Sources & Resources

Shuvinai Ashoona is one of the first Inuit artists to exhibit as a contemporary artist, both in Canada and internationally. She has also collaborated with a number of other contemporary Canadian artists, producing joint works and exhibitions. Her work has been subject to critical discussions in books, articles, and exhibition catalogues, and a documentary film features her work.

Key Exhibitions

Shuvinai Ashoona’s drawings and prints have been included in national and international contemporary art exhibitions, solidifying her reputation as a contemporary artist and breaking barriers that have ghettoized Inuit artists in the past.

Solo Exhibitions

Group Exhibitions

Primary Sources

Shuvinai Ashoona has been a regular contributor to the annual release of Cape Dorset prints, which is accompanied by an illustrated catalogue. She was a contributor to the 1997, 2000, 2003, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2014, and 2015 collections. The first drawings by Shuvinai Ashoona that came through Dorset Fine Arts date to 1993. Dorset Fine Arts is the marketing division for Kinngait Studios at the West Baffin Eskimo Co-operative.

Critical Texts

Blodgett, Jean, ed. Three Women, Three Generations: Drawings by Pitseolak Ashoona, Napatchie Pootoogook and Shuvinai Ashoona. Kleinburg, ON: McMichael Canadian Art Collection, 1999. Exhibition catalogue.

Borderviews: “Hilarious Horror.” Border Crossings 136 (December 2015), http://bordercrossingsmag.com/article/hilarious-horror.

Boyd Ryan, Leslie, ed. Cape Dorset Prints: A Retrospective; Fifty Years of Printmaking at the Kinngait Studios. San Francisco: Pomegranate Communications, 2007.

Campbell, Nancy. Noise Ghost and Other Stories. Toronto: Justina M. Barnicke Gallery, University of Toronto, 2016. Exhibition catalogue.

De Zegher, Catherine, and Gerald McMaster, eds. All Our Relations: 18th Biennale of Sydney. Sydney: Biennale of Sydney Limited, 2012.

Dyck, Sandra. Shuvinai Ashoona: Drawings. Ottawa: Carleton University Art Gallery, 2012. Exhibition catalogue.

Hill, Greg, Candice Hopkins, and Christine Lalonde. Sakahàn: International Indigenous Art. Ottawa: National Gallery of Canada, 2013. Exhibition catalogue.

Kardosh, Robert. “The New Generation: A Radical Defiance.” Inuit Art Quarterly 23, no. 4 (winter 2008): 20–30.

Karlinsky, Amy. Portfolio: “Land of the Midnight Sons and Daughters: Contemporary Inuit Drawings: Shuvinai Ashoona, Kavavaow Mannomee, Nick Sikkuark.” Border Crossings 105 (February 2008).

McMaster, Gerald, ed. Inuit Modern: The Samuel and Esther Sarick Collection. Toronto: Art Gallery of Ontario, 2011.

Sinclair, James. “Breaking New Ground: The Graphic Work of Shuvinai Ashoona, Janet Kigusiuq, Victoria Mamnguqsualuk, and Annie Pootoogook.” Inuit Art Quarterly 19, nos. 3 and 4 (fall/winter 2004): 58–61.

Wight, Darlene Coward, ed. Creation and Transformation: Defining Moments in Inuit Art. Winnipeg: Winnipeg Art Gallery; Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 2012.

Further Reading

Until the early 1990s most scholarship on Inuit art focused on sculpture and prints. The rise of the drawing culture in the North, centred in the community of Kinngait (Cape Dorset), has not been explored in depth. Ingo Hessel’s Inuit Art: An Introduction (1998) provides an intelligent overview of Inuit art and a straightforward examination of the developments in different communities since the late 1940s but makes little mention of drawing. Leslie Boyd Ryan’s Cape Dorset Prints: A Retrospective; Fifty Years of Printmaking at the Kinngait Studios (2007) traces the development of print production in Kinngait Studios. Inuit Art Quarterly (IAQ), a journal produced by the Inuit Art Foundation since 1985, publishes new scholarship in the field and provides a timeline of trends in Inuit art practice, often featuring articles on the artists of Cape Dorset.

Many university presses, most notably McGill-Queen’s University Press and the University of Manitoba Press, publish on a wide range of artistic practice in the North. Exhibition catalogues on other significant graphic artists from the Kinngait community have been published, including catalogues on Annie Pootoogook, Napachie Pootoogook, Pitseolak Ashoona, Pitaloosie Saila, Kananginak Pootoogook, Parr, and Pudlo Pudlat; these focus on their drawings in isolation from other artistic production, both in Kinngait and beyond.

Auger, Emily E. The Way of Inuit Art: Aesthetics and History in and Beyond the Arctic. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2005.

Cotter, Holland. “Asking Serious Questions in a Very Quiet Voice.” New York Times, June 22, 2007.

Crandall, Richard C. Inuit Art: A History. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2000.

Graburn, Nelson H.H. Ethnic and Tourist Arts: Cultural Expressions from the Fourth World. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976.

Hessel, Ingo. Inuit Art: An Introduction. Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 1998.

Lee, Pamela M. “Boundary Issues: The Art World under the Sign of Globalism.” Artforum International 42, no. 3 (November 2003).

Maire, Aurélie. “Dessiner, c’est parler : Pratiques figuratives, représentations symboliques et enjeux socio-culturels des arts graphiques inuit au Nunavut (Arctique canadien).” PhD diss., Université Laval and Institut national des langues et civilisations orientales, 2015.

Mitchell, Marybelle. From Talking Chiefs to a Native Corporate Elite: The Birth of Class and Nationalism Among Canadian Inuit. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1996.

Nasby, Judith, and Marion E. Jackson. Contemporary Inuit Drawings. Guelph, ON: Macdonald Stewart Art Centre, 1987. Exhibition catalogue.

Stern, Pamela, and Lisa Stevenson, eds. Critical Inuit Studies: An Anthology of Contemporary Arctic Ethnography. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2006.

Interviews and Film

Balzer, David. “Shuvinai Ashoona: ‘I Don’t Think from Newspaper.’” The Believer (November/December 2011). This interview by Canadian Art magazine editor David Balzer incorporates the artist’s voice in an insightful and expansive manner, offering rare insights into the thought process of this remarkable artist. Here is an excerpt.

Ghost Noise. Directed and produced by Marcia Connolly. Siteline Media, 2010. English and Inuktitut with English subtitles. Colour / black and white. HDcam, 23 min. https://www.idfa.nl/industry/tags/
project.aspx?id=38f02b44-b13b-43bc-a3cf-01388a8a065c. Marcia Connolly’s film explores the sources of Shuvinai Ashoona’s drawings, with their images of everyday life in the Canadian Arctic infused with mythic symbolism. Connolly offers insights into what it is like to work in a remote community and at a co-operative like Kinngait Studios. We discover what it means to Shuvinai to be an artist and how the source of her art in traditional Inuit culture is shot through with Western modernity. “I want to speak in Inuktitut,” says the artist, “but I always slip into English. Changing directions, that’s how I am.”

The etymologist Bill Casselman writes: “A Noise Ghost is an Inuit poltergeist, an arctic auditory phenomenon of incorporeal guile. This unseen, unbodied noise ghost may announce his haunting visitation by curling around a northern house on a cold quiet night and emitting a small, high-pitched hissing.”