Kananginak Pootoogook: Memorial Exhibition

In an artistic career that lasted more than five decades, Pootoogook produced a body of work of lasting cultural and aesthetic significance. Born in 1935 in a small hunting camp on southern Baffin Island near Cape Dorset, he was raised to be a hunter and trapper like his father. In 1957, he began collaborating with James Houston, an artist from southern Canada hired by the federal government to establish the North’s first printmaking studio. Working first as a printmaker responsible for translating drawings by the community’s older artists into limited edition stonecut prints, Pootoogook soon developed his own drawing style. Alongside the print shop’s national and international success, Pootoogook’s own artistic career blossomed. He became known especially for his careful studies of birds and other northern wildlife. Later, he began making a visual record of Inuit culture in transition, documenting many of the changes he had witnessed throughout his lifetime. Pootoogook continued to draw until the spring of 2010, when illness forced him to seek treatment in an Ottawa hospital.

The exhibition will feature a number of Pootoogook’s distinctive wildlife portraits, including several of caribou, a subject for which he was especially known. In these iconic images, Pootoogook represents the animal’s seasonal habits, using unconventional perspectives to show these majestic creatures from a variety of startling angles. Other drawings portray birds that frequent the arctic, including families of snowy owls and colonies of murres (sea birds that resemble penguins). In a few works, Pootoogook has used bird forms as a starting point for more purely abstract compositions.