A number of years ago, when I was doing research on Leonardo
Shapiro, the avant-garde stage director about whom I’ve written several times
on this blog, I looked into one of the artists he named as influences, Pudlo
Pudlat (1916-92),
an Inuit painter and printmaker. (I’ve blogged
about Leo a number of times for Rick
On Theater; see, for example, “Song
in the Blood (Hiroshima/Los Alamos),” 5 August 2009; “Cheerleaders of the
Revolution,” 31 October 2009; “Brother,
You’re Next,” 26 January 2010; “New York Free Theater,” 4 April 2010; “War Carnival,” 13 May 2010; “‘As It Is
In Heaven,’” 25 March 2011; “Acting: Testimony & Role vs. Character,” 25
September 2013; “Shaliko’s Strangers,”
3 and 6 March 2014; “Mount
Analogue,” 20 July 2014; and “Shaliko’s Kafka: Father and Son,” 5 and 8 November 2015; as well as “‘Two
Thousand Years of Stony Sleep,’” an early piece of writing by Shapiro himself,
7 May 2011.) I’d never heard of Pudlo—Inuit
commonly use only one name and this is how the artist is internationally
known—but as I looked more deeply into him and his art, I
found an engrossing and revealing subject.
As readers of ROT
know, I
fancy myself a devotee of art, so I pursued the story of Pudlo and
discovered that the artist, his work, and Inuit art just
interested me. On a
visit I made to Quebec City in December 2000, a center of Inuit art,
and later one to Vancouver in August 2003, I learned some general facts
about the art of the Inuit people,
which has an interesting, and I suspect unique, history (which I’ll
précis in a moment). Ever since
then, I’ve had an interest in Inuit art so when I read last August that the
George Gustav Heye Center, the National Museum of the American Indian branch in
lower Manhattan, was hosting an exhibit
of works by three Canadian Inuit artists, I suggested to my friend Diana (who’s
my usual theater companion but who also has an abiding interest in art and art
museums) that we make a trip downtown to see it.
We left the visit until the end of run of Akunnittinni:
A Kinngait Family Portrait (10 June 2017-8 January 2018) and didn’t get down to Bowling Green until Sunday,
7 January. (We were further delayed,
beyond plain, old procrastination, by the nor’easter of Thursday, 4 January,
the original date of our planned visit to the museum. At the last minute on the 7th, furthermore,
Diana didn’t feel well and dropped out. I
had figured she probably didn’t know Inuit art or New York’s NMAI as neither
are well known to the general public. Part
of my reason for going to the show had been to introduce her to both of them, but
I went downtown on my own anyway.)
The word akunnittinni, according to Andrea R. Hanley, the exhibition curator of Santa
Fe, New Mexico’s Museum of
Contemporary Native Arts at the Institute of American Indian Arts, loosely
means “between us” in Inuktitut, the language of the Inuit people. (If you are my age or older, you are probably
more used to speaking of the people of the arctic as Eskimos but, especially in
Canada, the current, and preferred, name is Inuit.) A Kinngait Family Portrait displays
a family gathering among an Inuk grandmother, mother, and daughter: Pitseolak
Ashoona, Napachie Pootoogook, and Annie Pootoogook. The three women “are known
for illustrating life’s intimacies within their Arctic communities and
families, as well as life’s challenges.”
They are the “us” in akunnittinni and what’s “between” them is what the
Smithsonian’s press release characterized as a “visual conversation” with one
another.
Kinngait, the Inuit name for the remote hamlet of Cape
Dorset on Dorset Island in Nunavut, the Canadian territory established as an
Inuit homeland in 1999, was the home of Pitseolak, Napachie, and Annie and the
Ashoona-Pootoogook family of artists—a family with a strong artistic identity
that has contributed significantly to the reputation of Kinngait art. Kinngait’s nicknamed the “Capital of Inuit Art”
and artists from the area are renowned worldwide for their prints, drawings,
paintings, and sculptures, produced in places like the now famous Kinngait
Studios since the 1940s. Almost a quarter of the town’s working residents
is employed in some aspect of the art business.
Eskimo, which is
still used in the U.S., especially in Alaska, refers to several native peoples,
including the Inuit. The term Eskimo is a foreign word applied to the
Inuit and other peoples by outside tribes.
