It began with an art studio so small and ill-equipped that printmakers opened windows to the Arctic winter to ventilate toxic chemicals.
Now, it’s an internationally known wellspring of imagery and imagination that graces the walls and tabletops of Canadians and art-lovers around the world — as well as a business that offers Inuit everything from public housing to small engine repair.
“We’re kept pretty busy,” said Pauloosie Kowmageak, president of the West Baffin Cooperative, Canada’s oldest Indigenous-owned arts organization, celebrating its 65th anniversary this year. It’s known in its home community of Kinngait, Nvt., simply as “the co-op,” but it’s better known as the first of the printmaking studios that brought Inuit vision to the world and gave Canada some of its most iconic art.
Art from Kinngait, formerly Cape Dorset, has appeared on postage stamps such as “The Enchanted Owl” by Kenojuak Ashevak, among others. It has been presented to ambassadors and represented Canada at major global art fairs such as the Venice Biennale.
“It’s been an important part of Canadian culture,” said Darlene Wight, curator of Inuit art at the Winnipeg Art Gallery, owner of the world’s largest collection of such work.
The co-op began in 1959, an outgrowth of efforts to improve the production, quality and marketing of the art Inuit had been making for centuries. Studios such as West Baffin gave Inuk creators a chance to move from carving to the more lucrative field of printmaking.
Those were rough-and-ready days, recalls printmaker Niveaksie Quvianaqtuliaq, who has worked at the studio for 34 years.
“We didn’t have any proper equipment,” he said. “When we used harsh chemicals, our vent was so weak we had to open windows and doors. In January, by the time all the chemicals were out, you could see your breath.”
Not so anymore.
The studio — now, it claims, the longest-running print shop in Canada — is equipped with the latest stonecut, etching, stencil and lithography equipment, as well as a drawing studio. It has a gallery, a restaurant and a retail area in the 1,000-square-metre Kenojuak Cultural Centre.
More than 100 people work there, making it the largest employer in town, said Kowmageak.
“Economically, we help out in the community.”
The artists and the printmakers who translate their designs onto paper are almost all local. Many are second or third generation.
“We’re happy that it continues within families,” Kowmageak said. “We’re trying to push it out to the school system as well to keep it going.”
Art from West Baffin has changed over the generations, Wight said.
Imagery rooted in traditional activities on the land, ancient myths and the lives of animals is shifting to include elements of modern Inuit life. It’s also grown more technically sophisticated, gradually moving from simple silhouettes to incorporate colour and perspective.
“It’s becoming more and more diverse,” said Wight.
“The subject matter is definitely changing from the more on-the-land life that their parents lived to a more urban outlook. That’s what all the younger people are doing — they’re not doing hunting scenes.”
Over the course of the co-op’s life, the art has also achieved international recognition.
In 1999, then-French president Jacques Chirac made a detour to Kinngait to meet artists and make purchases. Wight has curated shows of Inuit art in the European principality of Monaco — attended by Prince Rainier— as well as the Italian city of Verona.
“The Italians think they have the market cornered on art, but it was really fun to see them exploring carvings and prints and drawings and textiles,” Wight said.
Wight is currently preparing a show of Kinngait artist Shuvinai Ashoona for London, England. Shows celebrating the co-op’s anniversary are currently scheduled in Miami and Fredericton.
West Baffin has become a conduit between life on a remote Arctic island and the rest of the world. International visitors are common — most recently, a delegation from South Korea.
Quvianaqtuliaq has studied at the Nova Scotia Academy of Art and Design and worked with printmakers in Albuquerque, N.M.
“We’re around the world now,” he said.
“I look back and look around and I can’t believe I’m here, working with all the artists. I love my job.”
LONDON (AP) — With a few daubs of a paintbrush, the Brontë sisters have got their dots back.
More than eight decades after it was installed, a memorial to the three 19th-century sibling novelists in London’s Westminster Abbey was amended Thursday to restore the diaereses – the two dots over the e in their surname.
The dots — which indicate that the name is pronounced “brontay” rather than “bront” — were omitted when the stone tablet commemorating Charlotte, Emily and Anne was erected in the abbey’s Poets’ Corner in October 1939, just after the outbreak of World War II.
They were restored after Brontë historian Sharon Wright, editor of the Brontë Society Gazette, raised the issue with Dean of Westminster David Hoyle. The abbey asked its stonemason to tap in the dots and its conservator to paint them.
“There’s no paper record for anyone complaining about this or mentioning this, so I just wanted to put it right, really,” Wright said. “These three Yorkshire women deserve their place here, but they also deserve to have their name spelled correctly.”
It’s believed the writers’ Irish father Patrick changed the spelling of his surname from Brunty or Prunty when he went to university in England.
Raised on the wild Yorkshire moors, all three sisters died before they were 40, leaving enduring novels including Charlotte’s “Jane Eyre,” Emily’s “Wuthering Heights” and Anne’s “The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.”
Rebecca Yorke, director of the Brontë Society, welcomed the restoration.
“As the Brontës and their work are loved and respected all over the world, it’s entirely appropriate that their name is spelled correctly on their memorial,” she said.
