A little-known story of Inuit artistry and innovation recently emerged from the Arctic island community of Kinngait in the Canadian province of Nunavut. Now known as the global epicenter of Inuit art, Kinngait was home to a group of Inuit printmakers who achieved artistic recognition and commercial success in textile design during the 1950s and ’60s.
Long buried, their story is now being shared through a contemporary lens across Canada — and now, for the first time, in the United States. “ᖃᓪᓗᓈᖅᑕᐃᑦ ᓯᑯᓯᓛᕐᒥᑦ Printed Textiles from Kinngait Studios” will be on display at Bowdoin College’s Peary-MacMillan Arctic Museum in Brunswick until Oct. 26.
“The story is so interesting,” said Genny LeMoine, curator at the Peary-MacMillan Arctic Museum. “It’s visually amazing and really compelling. … People will be blown away by it.”
Since its opening in 1967, Inuit culture has been a focus of the museum, partly as a way to showcase the changes in Inuit society documented by explorer Donald MacMillan. More recently, the museum identified contemporary Inuit art as a priority because it helps tell the story of Inuit culture in modern times while educating visitors about the contemporary Arctic.
The exhibition features works from Inuit graphic artists alongside interviews and oral histories from the Kinngait community and present-day Kinngait artists. It also features new work from three contemporary Inuit fashion designers.
Interactive elements, such as an app and a virtual tour, allow visitors to explore the exhibition in additional depth.
Roxane Shaughnessy, senior curator at The Textile Museum of Canada, said in a news release that the voices and work of contemporary artists from Kinngait and other parts of Nunavut open up conversations about the significance of these printed fabrics to Inuit cultural heritage.
The 20th century in the Canadian Arctic brought colonial influences that disrupted Inuit communities’ traditional relationships with the land. Resettlement and changes to subsistence lifestyles led to more dependency on store-bought food and on the government. Colonial forces suppressed Indigenous language, cultural practices, spiritual beliefs and traditional medicine in an effort to assimilate Indigenous peoples and erase their unique identities.
According to Heather Igloliorte, an Inuk scholar and curator, Inuit artists preserved their heritage by expressing forbidden knowledge through art. Art was a way to record and preserve stories, legends and traditions — so the scenes on the textiles are more than just images on cloth.
“By embedding that otherwise forbidden knowledge in their artworks, Inuit artists expressed the principle of qanuqtuurungnarniq, being innovative and resourceful to solve problems, by using the means available to them — art making — to cleverly safeguard Inuit knowledge for future generations,” Igloliorte said in a 2017 article in Art Journal.
During the 1950s, the Canadian government enlisted artist James Houston to spearhead the development of handicraft production in the community. In 1957, Inuit hunters and seamstresses were introduced to printmaking as an opportunity to work toward economic independence.
The work of the Kinngait printmakers reflected diverse influences, including the Inuit graphic tradition, the design trends and market preferences of the era, and the style of Japanese block-and-stencil printing. The textiles were characterized by imagery of animals and complex designs that reflected Inuit experiences with a high level of artistic and technical skill. Their designs were made into household items like curtains, tablecloths and pillowcases that were sent out into the world.
The enterprise capitalized on a midcentury design craze that saw the commercial sale of textiles by renowned artists such as Pablo Picasso and Andy Warhol.
Within two years of the introduction of silk screen printing in Kinngait, the textiles won national awards that led to more exposure and sales. But the success of Kinngait textiles was short-lived. By 1968, the fabric-printing operation at Kinngait was discontinued. Local artists’ designs were licensed to an Ontario company that reproduced them on commercial textiles.
In 2016, the Kinngait artists’ long-forgotten work was brought to light by William Huffman, marketing manager at Dorset Fine Arts. The Toronto-based organization works with artists in Kinngait, which was formerly known as Cape Dorset.
Huffman stumbled upon a box of textiles in a storage unit and contacted the Textile Museum of Canada, which led to the establishment of the first and only public collection of Inuit printed textiles in Canada.
The designs in the exhibition make up a unique body of work that expresses Inuit values, culture and knowledge, while contributing to the ongoing evolution of Inuit art.
In 1976, Kinngait artist Kananginak Pootoogook said, “Our art helps us understand each other. Our art will help us not to forget how our ancestors lived, for we do not live that same way today.”
In order to establish this connection between past and present, the exhibition integrates perspectives from three contemporary Inuit fashion designers who share their thoughts on the Kinngait fabrics.
“You see their connection to the land and the spirit world because they believed that everything had a soul, and the animals would change to humans, as told in the legends and the stories,” Martha Kyak, one of the three contemporary artists included in the exhibition, said in an article published by the Canadian Museums Association.
“I’m really happy to see that Inuit and First Nations design … is really starting to rise. There is this new wave of bringing it back, and bringing it back with such attitude, oftentimes almost aggressively, because it was almost taken away from us,” Nooks Lindell, another of the contemporary artists, said in a release from the Textile Museum of Canada. “We’re super proud to show it off — that it’s still here. It’s such a powerful thing.”