Its most likely etymology is a Montagnais word meaning ‘snowshoe-lacer.’ (The Montagnais are a group inhabiting the
north shore of the Gulf of St. Lawrence in Quebec and Labrador.) In Canada, however, the word is believed to be
derived from an Algonquin word that means ‘raw meat-eater,’ and although linguistically this is less
likely, the belief is widely held in Canada and the word Eskimo is considered derogatory and racist. In any case, the Canadian government
officially recognizes the people of the far north, including Nunavut, as Inuit,
the name these native peoples use to refer to themselves; the name Eskimo is
seldom heard in Canada today. Inuit,
by the way, is plural; the singular is Inuk,
which means ‘person.’ The native tongue of the Inuit, as I stated
above, is Inuktitut, one of the official languages of Nunavut.
The Inuit people were a nomadic culture of hunter-gatherers
in the arctic regions of Greenland, Canada, and Alaska well into the 20th
century. (There are also significant
populations of Inuit in Denmark and Russia.)
Following the fish and game of the far north as the ice receded, living
in igloos (which means simply ‘house’ and
may be made of ice and snow, corresponding to the familiar image we have, but
is also commonly built from stone, sod, mud, skins, or any other convenient
material), and moving from spot to spot as the hunting, weather, or terrain
necessitated.
Traveling by dogsled across land and in umiaks or the
smaller kayaks across water, an Inuit family or clan could not really afford to
carry much with them that wasn’t of immediate practical value in their harsh
life, so decoration was minimal, and artwork, even on practical items, was
uncommon. (The 2001 Inuit-produced—also -directed
and -acted—movie Atanarjuat: The Fast
Runner gives a dramatic glimpse of this lifestyle.) What little there was was carved ivory or
bone. A change occurred in about 1945,
however, when the Canadian government encouraged Inuit and other native peoples
to settle in towns and villages, learn cultivation and other domestic skills,
and give up the nomadic life they’d known for centuries. I won’t get into the socio-political
implications of this change (except to suggest that it wasn’t entirely insensitive
and cold-hearted as the world around the Inuit had changed and their
subsistence existence was becoming untenable), but the sociological effect was
profound.
The Canadian government saw that the move to permanent
habitation in towns and villages left many Inuit without traditional
livelihoods or even pastimes. This was
mostly true of the men, as the women were able to transfer their traditional
responsibilities of homemaking and child-rearing from the nomadic existence to
the permanent one with little significant change (except, of course, that they
now got their material needs from stores instead of the wild). The men, on the other hand, were the ones who
lost their customary occupations. Looking
around for something with which to replace the lost income and work, the
government lit on art and established training programs and outlets for
whatever the Inuit produced, even supplying them with the materials they needed.
In what may be one of the rare examples among artificial
cultural redirection, the plan succeeded wildly. I guess the Inuit had a hidden tribal talent
for making terrific art, and they started a co-op in 1958 to market and
determine the prices of their work so that they wouldn’t be ripped off by
gallery owners and dealers or, in turn, cheat the buying public. Inuit art took off in popularity and
desirability in the south. Over time,
some artists became recognized, such as Pudlo (on whom I blogged on 28
September 2009) and the Ashoona-Pootoogook family, and art museums began organizing
exhibitions of Inuit works. Collectors,
first in Canada then in the United States, began to buy the art. As making art supplanted the fur trade as the
region’s principal employment, whole villages lived off the art turned out in
their community studios, some making it, some marketing it, some managing the
studios; printmaking became a profitable concern.
Over 70 years now, Inuit art has become established and
while it started as naïve work, it now has a sophistication and dynamic that
compares easily with the works of American Indian artists in, say, the Taos art
colony area (coincidentally, near where Akunnittinni was organized at the
IAIA). In both cases, too, the themes
and subjects developed from strict focus on traditional culture to an embrace
of the whole universe around them—in the case of the Inuit, the Canada of the
Europeans and the technology of the middle- and late-20th-century world. Though many Inuit artists work in a
naturalistic style, carving animals or scenes common to the Canadian north,
many others work in symbolist and abstract styles that draw on indigenous
images and refer to the style of Inuit art that developed in the post-World War
II years (there not having been a true indigenous precursor). The media used by Inuit artists has expanded
as well, from simple carvings to sophisticated soapstone sculpture, painting,
drawing, lithography, and all the forms commonly used by Western artists.
