Contemporary Inuit Art
by Robert Kardosh

Contemporary works by artists of Inuit ancestry first began appearing for sale in southern Canadian art galleries in the 1950s and 60s. This was a time of major transition and uncertainty for Canada’s Inuit population. Not only were diseases like tuberculosis spreading across the North and forcing many Inuit to sanatoriums in the South, but changes in the migratory paths of northern caribou herds were also resulting in frequent severe game shortages, producing tremendous hardship for those living in the affected areas. However, it was the post-war collapse of the international market for white fox furs that had the most widespread effect on the Inuit, the majority of whom had become at least partially dependent on trapping for their livelihood. Unable to return to their former life of subsistence hunting and semi-nomadic wandering, at the beginning of the second half of the 20th century the Inuit people were facing a future that was far from certain.

It was during this critical period that Canadian government administrators and others began to see art making as a possible alternative source of income for northerners. Inuit carvers had been making art since prehistoric times, and works made explicitly for trade became common with the arrival in the North of whalers, traders, missionaries and other whites in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. But without an infrastructure linking northern producers to fine art markets in the South, artistic production could never be more than a marginal economic activity for the Inuit. The 1950s and 60s saw the establishment of exactly such a government-sponsored infrastructure, culminating in the formation of a network of Inuit co-operatives with links to art marketing agencies in the South. As more and more Inuit left their seasonal camps to become year-round residents of a number of newly formed communities, many talented men and women took up the new occupation of art making with enthusiasm and pride. Selling sculptures and other works to their local co-ops, these artists soon began attracting national and international attention.

From a purely economic point of view, the result of the initiatives undertaken during these first years can only be described as an outstanding success. Even today, at a time when fewer and fewer young people are showing an interest in an artistic career and many of the original artists of the 1950s, 60s and 70s have passed from the scene, art production remains the single biggest income earner among the Inuit. While sculptures in stone, bone and other locally available materials have outnumbered works in other media, forms of two-dimensional art have also played an important role in the development of northern art, parcticularly in those communities where print studios were established (in the 1960s and 70s). While some of these operations have since closed down, Cape Dorset on Baffin Island continues to produce annual collections of limited edition stonecuts, lithographs, stencils and engravings, providing employment and income for artists and printers alike. Drawings, originally considered primarily as a source of imagery for the print programs, have become another important and exportable form in their own right, as have appliquéd wallhangings, a specialty of women artists from Baker Lake.

Yet the success of contemporary northern art has been more than simply economic. From the point of view of the artists and the Inuit people more generally, art making has functioned as a vital means of cultural affirmation, serving to preserve in sculptural and two-dimensional images the spiritual and material traditions of the past. In the case of some artists, it has also served as a means of commenting, sometimes critically, on the conditions of the present. By contrast, for many southern art collectors and connoisseurs, the high aesthetic quality and expressive power of much of the work has constituted the art's greatest success, combined with its interesting and unique cultural content. The successful development of a market for Inuit art has also permitted a large number of women artists to achieve a notable degree of independence, the implications of which are not only economic but also cultural, social and personal.

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