Exhibit at McMichael gallery to feature life’s changes in Nunavut village

A new exhibit at the McMichael Canadian Art Collection will feature works that showcase societal changes in Kinngait, an Inuit hamlet in Nunavut, during the past five decades.

The exhibit, titled Worlds on Paper: Drawings from Kinngait, will open on March 8 at the McMichael gallery, located in Kleinburg, Ont., a village just north of Toronto.

The McMichael gallery has held in trust more than 90,000 Kinngait drawings in its archives since the 1990s.

Many of these drawings have never been shown outside of the Kinngait community, which was known as Cape Dorset until its name change in 2020.

Emily Laurent Henderson, McMichael’s associate curator of Indigenous arts and culture, has curated the upcoming exhibit, which will run until Aug. 24.

Henderson selected the more than 200 works that will be featured. The works of 48 artists will be displayed.

Henderson said some of the pieces in the exhibit have been previously shown in other McMichael installations over the years.

But Worlds on Paper: Drawings from Kinngait is a massive initiative, which will consume three exhibition spaces in the gallery, a well-known facility which opened to the public in 1966.

Henderson said it was a challenging venture to determine which pieces to include.

“It was very, very difficult,” she said. “At first I was just sort of saving things that were interesting in terms of texture and color and pattern; things that would look interesting from a visual perspective.”

Henderson, who has worked at McMichael since November 2023, said she was intrigued by the gallery’s resources, which contained first-hand accounts of Inuk artists that were recording their lives as they remembered them or as the world was changing around them.

“After the first couple of months of looking through the archive, the works that I was saving, it was changing from things that I just found visually interesting or appealing to things that I found that there was a real story that was being told here about this community in a moment of transition,” she said.

The Kinngait archives covers work from 1959 to about 1990.

Henderson said this was a critical time of change in the north in general, and in the community of Kinngait as well.

“So, you're seeing things like people that are being settled for the very first time, sometimes by choice,” she said. “But most of the time it's forcible or it's coercive that people are being moved from seminomadic camps where they're changing depending on food sources or different seasons to living in permanent sedentary settled lives.”

There’s also more interaction with the RCMP and clergy.

“And you're seeing transport go from being dog team and ship to also including planes and snowmobiles,” Henderson added. “And there's all these things that are happening in community life and the way that the world has changing and it actually gets captured in this archive.”

Some of the better-known artists that have works in the exhibit are Kenojuak Ashevak, Pitseolak Ashoona, Kananginak Pootoogook and Pudlo Pudlat.

Henderson was also keen to include many relatively unknown artists.

Henderson is happy the exhibit opening is just around the corner.

“It's very surreal and it's very exciting,” she said. “I think there was a while where it was daunting. And it is still daunting because there's this sense of huge responsibility.”

Henderson said she has a keen desire to best represent the work of close to 50 artists.

“It's very humbling and a huge honor to be able to approach that work and that responsibility,” she said. “But I am getting excited now that things are going to get locked in and fall into place. It's quite thrilling. It's quite thrilling and I'm so excited to share this with a community that is in and around the Greater Toronto Area.”

Henderson said she was thinking of two different audiences – Inuit and non-Indigenous people – while she was curating the exhibit.

She’s hoping Inuit audiences will be able to recognize aspects of their lives or their childhood or stories that were passed down to them.

“And then for non-Inuit audiences, this has taken a really interesting turn for me in many ways, especially right now since there’s such a focus on the Arctic,” she said.

For more information about the exhibit visit https://mcmichael.com/event/worlds-on-paper-drawings-from-kinngait/

Local Journalism Initiative Reporters are supported by a financial contribution made by the Government of Canada.