Among the most popular subjects I observed in Inuit art when I was in Quebec
and later in Vancouver at the other end of the country were native animals,
Inuit figures, and the mysterious and majestic inuksuit, a form
nearly ubiquitous in the galleries and shops all over both cities. (I have an Inuit sculpture entitled Inukshuk and I blogged on the subject of the carving
in “Inuksuit,” posted on 10 August 2011.)
A little history of
NMAI: George Gustav Heye (1874-1957) opened his private Museum of the American
Indian to the public in 1922 to house and display his own collection of Native
American art. He’d started collecting in
1903 and he established the Heye Foundation in 1916 to oversee it and promote
the study of Indian art and culture. The
museum was located at 155th Street and Broadway in Harlem until it was acquired
by the Smithsonian Institution and moved to the Alexander Hamilton U.S. Custom House in 1994. The Smithsonian took over Heye’s museum in
1989 and opened the main building for the National Museum of the American
Indian on the National Mall in 2004. The
George Gustav Heye Center, now
a satellite of the larger NMAI, maintains its own permanent collection (based
on Heye’s original holdings) and exhibits.
The Hamilton Custom House, which also houses the U.S.
Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York, the National Archives
at New York City, and a branch of U.S. Customs and Border Protection, is a splendid
Beaux Arts building built in 1907. It
served as the U.S. Custom House in New York City until 1973 (when its customs
function was moved to 6 World Trade Center) and in 1979, New York Senator Daniel
Patrick Moynihan (1927-2003) saved the building from demolition. A restoration having been completed in 1987,
the building was renamed for the nation’s first Secretary of the Treasury
(under whose jurisdiction customs fell until 2003) in 1990 with Moynihan’s
sponsorship. Designed by St. Paul,
Minnesota, architect Cass Gilbert (1859–1934), who had once worked for McKim,
Mead & White (Washington Arch, 1892; the main campus of Columbia University,
1893-1900; the Brooklyn Museum, 1895; New York’s former Pennsylvania Station, 1910;
and the James Farley Post Office in Manhattan, 1913; among many other
significant buildings), the custom house is architecturally stunning in its own
right. A National Historic Landmark (1976)
and listed on the National Register of Historic Places (exterior and
interior, 1972), the custom house on its own is worth a visit. It’s a magnificent Beaux Arts building with
many stunning architectural and artistic details (outlined in “Architecture & History” on the
Heye Center webpage at http://nmai.si.edu/visit/newyork/architecture-history/)
and serves as a magnificent example of the re-purposing of historic architecture.
According to Hanley, the art works of Pitseolak, Napachie,
and Annie Pootoogook “provide a personal and cultural history of three
generations of Inuit women whose art practices included autobiographical
narratives and chronicled intimate and sometimes harsh memories and
historically resonant moments.” (Akunnittinni:
A Kinngait Family Portrait,
curated by Andrea Hanley, was organized by the IAIA’s Museum of
Contemporary Native Arts. It appeared
there at the MoCNA from 22 January through 1 April 2016.) The Ashoona and Pootoogook works, says
Hanley, “also include sardonic references to pop culture, which now infuses
everyday life in Kinngait, as well as nuanced depictions of family and village
life.” Patsy Phillips, director of the
IAIA, observed: “The grandmother painted more romanticized versions of the
story she heard—of how the culture used to be.
The mother drew more of the darker side of the stories she heard [while]
the daughter’s were much more current.”
