Excerpt from
Worlds on Paper: Drawings from Kinngait

I imagine what 90,000 drawings would look like, laid out end to end, disappearing around corners or over the horizon. At a rough average of about fifty centimetres in width, the paper trail would stretch for about forty-five kilometres, enough paper to cross the full length of Dorset Island just over seven times. Now held in trust in the vaults at the McMichael Canadian Art Collection, more than 2,200 kilometres away from the hamlet in which they were created, the Kinngait Drawings Archive (from the town formerly known as Cape Dorset) is a testament to the enormous creative output of the artists featured here—but it also serves as an unparalleled cultural and social document spanning the period from as early as 1957 to 1990, when the archive was transferred to the care of the McMichael. While the gallery holds these works in trust, they remain the property of the West Baffin Eskimo Cooperative (WBEC). 

Artists make up a quarter of the adult population of Kinngait, and this likely gives the hamlet one of the highest concentrations of working artists in a single community anywhere on Earth. This democratization of artistic production from Canada’s most iconic studio not only has shaped the trajectory of the Inuit arts landscape as we know it today, but also has made possible the careers of legendary figures in art who have produced some of the most instantly recognizable imagery to ever come out of the North—Kenojuak’s Enchanted Owl being perhaps the most famous. This has led to now more than six decades of continued Inuit presence on both the national and international art market, as well as in the popular imagination. But of these more than 90,000 drawings, only around 2,500 were ever translated into prints through the co-op printmaking program, the selections made over the years by the studio managers at the helm of the printmaking enterprise. What are the stories that are told in these works that never made it to market? What can we learn from the distinct first-hand accounts they offer of colonization, resettlement, and the explosion of artistic talent that has unfolded over these past generations?