A new book on Annie Pootoogook, Cutting Ice, is due out February 20. Its release coincides with the closure of the late artist’s solo exhibition of the same name at the McMichael Canadian Art Collection. The book was edited by exhibition curator Nancy Campbell, who first encountered Pootoogook’s work at Toronto’s Feheley Fine Arts gallery in 2003 and proposed a solo exhibition to the Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery. That Power Plant show came to fruition in 2006, the same year Pootoogook won the Sobey Art Award. On the advice of some Cape Dorset elders, Campbell interviewed Pootoogook’s siblings and people in her community for the book, and there are images from fellow Cape Dorset artists as well, with all texts published in both English and Inuktitut. Alongside 62 full-colour drawings, stretching from Pootoogook’s earliest works to some of her last drawings, the book also contains a critical essay exploring Pootoogook’s influence on other Inuit artists. (CBC)
Concordia’s first Indigenous curriculum and pedagogy advisor aims to integrate Indigenous topics throughout all the university’s programs. With various faculties and departments, professor Donna Kahérakwas Goodleaf will facilitate anti-colonial training and will devise ways for courses to implement the recommendations of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. She aims to consult with Indigenous students about their needs, and she hopes that more Indigenous people will be hired throughout the university to reflect the needs of the community in Indigenous programs. “I don’t want to be seen as this window dressing,” she said. “I think this should be the very beginning of it.” (The Link)
The Aboriginal Curatorial Collective has announced the formation of the 2018 advisory committee for its Tiohtià:ke Project. The committee includes project mentor Hannah Claus and four members: Adrienne Huard, Lori Beavis, Nadine Saint-Louis and Skawennati. Together they will consult during the year to facilitate the ACC-CCA initiative the Tiohtià:ke Project, promoting contemporary Indigenous art within and outside the province of Quebec. The project uses Montreal/Tiohtià:ke as the central gathering place, in this way revisiting the territory’s ancestral role for Indigenous peoples. (press release)
It’s official: the Inuit Art Centre has announced its first all-Inuit, all-woman team of curators. Spearheaded by Heather Igloliorte, the inaugural exhibitions of the IAC will be “forward-looking, inclusive, collaborative and dynamic,” Igloliorte said at an announcement in Winnipeg. The team will include Jade Nasogaluak Carpenter, a Yellowknife-born, Calgary-based artist and curator; Asinnajaq, an Inukjuak, Nunavik-born, Montreal-based filmmaker, curator and writer; and Krista Ulujuk Zawadski, the Chesterfield Inlet–raised, Rankin Inlet–based curator of Inuit art for Nunavut’s Department of Culture and Heritage. The dedicated $65-million centre, a project of the Winnipeg Art Gallery, will house the largest public collection of Inuit art in the world, and is set to open in 2020. (Winnipeg Free Press)
Inuk artist Veronica Puskas has won an award for excellence. The award for a first-time exhibitor came at Quilt Canada’s national juried show in St. Catharines. Puskas’s winning quilt, selected out of 80 in that category, is based on a photograph of her mother and grandmother at the Meliadine River near Rankin Inlet in 1950. A jurist remarked on Puskas’s rare ability to render people in the quilt medium. (CBC)