Pitseolak (1904–1983; some accounts give her birth year as
1907 or 1908) was born on Nottingham Island (Tujajuak) in the Hudson Straights in the Northwest Territories (part if which is
now Nunavut). She spent her childhood in several camps on the south
Baffin Island (Qikiqtaaluk) coast. She was a member of one of the
last generations of Inuit to grow up in the centuries-old traditions of
the North American Inuit—or, as the artist characterized it, “long
ago before there were many white men.” She
married Ashoona, a hunter, in 1922 or ’23 in a marriage arranged by her uncle
after her father died about a year earlier, and she bore 17 children, only six
of whom she raised to adulthood. (Though
some died as children, others, as was the custom, were raised by other Inuit
families.) Pitseolak was the matriarch
of a large family of artists, including at least five children—sons Namoonai
(1926-2002), Kaka (1928-96), Koomwartok (1930-84), Kiawak (1933-2014), and
Ottochie Ashoona (1942-70), all sculptors, and daughter Napachie, a graphic artist—and
three grandchildren—Ohitok Ashoona (b. 1952, sculptor), Shuvinai Ashoona,
(b. 1961, graphic artist), and Annie Pootoogook (graphic artist). (A note
about Inuit names: Inuktitut has its own writing system, and when names and
words are transliterated into English, there are often spelling variations.) Pitseolak’s husband, Ashoona, died at 40 years
of age during an epidemic in the Nettilling Lake area, near the south end of
Baffin Island, in the mid-1940s (around 1944 or ’45), leaving Pitseolak to
raise their young family on her own.
Pitseolak, by then in her 50s, settled permanently in Kinngait/Cape
Dorset in the early 1960’s where she was encouraged to try drawing as a way to
support her family after the death of her husband. She’s said drawing also served as an
emotional support for her, and it’s little wonder that images of motherhood were
central to Pitseolak’s art. She was
among the first Inuk in Kinngait to start drawing, beginning with stonecut
prints, and one of the most prolific. Despite
the sad circumstances that initiated her drawing and a life of hardship, Pitseolak’s
art mostly depicts a positive view of the Inuit way of life remembered from her
childhood. According to Christine
Lalonde, Curator of Indigenous Art at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa,
“scenes of deprivation or suffering almost never appear in her drawings,” and,
indeed, the sample on exhibit at the Heye Center demonstrated this trait (which
we’ll see is in contrast to the drawings of her daughter).
(Stonecut, not to be confused with the more technically
complicated lithography, is a process much like woodcut or linocut—all forms of
“relief” printing—which the Kinngait printmakers have refined. The first step is tracing the original
drawing onto the smooth surface of a prepared stone. Using India ink, the printer outlines the
drawing on the stone and then chips away the areas that are not to appear
in print, leaving the uncut areas raised, or in relief. The raised area is inked using rollers and
then a thin sheet of fine paper is placed over the inked surface and the paper
is pressed gently against the stone by hand with a small, padded disc. Only a single print can be made from each
inking of the stone, so the edition takes time, care, and patience.)
Remembrance of Inuit society of her youth shows up clearly
in Pitseolak’s Games of My Youth (stonecut
and stencil, 1978), in which four Inuk girls are at play, two of them playing
an Inuit ball game while a third is hanging in mid-tackle of an opponent, and in
Family Camping in Tuniq Ruins (stonecut and stencil, 1976),
with its family of seven Inuit in traditional garb peering out of an
igloo. Another example of this subject
is Migration towards Our Summer Camp
(lithograph, 1983), a collection of images of a smiling Inuit clan on the move
in traditional clothing for a trek through the tundra, wearing backpacks and
carrying harpoons, accompanied by dogs and pack animals, transporting fishing
and hunting gear. The most iconic (and
earliest) of Pitseolak’s works on display here was the 1969 Dream of Motherhood (color stonecut on
paper), a fanciful
image of a woman with long braids and her hands in the air, fingers extended,
carrying two children atop
her head in the hood of her parka. (The
garment is in fact an amauti, a
traditional Inuit parka specifically designed for the hood to serve as a baby-carrier.)
Pitseolak made close to 9,000 drawings during her 20 years
in Kinngait. Her prints, rendered in
muted, mostly earth colors, have appeared in every annual print collection
since her work was first published in 1960. Her best and most authentic
drawings were of “the old Eskimo ways,” as she said, a way of life firmly
imprinted on her memory. In the
conventions of Inuit art, this is known as sulijuk,
‘it is true’ or ‘it is realistic’—which indicates artists depicted elements of
Inuit life as they saw it, without interpolating much of their own imagination. Pitseolak
received several honors in her lifetime, and her work has been the subject of
several projects. In 1971, the National Film Board of Canada produced a documentary
based on her book, Pitseolak: Pictures
out of My Life (McGill-Queen’s University Press. 2003). In 1974. she
was elected a member of the Royal Canadian Academy and she received the Order
of Canada in 1977. Pitseolak died in
1983 and is buried behind the Anglican Church in Kinngait. She had promised
to work on her drawings and prints until she was no longer able, and she fulfilled
the vow. Her vast legacy of art work is currently on long-term loan at
the McMichael Canadian Art Collection near Toronto where it is being
photographed, documented, and exhibited.
