Stretching the frame on Inuit art New Qaumajuq exhibition spans more than 2,000 years across circumpolar Arctic By: Jen Zoratti Posted: 7:00 PM CDT Friday, Mar. 31, 2023 Last Modified: 10:15 AM CDT Saturday, Apr. 1, 2023 Updates

Darlene Coward Wight has been the curator of Inuit art at the Winnipeg Art Gallery — and now, Qaumajuq — since 1986.

Most of her research, writing and curation has been focused on contemporary Inuit art — considered to be around 1950 to the present day — which makes sense: WAG-Qaumajuq is, after all, home to the largest public collection of contemporary Inuit art in the world.

But over the years, Wight has encountered some intriguing questions: What happened before 1950? Presumably Inuit were making art, but who — and where? And what did it look like?

Inuit Sanaugangit: Art Across Time, which opens Saturday in the third-floor Qilak gallery at Qaumajuq, offers answers.

Curated by Wight along with Jocelyn Piirainen, associate curator at the National Gallery of Canada, the exhibition presents a survey of sanaugangit (sa-now-gan-eet or sa-now-gah-knee) or “art by Inuit” from 200 BCE to present day, by Inuit (Canada), Kalaallit (Greenland), Yup’ik and Unangax/Aleutian (Alaska and Siberia) artists, in a wide range of mediums, including sculpture, drawing, clothing, printmaking and film.

“I wanted to do a show that gave the context to contemporary Inuit art, which we are always showing, that’s our collection,” Wight says over the din of heavy equipment in the gallery space, as the finishing touches are put on the exhibition.

Inuit Sanaugangit not only spans more than 2,000 years but also a vast geographical region: the circumpolar Arctic.

“I’ve been here for 36 years doing shows, and I just wanted to do something that would be more comprehensive, that would literally show the entire Inuit world, which starts in Siberia. People then migrated to Alaska and then migrated across the north of Canada, as far as Greenland,” Wight says. (The exhibition is organized geographically, with subtle, pastel-hued colour-coding for wayfinding.)

“And so that’s why I decided I had better find works for those periods, because we didn’t have them in our collection.”

The earliest pieces in the show are a trio of figures that date back to the Okvik Old Bering Sea period in Alaska, which is 200 BCE to 500 CE. “The one in the middle is a particularly lovely example of Okvik period,” Wight says, highlighting a striking carving of a head. “These wonderfully elemental heads with the tattoos on them — to have things that old in the show is really, really exciting.”

Sourcing all 374 works featured in the exhibition was a Herculean task that began in 2018. For two years, Wight conducted research and pored through private and museum collections alike. And then, the pandemic hit, forcing Wight, like everyone else, to pivot — only her pivot was to another enormous project: designing the Visible Vault that serves as the anchor of Qaumajuq, which opened in 2021.

Working on Inuit Sanaugangit was a welcome learning experience for the veteran curator. “I didn’t really know much about all the excavation work that had been done in Canada by archaeologists, things that had been found in the ground and are now being kept in collections like the Government of Nunavut Collection,” Wight says.

She also had success at the Canadian Museum of History in Ottawa. “They have a very extraordinary collection of Dorset, which is a culture that was in Canada, oh, from about zero to 800,” Wight says.

“Most of them are too precious to lend to me, but they had already made resin casts of these very, very precious things.” Those casts are on view.

Private collections yielded treasures old and new, too — such as a contemporary serpentinite carving by Labrador-based sculptor Michael Massie of a man who, in a sight familiar to most Winnipeggers in summertime, is covered in mosquitoes. “I borrowed that from Marnie Schreiber in Burlington,” Wight says. “And actually, there’s a number of things that I borrowed. She had prehistoric things, she had some of the really cutting-edge contemporary things.

“It was just so extraordinary that people would lend them.”

In addition to the historic works from Siberia, Alaska and Greenland, the exhibition also features contemporary art from Inuit communities across the Canadian arctic: Nunavut, Nunavik, Nunatsiavut and the Inuvialuit Settlement Region, some of which also had to be borrowed. “We didn’t have very much from Nunatsiavut, or Labrador,” Wight says. “So we borrowed from The Rooms in St. John’s.”

Inuit Sanaugangit is something of a highlight reel, allowing viewers to see the distinctive artistic expressions across eras, regions and communities.

“I think it’s important to understand who Inuit are,” Wight says. “They have a long history and they don’t just live in Canada. I think it’s important to show that cultural history, not just the art history, that they actually do have ancestry that goes back to Alaska, and the climactic changes that made cultural changes happen.”

She points to the Little Ice Age by way of example. “It made a very short season for hunting whales along the northern Arctic coast — that instigated a culture change. The people that were reliant on bowhead whales, they disappeared, their culture disappeared, it’s not quite known why. And because it got colder, the culture shifted to the Inuit as we know today, the ancestors of the Inuit became a culture that hunted more from the sea ice. It was a different culture and a different technology that they developed.

“I think it’s important for people to see the breadth of the culture.”

Inuit Sanaugangit: Art Across Time is on view until January 2024.

jen.zoratti@winnipegfreepress.com

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Jen Zoratti
Columnist

Jen Zoratti is a Winnipeg Free Press columnist and author of the newsletter, NEXT, a weekly look towards a post-pandemic future.

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