ᑕᑯᒃᓴᐅᔪᒻᒪᕆᒃ Double Vision & Sleeping in Skins

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Located in downtown Toronto, we are the only museum in Canada dedicated to exploring the human experience through textiles.

On view now at the Textile Museum of Canada is ᑕᑯᒃᓴᐅᔪᒻᒪᕆᒃ

Textile Museum of Canada, TorontoMarch 9, 2022-March 31, 2023

The work of three Nunavut artists — a Baker Lake mother and her two daughters — will be the basis for a Textile Museum of Canada and Toronto Biennial of Art exhibition titled Double Vision.

Inspired by the multilayered histories of the city’s waterways, the biennial’s curatorial team has amassed an exciting array of contemporary Canadian and international artists, with a focus on Indigenous artists.

Interview by Adi Berardini The focus and mandate of The Toronto Biennial of Art is to “make contemporary art accessible to everyone.” From March 26 to June 5th, local, national…

Jessie (Una) Oonark, OC, RCA, was born near Back River, Nunavut. Oonark lived the first fifty years of her life in camps throughout the region before settling in Qamani'tuaq (Baker Lake), NU with her

The beginnings of the Baker Lake Sanavik Co-operative.

Katilvik: a place to discover, learn and research unique works of Inuit Art and Indigenous Art

Years after her death, 27 of Jessie Oonark’s pristine drawings were discovered in a manila envelope in a basement. Athough already a celebrated artist, these lost drawings confirmed Oonark’s vitality and confidence as an artist.

Jessie Oonark grew up north of Baker Lake, surviving extreme hardship, starvation, and the death of four of her thirteen children. Her father and grandfather were shamans, and within this belief, it was forbidden to draw and create likenesses as this might attract the spirit world. From the beginning, predating her move to Baker Lake, […]

Janet Kigusiuq was a multidisciplinary artist born in the Back River region, NU. She began her artistic practice In the mid 1960s in Qamani’tuaq (Baker Lake), NU. Kigusiuq experimented with many diffe

Janet Kigusiuq’s practice explores the relationship between representation and abstraction. Like her mother, Jessie Oonark, Janet was born in the Back River area some 200 kilometres north of Qamani’tuaq. She lived through the starvation period of the 1950s before their relocation to Qamani’tuaq and was married at the age of eleven, likely as a means […]

Victoria Mamnguqsualuk was a renowned artist based in Qamani'tuaq (Baker Lake), NU, and is one of the best-known artists of her generation. Mamnguqsualuk was a gifted storyteller, who created narrativ

Over the course of her career, Victoria Mamnguqsualuk often returned to the same character, Kiviuq (alternatively spelled Qiviuq, Keeveok, or Kivioq, and, in Greenland, Qooqa) in her work. A migrant, Kiviuq travels through different lands as well as through different times and cultures. He is one of the oldest figures in Inuit oral tradition, and […]

With a body of work that con­tin­ues to speak to con­tem­po­rary is­sues of dis­place­ment, scarcity and com­mu­nity, this Fea­ture ex­plores the breadth of Mam­n­guq­su­aluk’s de­pic­tions of the leg­endary Inuit wan­derer Kiviuq as well as scenes of hor­rific and...

What records have been stitched into the wool duffel of Baker Lake?

Inuit women in Qamani’tuaq (Baker Lake) created a new art: nivingajuliat (wall hangings) which are an important reservoir of Inuit culture.

Felt has played a key role in the practices of a number of contemporary artists, from Robert Morris to Rosemarie Trockel. But for indigenous populations in cold climates around the…

Canadian Inuit are an Indigenous people living in 53 communities spread across the Canadian Arctic - or what we call Inuit Nunangat.

For 5,000 years, the people and culture known throughout the world as “Inuit” have occupied the vast territory stretching from the shores of the Chukotka Peninsula of Russia, east across Alaska and Canada, to the southeastern coast of Greenland. It is here, based on our ability to use the physical environment and living resources of this geographic region known as the Arctic, where our culture developed and our history unfolded. Inuit are an original people of much of the land now known as Canada, and our history represents an important and fascinating story. It is not just a story about an early chapter of Canadian history.

This book is a collection of contributions by well-known and respected Inuit Elders.

Roxane Shaughnessy, Textile Museum of Canada, rshaughnessy@textilemuseum.ca Anna Richard, Textile Museum of Canada, arichard@textilemuseum.ca

When I travelled to Europe with Inuit crafters, I quickly learned the importance of a unique tool I had never seen before, the ulu,