Born at Sako, a traditional Inuit camp on the southwest coast
of Baffin Island, Northwest Territories, Napachie (1938–2002) was the only
surviving daughter of Pitseolak; along with her four sculptor brothers, and her
graphic-artist sisters-in-law, Mayureak (b. 1946, wife of Kaka) and Sorosiluto Ashoona (b.
1941, wife of Kiawak), she was part of the prominent and renowned Inuit artist
clan. In the mid-1950s while living at
Kiaktuuq, she married sculptor and printmaker Eegyvukluk Pootoogook
(1931-2000), son of an important camp leader, Pootoogook (1887-1958), a graphic
artist and carver who later become one of the main printers at the Kinngait Studios. (Like her mother’s, Napachie’s marriage was
arranged.) Napachie, Eegyvukluk, and their 11 children (who included
daughter Annie Pootoogook, a third-generation artist) moved to Kinngait in 1965
and, just as her mother had, took up drawing; she sold her first drawings at
age 25 (1963) for $20. Since then, Napachie’s work has been included in
almost every annual collection of Kinngait prints. She created works
until her death from cancer at 64, leaving a legacy of over 5,000 prints and
drawings.
Napachie used a vigorous, energetic figurative style to
bring to life narrative scenes depicting both personal memories and ancient
stories depicting local current, mythical, and legendary figures. Following classes in painting and drawing at
the Kinngait Studios, after 1976, she drew landscapes and interiors using
notions of spatial composition of Western techniques. Although many of her
early prints and drawings presented a rhapsodic depiction of Inuit spiritual
beliefs, the focus of her work since the mid-1970s, as exemplified by those
featured in Akunnittinni, was more on recording the traditional home life
of the Inuit people, “including,” as the exhibit text put it, “darker aspects
that were left out of her mother’s more
idealistic representations.”
Indeed,
according to Will Huffman, marketing manager at Dorset Fine Arts in Toronto,
the marketing division of Kinngait Studios, Napachie revealed aspects of
her culture that many Inuit would have preferred not be seen by outsiders—a
characteristic that reminds me of Native American artist Fritz Scholder (1937-2005),
on whom I blogged on 20 March 2011. This
can be seen in 1994’s Alcohol
(colored pencil and ink on paper), which depicts a woman holding a small child
while handing a kneeling man a bottle of (presumably) liquor—or is she taking
it away from him? On the floor in front
of the man—her husband and the father of the toddler?—is a broken bottle. He’s holding a fat stick (a weapon?) and his
mouth is open wide as if he might be yelling at the woman, while sprawled on
the floor behind him is another man, sleeping or passed out. The reference is clearly the alcoholism that
plagues Inuit (as well as other Native American) communities with hints—the
stick—of the domestic violence and abuse that is also an endemic problem among
Inuit.
In Male Dominance
(ink and colored pencil on paper, 1995-96), Napachie presents five weeping women
surrounding a man wielding a long knife; on the ground by his knee is a small
bow with an arrow. He’s looking out at
us, smiling in self-satisfaction. The
six are connected to each other by a rope, symbolizing the utter dependence of
Inuit women on men, who could abduct them as wives, even if they were already
married. (There is, as Hanley, who’s
Navajo, puts it, a broad streak of “contemporary indigenous feminist” emphasis
in all three artists’ work, but particularly Napachie’s.) If a man desired another Inuk’s wife, he
could just kill his rival and take the man’s wife for his own. Napachie habitually incorporated inscriptions
(in Inktitut, the artist’s only spoken and written tongue), and on Male Dominance, she wrote:
Aatachaliuk is scaring women to ensure his domination, before he claims
them as wives, after slaying his male enemies. He did this to hide his
soft side.
