Kinship Communities Exhibition: Behind the Scenes

This is the fourth and final post in a series of blog posts about the recent Kinship Communities exhibition curated for the University of Lethbridge Art Gallery’s Helen Christou Gallery. Each post provides additional background information on the communities represented in the exhibition and some of the artwork included.

Putting together this exhibition has been an exciting and eye-opening experience for me. As a first-time curator in the middle of a global pandemic, I was not sure what this experience would be like. When I was initially approached to curate the exhibition, I immediately jumped on the opportunity. In my previous museum and art gallery experience, I was always drawn to the collections side of things more so than the curatorial side, but I was excited to get the chance to explore curation – and I have loved every minute of it.

When I started at the Gallery as a Collections and Research Assistant, I was given the task of compiling biographies for all the female Inuit artists whose works were a part of the recent Dr. Margaret (Marmie) Perkins Hess bequest. These biographies would be made part of the database records for the artist and ultimately, helped shape my exhibition’s theme of kinship and community. In my research, I was regularly finding connections between artistic families and communities. This became the main focus of my exhibition.

Map of Canada, highlighting the locations of the communities featured in the exhibition and showing the comparative distance between them using the distance between Calgary and Lethbridge for scale.

I began looking at the individual artists from Arctic communities more broadly in the Collection. The ULAG’s collection of Inuit works covers artists from Kinngait (Cape Dorset) and Qamani’tuaq (Baker Lake) in Nunavut to Inukjuak (Port Harrison) in northern Quebec and Ulukhaktok (Holman) in the Northwest Territories, as well as various other settlements throughout the Arctic. I grouped artists based on where they were located when they created their art and selected those that I felt fit my theme and that I was drawn to. I then narrowed down my list based on gallery space and selected five works each from Kinngait and Qamani’tuaq, and grouped together three works from Pangnirtung, NU and two works from Ulukhaktok, NWT; one group of five works for each of the walls of the gallery space.

Exhibition installation in progress, view of the two side walls in the Helen Christou Gallery.

In many cases, the artists and their works were connected to other artists from their communities that I had also chosen for the exhibition without me realizing – a printmaker who worked with two artists created a link between them, an artist who helped mentor another artist’s niece became like a member of their family, brother printed for sister, wife printed for husband – these are just some of the ways the artistic communities produced a web of connectivity within this exhibition. The subject matters of the prints often also worked within the theme of kinship, images of community activities, family dynamics, and also interactions with animals and the natural world. Kinship is not solely restricted to human-human interactions, particularly for the Inuit, and I wanted to represent that in the prints I selected for the exhibition.

View of my closet doors with cue cards of each of the female Inuit artists from the Dr. Margaret "Marmie" Perkins Hess collection organized by family. This was one of the ways I visualized the communities and the connections between artists within a given location.

All this is not to say that I did not have a few challenges along the way. My academic background is in History and I am no stranger to the impacts of settler colonialism, particularly in the Canadian context. I struggled with how to present these prints in a respectful way, especially given my own background as a settler Canadian curator, and the colonial natureof Inuit resettlements in the 1950s by the federal government and the Department of Northern Affairs and National Resources. The implementation of these centralized communities frequently coincided with the development of the local arts co-operatives. The governmental motivation for having the Inuit create art was economic; the ultimate goal was to create financial self-sufficiency within Inuit settlements by making something that could be sold to the South. In Randy Turner’s article “Northern Stars: Inuit Carvings, Jewelry and Wall-Hangings Are Not Just Pieces of Art; They're Stories – Some Thousands of Years Old – Spoken By Hands,” he describes the situation, and the government’s solution:

Thousands of displaced Inuit now living in settlements with virtually no available full-time employment or means of financial support. So much time on their hands. And that was the answer, perhaps. Their hands.

Encouraged by Arts & Crafts Officers, the Inuit used the skills they had already known for creating and sewing clothing, making utility tools, and recognizing the animals and natural world around them, and created drawings, tapestries, sculptures, prints, and more.

With all of this in mind, it was difficult for me to find a way to showcase the prints as the colourful, skillful, and wonderful works that they are, while still acknowledging the history that is a part of them. It was important for me to recognize the colonial impacts on the Inuit ways of life without losing focus of the art itself and the skill of the artists. While I was researching some of the artists, I came across the Cape Dorset Print Catalogues, which was how the prints were marketed and sold to the buyers in the south. I was struck by one such catalogue’s foreword, written by Kinngait artist Kenojuak Ashevak, who, although not included in this exhibition, is perhaps one of the most widely recognized Inuit artists. I would like to share a passage from her foreword that really resonated with me while I was trying to figure out how to respectfully work with these prints:

"I will never forget when a bearded man called Saumik [the name given to James

Houston, meaning “the left-handed one”] approached me to draw on a piece of paper. My heart started to pound like a heavy rock. I took the papers to my Qamak and started marking on the paper with assistance from my love, Johnniebo. When I first started to make a few lines he smiled at me and said “Inumn”, which means “I love you”. I just knew inside his heart that he almost cried knowing that I was trying my best to say something on a piece of paper that would bring food to the family. I guess I was thinking of the animals and beautiful flowers that covered our beautiful, untouched land." (excerpt from 1993 Cape Dorset Print Catalogue, Kenojuak Ashevak)

There is a sense of bittersweetness to the excerpt, particularly coupled with the knowledge that at the time Ashevak was writing this foreword in 1993, she had been making art for over thirty years and was reflecting on that time. Despite her fears, Ashevak recognized that in this changing world, she would need to draw and create for her family to survive, particularly after the death of Johnniebo in 1972. This experience with creating art is not unique to Ashevak and, to me, shows a deeply personal connection with the works that came out of the co-operatives across the Arctic, particularly in this early time period.

The colonial history of how Inuit prints, including those of this exhibition, came into existence is important to recognize, however, the artists – the people – and the art they created is incredibly significant, and that is worth recognizing as well. I suppose that is where I have landed on how to talk about and exhibit these works in a way that, I hope, has been respectful and thoughtful. I think this aspect is so important to me because it comes back to the theme of kinship; I felt a kinship with the artists, through their art and without ever meeting them. And I think that, ultimately, is what I tried to, and hopefully succeeded in, accomplishing with this exhibition.

I hope this series of blog posts has helped explain my curatorial choices and process, and would like to leave off with some portraits of the people who started it all, the artists featured throughout this exhibition.

Ryley Gelinas

Collections and Research Assistant