Eskimo Co-operative, to self-manage the production and sale of their work. The Co-operative organized the work flow of the studio, took care of paying the artists, and distributed the work to select galleries in the south. By the 1970s “Eskimo” prints were valued in the Canadian south and beyond. They were exhibited in important galleries and museums, featured in art magazines and the media, and purchased by collectors. This artistic interchange and new enterprise enabled the northern artists to earn a modest income and introduced the images, stories, and aesthetic forms of the north into the Art World.

Houston initiated other studios in the north, but the West Baffin Eskimo Co-operative in Kinngait is the most successful. A number of the artists, such as Kenojuak Ashevak and Pitseolak Ashoona, became well-known in the south. By 2002, a younger generation of artists, including Annie Pootoogook and Shuvinai Ashoona, were being celebrated even further from home, in the international centres of contemporary art.

The changes Houston brought to Kinngait can be understood as a transfer of capital, the types of capital necessary for artists to enter the Art World. Artists in the south of Canada obtain capital by visiting art galleries and museums (social capital), engaging in post-secondary education (social capital), building relationships with other artists, curators and collectors (social capital), and by soliciting galleries to show and sell their work (economic capital). All of these lead to an increase in the prestige of the artist and their work (cultural and symbolic capital). Given the challenges of extreme distance from the Art World and its institutions and educational facilities, Houston’s actions provided Kinngait artists with these same forms of capital but in an unorthodox manner. New printmaking skills and connections he made with the Art World in the south gave the artists social capital, while the introduction of business practices and relationships with commercial galleries added to their economic capital. In turn, these forms of capital, along with the artists’ own labour, contributed to inceasing the cultural and symbolic capital of their work. Through their efforts Kinngait became an artistic centre despite its peripheral location.

The life story and artwork of one artist, Annie Pootoogook, provides a more personal perspective on this transfer of capital.² Pootoogook came from a family of artists. Pootoogook’s grandmother, Pitseolak Ashoona, was one of the first artists to join the West Baffin Eskimo Co-operative. At the time, the Inuit still lived a predominantly nomadic life on the land, surviving by hunting and fishing. When Ashoona became a widow with young children to feed, she settled in Cape Dorset (Kinngait). She supported her family by making drawings for the print studio. Soon, her daughter, Napachie Pootoogook (Annie’s mother) joined her and took up drawing to support her family. As Napachie noted, 

my mother’s way of life was taught to us children. She would feed us and clothe us even though we had no father. Life was very difficult for my mother, trying to raise us….She made drawings to support us, and she encouraged me to do the same.³

Like her mother, Napachie had a long and highly respected artistic career. Both artists, mother and daughter, lived through the transition from the land to the town. In their drawings, they began to illustrate these changes by adding images of their life in town rather than focusing only on the traditional subjects of animals, birds, and the traditional Inuit life.

Annie Pootoogook began drawing with her grandmother and followed the same artistic path as she illustrated her world in Kinngait. To illustrate her world, Pootoogook uses a simple, linear style with ink outline and an evenly coloured pencil crayon fill. At the centre of this world is the home, a modern bungalow or, in summertime, a tent on the land. These modest living spaces are inhabited by people going about their daily lives seemingly unaware that they have been caught in Pootoogook’s gaze. What Pootoogook sees and illustrates are the mundane activities of the everyday; a woman lying on the floor watching TV, a family sleeping in a tent, a woman behind a house breaking liquor bottles, a group of people coming home with a seal, a family shopping at the grocery store. All of these people live in homes populated by ordinary objects such as furniture, clocks, modern appliances, camping gear, toys, clothing, food containers. Each object, in Pootoogook’s drawings, is illustrated with an attention to detail that does not glamorize or idealize them. They are just there and just part of life. The child-like naivety of the drawing style, however, belies the deeper considerations that her work represents. In a very candid way, Pootoogook presents the human relationships around her – both loving and hurtful. She keeps an objective distance that makes no attempt to pass judgement. Family violence and alcoholism co-exist along with the loving relations between couples and parents and children. Similarly, Pootoogook eyes the material things of her world, some from the south and others from her people’s life on the land. Holding Boots (2003/04), an image of a child holding a mukluk in one hand and a rubber boot in another, provides a delightful take on the merging of two worlds. As Pootoogook noted, “I never thought that this is traditional Inuit way, and this is white style. I never thought of that because I just draw what I see.”⁴

Pootoogook quickly moved to a place of prominence in the Canadian contemporary art world which then brought her international recognition. She was given a large solo exhibition at the Power Plant in Toronto in 2006. That same year she attended a residency in Scotland which was her first time travelling outside of Canada. And, again, that same year she won Canada’s premier art award for emerging artists, the Sobey Art Award. In 2007, she was invited to take part in Documenta 12 and travelled to Kassel, Germany. Her work was then exhibited across Canada and in the United States. Her success, however, added further challenges to her life. She tried living in the south but the easy access to alcohol created too many problems. She moved back to Kinngait but then returned south to Ottawa in 2016. There she began drinking, selling her work on the street, and living in shelters. Sadly, on September 19, 2016, Pootoogook was found dead in the Ottawa River. She is a great loss to her people, to Kinngait, and to the Art World.⁵

After more than fifty years, Kinngait’s significance as the centre of Inuit Art drew the attention and economic support of the Canadian government. In September 2018, Kinngait celebrated the opening of the Kenojuak Culture Centre. The ten million dollar facility was funded by the government, corporations, and private donors. The multi-purpose facility includes a new state-of-the-art print studio and working space (see video below) replacing the two wooden buildings that had served the artists for so long. Now, in the summer months, cruise ships bring visitors from around the world, adding another avenue for economic and social change.

The story of Kinngait, a place far from the world centres of capital, and the story of Annie Pootoogook illustrate how the relationship between the centre and the periphery brings change but also how such change can have very personal impacts that are not always positive. Houston’s introduction of a foreign art practice brought artistic, cultural, and economic transformation to Kinngait, a transformation that also changed people’s lives, encouraged new artistic forms, and ultimately brought this tiny community greater recognition in Canada and the world.

1. https://www.historymuseum.ca/blog/east-meets-north/

2. The paragraghs on Annie Pootoogook’s life and art are revised from an essay I wrote for an exhibition of Pootoogook’s work that I curated for Keyano Art Gallery in Fort McMurray, Alberta in 2007.

3. As quoted in Odette Leroux, Marion E. Jackson and Minnie Aodla Freeman, eds.  Inuit Women Artists: Voices from Cape Dorset (Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 1994), 45.

4. As quoted in Nancy Campbell. Annie Pootoogook (Calgary: Alberta College of Art and Design, 2007), 23.

5. See https://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/art-and-architecture/the-remarkable-life-of-inuit-artist-anniepootoogook/article32198919/