Trading Women for
Supplies (ink on paper, 1997-98)
is a portrayal of a Caucasian captain of a whaler exchanging materials and
supplies—a jacket and a duffel bag of cans and boxes—to an Inuit man in a parka
for a woman. “The captain from the
bowhead whale hunting ship is trading materials and supplies for the women,”
inscribed Napachie. “As usual, the man
agrees without hesitation.” In the
drawing, according to Edward J. Guarino, a retired high school teacher from Yonkers,
New York, and Inuit art collector who lent some of his holdings for the show,
the artist “documents the sexual exploitation of Inuit women by men, both Inuit and
non-Inuit.”
Arguably the most grotesque and shocking picture in the exhibit was Napachie’s
Eating His Mother’s Remains
(ink on paper, 1999-2000). It’s an image
of exactly what the title says: a man “is chopping up and eating his mother’s
rump before leaving. He is also
preparing to take the human remains by wrapping them in seal skin and using the
rope to bind it.” While cannibalism
wasn’t ever part of the Inuit culture, it was practiced rarely in the event of
extreme famine and Pat Feheley, owner of Feheley Fine Arts in Toronto and an
expert on Inuit art, wrote: “. . . I expect that someone had told Napachie
about this particular man.”
Annie Pootoogook (1969–2016), born in Kinngait, was the
daughter of Napachie and Eegyvukluk, and the granddaughter of Pitseolak. By the time she was born, the Ashoonas and
Pootoogooks were firmly in the middle class as a consequence of their artistic
endeavors. Annie began drawing in 1997 at
the age of 28 and quickly developed a preference for scenes from her own life,
becoming a prolific graphic artist. In
2003, Annie’s first print, an etching and aquatint drawn on copper plate, was
released. The image, entitled Interior
and Exterior (not included in the
NMAI show), is a memory of the artist’s childhood, lovingly recording
the particulars of settlement life in Kinngait in the 1970s. Her first solo exhibition at The Power Plant
Contemporary Art Gallery in Toronto in 2006, and winning that
same year the Sobey Art Award (which came with a prize of $50,000 Canadian, the
equivalent of about $48,000 U.S. today)—as well as her participation at
Documenta 12 (a quinquennial exhibit of contemporary art in Kassel, Germany)
and the Montreal Biennale in 2007, established her as the leading contemporary
Inuit graphic artist of the period. At
Documenta, Annie exhibited not as a native artist as her predecessors from
Kinngait had commonly been classified, but as a modern artist.
After the sudden acclaim, Annie moved from Kinngait to
Ottawa in 2007, but the spotlight that had been turned on her wasn’t a positive
development for her artistically or personally.
She created little new art in the years following the move (there are no
pieces of Annie’s work after the early 2000s in Akunnittinni) and
began living on the streets and along the banks of the city’s Rideau River,
falling into drug abuse and addiction. In
2010, she started a relationship with William Watt, who became her common-law
husband; they had a daughter in 2012.
(Annie had two older sons, now adults, who were adopted by
relatives. Her daughter, named after her
mother, Napachie, was eventually also adopted.) Around that year, she began drawing again,
making one sketch a day which she sold for cigarette money, about $25 or $30
each; her Kinngait works were selling for $1,600 to $2,600 a piece at her
Toronto gallery.
Four years later, on 19 September 2016, 47-year-old Annie
Pootoogook’s body was found in the Rideau River in Ottawa. While her death hasn’t been ruled a homicide—the
cause of death was drowning, but the medical examiners couldn’t determine if
the renowned artist drowned herself or if she was drowned by someone else—the
Ottawa Police Service continues to investigate the death as suspicious.
Annie’s artwork, mostly drawings on paper with ink and
colored pencil, broke with conventional traditions of Inuit art. Her subjects were not arctic animals or serene
scenes of nomadic existence from a time before settlement life; rather, her
images reflected her experiences as a female artist growing up, living, and
working in contemporary Canada. Her art
depicted a community experiencing transition and conflict as the old ways of
her grandmother and mother clashed with modern Canada. (In this aspect, Annie was following in a path
blazed by one of Inuit art’s most illustrious old-timers, Pudlo, who made room
in his art for modern technology
alongside the traditional Inuit and arctic images. Pudlo, however, didn’t see 20th-century
phenomena as clashing with Inuit life; they’d become part of it.) Taking inspiration from her grandmother and
mother, nonetheless, and following their lead in the sulijuk tradition, Annie depicted the life of her community in
flux in bright, vivid colors in contrast to Pitseolak’s subdued palette.
