Forms of Exchange

Art of Native Peoples from the Edward J. Guarino Collection

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Shamanizing by Aoudla Pudlat

Aoudla Pudlat (b. 1951), Cape Dorset

Shammanizing 2, woodcut on paper, #15, 3/50, 2001 (Baker Lake Annual Print Collection)

"I will never forget when a bearded man called Saumik [James Houston] 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 [tent-house] 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."

Kenojuak Ashevak, Inuit

Inuit Sculpture, Drawings, and Prints

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The Inuit, a distinct group among the Eskimo people, live in the Eastern Canadian Arctic, one of the harshest environments on earth. Initially semi-nomadic hunters, they adopted fur trapping after contact with White traders. While a tuberculosis epidemic raged through the population, the fur trade collapsed by the time of World War II. The Inuit then moved from outlying camps into government-sponsored towns. Perceiving this economic and social disruption, several non-Native advisors and government agencies encouraged the Inuit to adopt art making as a means of gaining self-sufficiency. The Inuit welcomed this survival strategy, and in the late 1940s, they increased their production of sculpture for sale in the South (i.e., below the Arctic Circle). With the help of intermediaries, the Inuit quickly developed a burgeoning international market for their art, with themes and subjects that evoked their pre-contact way of life.

Traditionally, Inuit sculpture consisted of small, easily carried amulets carved of stone, ivory, or bone to ensure success in hunting. Although missionaries eventually converted most of the people to Christianity, the Inuit continue to make works that reflect their former beliefs in shamanistic practices, including animal/human transformations. As the art market for sculpture evolved, collectors eagerly began to acquire larger pieces that show Inuit people in traditional clothing performing the typical activities of camp life.

Canadian artist James Houston introduced printmaking to the residents of Cape Dorset in 1957; it then spread to other communities such as Baker Lake. Typically, the printmaking process is a communal one: artists make drawings at home and then submit them to the co-ops, whose members decide which are to be printed. Co-op printmakers adapt the drawings for a yearly edition of prints, employing a variety of techniques borrowed from Japanese and Western art including stonecut, stencil, woodcut, etching, and lithography. Initially, the drawings were just a means to an end, a potential model for a print, but in recent decades, Inuit drawings are now appreciated as self-sufficient works of art.

Inuit camp life and shamanistic beliefs are subjects that especially appeal to collectors. This art also preserves a vanished history for members of the Inuit communities, who no longer live in ice houses, travel in dog sleds or survive by hunting. But in recent decades, Kananginak Pootoogook, Napachie Pootoogook, and Suivinai Ashoona have begun to show the melding of traditional, isolated Arctic culture with transnational modernity. Works by these artists in the Guarino collection demonstrate not only the aesthetic brilliance but also the social relevance of contemporary Inuit art at the beginning of the twenty-first century.