Annie Pootoogook | Making Love. 2003-2004
Annie Pootoogook depicted Inuit life as contemporary and complex, often tackling difficult subjects such as poverty, abuse and communal struggles. Pootoogook also depicted Inuit love and sex, a topic rarely discussed in conversations around Indigenous art. Pootoogook pulled no punches and her work opened up new conversations in the Indigenous art world and brought Inuit experiences to the foreground of contemporary art.
Jessie Oonark | TOP Untitled (Hunter with Seal). c. 1967; BOTTOM Untitled (A Man Plays with His Family). c. 1967
Oonark died in 1985, having received the Order of Canada the year before. Though she only began making her drawings and hangings at the age of 59, she quickly established herself as a trailblazer in the field of Inuit visual art, with her work shown in exhibitions at the Art Gallery of Ontario, the National Museum of Man (now the Canadian Museum of History), Av Isaacs’ Innuit Gallery of Eskimo Art in Toronto, ON, and, after her death, in a major 1986 retrospective at the Winnipeg Art Gallery (WAG). Oonark was also den mother—both literally and figuratively—to a whole generation of artists in her adopted hometown. (Eight of her children would become artists, and her work would lay the foundations for the discipline of artmaking in that remote community.)
For more on Jessie Oonark please read Inuit Art Quarterly’s incredible piece on her: http://iaq.inuitartfoundation.org/30-3-flashback-jessie-oonark/