Like her grandmother, Pitseolak, before her, however, Annie was
an instinctive chronicler of her times. She
filled her domestic interiors with details such as clocks and calendars,
graduation photos, and Inuktitut messages stuck to the fridge in modern Inuit
kitchens. Indeed, unlike much
conventional Inuit art, in which figures are usually isolated in ambiguous,
white backgrounds, Annie filled her pictures with fully-limned settings,
usually interiors, like little stage sets.
Her graphics record the incursions of the mainstream culture into Inuit
life, with images of technology like ATM machines, television, videogames,
mobile phones, and snow mobiles. The
death of her mother, Napachie, in 2002 led Annie to explore themes of mortality
and spirituality.
The theme of the inclusion of modern technology in everyday
Inuit life appears with a touch of humor in Watching the Simpsons on TV (pencil,
ink, and colored pencil on paper, 2003), a hyper-detailed scene of the interior
of a contemporary Inuit home with the young mother and father either dressing
to go out into the cold or doffing their outerwear after coming home, while
their small child, bundled up in his or her parka, is standing facing away from
us, staring at Marge and Homer Simpson on the television set right in front of
his face. In its simplicity and
directness, Annie’s drawing could be a one-panel cartoon: it tells a whole
story at a glance and makes a comment on a social phenomenon in a subtle and
amusing way.
2003–04’s Family Sleeping in a Tent (colored pencil
and ink on paper) works the same way: we see two couples snuggled in sleeping
bags on a pair of double mattresses in a huge tent. Around them are all the conveniences of a
modern campsite: camp stove, Coleman lantern, CB radio, a can of “camping
fuel,” a radio, and a clock. (With all
that equipment, you know they got to the campsite in a truck or an SUV!) As a bonus benefit, it’s interesting to
contrast this drawing with Pitseolak’s Family
Camping in Tuniq Ruins.
I wouldn’t be
surprised to learn that Annie drew Family Sleeping as a deliberate homage to her grandmother’s
Family Camping. The younger artist clearly felt a special
connection to Pitseolak since included in this exhibit are two prints which are
direct and specific references to the older artist: 2006’s Pitseolak’s Glasses (collagraph on paper), which simply presents
the late artist’s familiar black-framed glasses (Jason Farago described them as
“Nana Mouskouri-style eyeglasses” in the New
York Times—for anyone who knows who that is!), and Portrait of Pitseolak (collagraph and ink on paper, 2003-04),
portraying Annie’s grandmother standing alone before a blank, white background—a
reference, I suspect, to the convention of her grandmother’s and mother’s
practice—wearing not a traditional Inuit parka, but a dark gray, modern jacket,
buttoned all the way up, over a red skirt with green flowers, with a gray
polka-dot head scarf tied under her chin, carrying a brown wooden cane in her
right hand and a yellow, polka-dot bag in her
left. Pitseolak’s wearing the signature
glasses in the portrait. (A collagraph
is a form of monoprint created from a collage of textures that have been
glued onto a rigid surface.) Edward
Guarino, the Inuit art collector, calling the poignant and touching Glasses “a masterpiece,” characterized the
picture as “a contemporary still life that is also a moving symbolic portrait
of a beloved family member who has died.”
Of the affectionate Portrait,
Guarino wrote that it’s “at once a remembrance of a beloved family member as
well as the likeness of a celebrated artist and a portrait of old age.”
Akunnittinni: A Kinngait Family Portrait is a very small show, displayed along one
wall of the corridor outside the Heye’s permanent exhibit gallery. There are only 18 prints and drawings, six
from each of the artists. Each one,
however, is exquisite, providing a
glimpse of the later work of the three women that, at least according to the IAIA’s
Hanley, exemplified each one’s style and main themes. The works of Pitseolak Ashoona and Napachie
and Annie Pootoogook are also remarkable because each print or drawing tells a little tale; you
can’t describe most of them, as I imagine you’ve noticed, without recounting
the story behind the image. (Napachie, of course, actually inscribed her works
with the story she’s illustrating.) However
small the selection of works, though, the “discourse and dialog” among the
three artists, as Hanley terms it, is nonetheless powerful. Furthermore, spanning nearly 40 years, the
pieces on display at the Heye Center also chronicle how the family’s life and
the world of Kinngait have changed over time.
