Qaumajuq, an art centre showcasing the world’s largest collection of Inuit art, officially opened at the Winnipeg Art Gallery (WAG). The Inuit art centre adds another 40,000 square feet to the WAG, making it the fifth-largest art museum in Canada.
The exhibit is available to view for the public from March 27 to April 2. The exhibit features the work of nearly 90 Inuit artists from northern Canada, as well as a few living in the south.
The new institution’s name means “it is bright, it is lit” in Inuktitut. “The WAG has this extraordinary collection of Inuit art, close to 14,000 objects (and) another 8,000 on long-term loan,” Winnipeg Art Gallery director and CEO Stephen Borys said, also noting that the WAG has been collecting Inuit art for 70 years.
The four-storey facility, designed by the Los Angeles-based architect Michael Maltzan with the Winnipeg firm Cibinel Architecture, includes an 8,000 sq. ft exhibition space, a 90-seat theatre, a café and art studios. It also features a three-story glass vault that holds around 5,000 Inuit works. Visitors will be able to see conservators and curators working within the vault, which is visible from outside through a street-level glass facade.
More than ninety artists will present works, ranging from an eighty-year-old carving to a recent sealskin space suit, in Qaumajuq’s inaugural exhibition, titled “Inua” (Inuit Move Forward Together). The fledgling institution now houses WAG’s roughly 14,000-piece collection of contemporary Inuit art, the largest in the world, representing some 2,000 artists and dating as far back as the 1880s, many of which languished in storage for decades. Another 7,400 pieces are on long-term loan from the Government of Nunavut.
The lead curator of Inua, Inuk art historian Heather Igloliorte, and the WAG’s head of Indigenous initiatives, Julia Lafreniere, who is Métis, say the curatorial framework and programming of the museum will act as a rebuttal to the WAG’s past and challenge the anthropological presentation of Indigenous histories in museums. Organisers will continue to collaborate with a panel of Nunavut advisors to ensure that Indigenous voices are at the forefront from now on.