D ELI GHT S | THE ART WORLD
Art from Kinngait on display
A Peter Simpson
Editor’s note: Due to unpredictable publichealth restrictions, please contact galleries in advance to check whether exhibition dates have changed.
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nnie Pootoogook was an unassuming figure on the streets of Ottawa — quiet, small and without pretence — yet the mark she left on Canadian art is indelible. I didn’t know Pootoogook, but she was beloved by those who did know her. She was born in 1969 in Kinngait (at that time called Cape Dorset) on Baffin Island, into a brilliantly talented artistic family. Eventually she became an artist as well, and would develop a body of drawings that dispensed with familiar imagery of northern life — or, at least, the type of northern imagery that was familiar to potential art buyers in the south of Canada — and fo-
cused on the domestic hardships that Inuk women face in their own homes and communities. She had, wrote Nancy Campbell for the Art Canada Institute (aci-iac.ca), “a keen eye for detail and fearlessness in representing daily life — the celebratory, the frightening and the mundane.” From her remote beginnings, Pootoogook became the first Inuk artist to win a $50,000 Sobey Art Award, with an exhibition of her work at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. Later, her work was exhibited at the National Museum for the American Indian in New York City, and today it’s seen in the National Gallery of Canada, the Art Gallery of Canada and elsewhere, WINTER-SPRING 2022 | JAN-JUNE
CITY OF OTTAWA
Having Some Tea, by Annie Pootoogook, one of the works by the late artist that can now be seen in locations in central Ottawa.