(The three artists’ lives actually covered well over a century of Inuit
history.)
On the website Hyperallergic,
Christopher Green wrote that the exhibit “moves past the belabored topics of
market making and the in/authentic modernity of Cape Dorset printmaking to
pursue matrilineal discourses internal to the community. The effect,” he continued, “is an inward-looking
familial history, rather than one . . . that focuses on the needs and desires
of southerners.” Pitseolak’s works,
asserted Green, demonstrated “the long line of generational knowledge that
reaches back to precolonial life,” while Napachie’s pictures represent a “foray
into particularly contemporary issues that were not necessarily present in
Ashoona’s work.” The art critic
declared, “It is the work of Annie Pootoogook that most strikingly demonstrates
the ways traditional Inuit family life has been integrated into the modern
North,” and insisted, “Her drawings alone are reason enough to see the
exhibition.”
Jennifer Levin wrote in the Santa Fe New Mexican, “The exhibition shows . . . a humorous eye
for detail and an impulse to tell stories about family life.” In Akunnittinni, which Levin covered
at MoCNA, it’s Napachie’s work that “stands out as the most shocking in its
reflection of Inuit life,” she observed, but Annie’s “vibrant work” displays
her “edgy insistence on present-day life in the Canadian Arctic.” The critic summed the show up by observing
that it “shows that, like family and cultural traditions, some artistic
concerns are passed down, mother to daughter to granddaughter, as each
generation turns to drawing for its own reasons.”
In the Inuit Art Quarterly, Michelle McGeough (also writing about the
Santa Fe exhibit) remarked:
The exhibition . . . gives each artist space in the intimate gallery to
present their unique individual visual depiction of Inuit history, positioning
a life lived on the land prior to settlement living alongside stories of the
contemporary realities of Northern life.
This arrangement gives the viewer the opportunity to appreciate the
individual artists’ articulation of northern life and oral traditions.
Of the works of
Pitseolak on exhibit, McGeough noted that “the artist’s prints brilliantly
demonstrate her mastery of line and composition and her ability to eloquently
render the movement of a body through space.”
Her daughter, Napachie’s “narrative imagery depicts a much harsher
reality for Inuit women. She does not
shy away from uncomfortable topics, and in doing so, challenges any idealized
notions one might have of northern life.”
They are “dramatic depictions of oral traditions and a collective history
marked by change.” McGeough continued: “In
contrast, Annie Pootoogook’s artistic sensibility is shaped by the sweeping
thrust of modernity in Canada’s North. Infused
with popular culture references, her depictions of contemporary life focus on
the personal and intimate.” The IAQ
critic added, “The viewer instinctively knows she shares a very personal
relationship with the subjects whom she depicts.”
In the New York Times, Jason Farago dubbed Akunnittinni “touching” and
remarked that while the three artists “each established quite distinct artistic
vocabularies,” nevertheless “beneath their divergent styles were common
concerns about the wages of modernization, as well as the role of art among
families and communities “ The Timesman
observed that Pitseolak’s pictures “depict seals, dogs, ballplayers and a
camping family as hard-edge figures afloat in fields of white,” while her
daughter, Napachie’s, “engaged with social concerns in their community,
including alcoholism and the abuse of women.” Annie Pootoogook “took that present-tense
orientation even further,” continued Farago, “completing raw but often humorous
drawings of contemporary life in Cape Dorset.”
[I recommend that anyone even remotely interested in the art and artifacts
of the American Indian, much of which is breathtakingly beautiful and all of
which is eye-opening, pay a visit to the
Heye Center, a little-known gem of New
York City culture at the southern tip of Manhattan. Like all Smithsonian facilities, it’s
free and open every day (including Mondays, the traditional dark day for
museums, and holidays except Christmas Day) from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. (until 8
p.m. on Thursdays). The address of the Heye Center is 1 Bowling
Green (on Whitehall Street, an extension of Broadway, at Stone Street) and
its phone number is (212) 514-3700; the website is at http://nmai.si.edu/visit/newyork/.]
