Inuit are Indigenous peoples who traditionally lived in the Arctic areas of Canada, including Nunavut, Nunavik, Nunatsiavut, and the Inuvialuit Settlement Region. This research concerns the Inuit of Kinngait (Cape Dorset) and Kangiqliniq (Rankin Inlet), two major centers of Inuit artistic production in the modern era. Inuit art is firmly tied to their connections with the land, animals, seasons, and social relations, with histories that predate their encounter with European settlers by many centuries. Inuit have produced carvings, utilitarian objects, clothing, and small figurines of ivory, bone, and stone for centuries. These were more than art; they were also means of sharing knowledge, learning to survive, and practicing spirituality. These works of art by the Inuit revealed their understanding of the nonhuman world as animate, related, and connected.
The colonial encounter sparked a revolution of enormous change. Missionaries, traders, and colonial administrators reshaped social and economic systems, resulting in settlement, displacement, and the introduction of new cultural materials. By the mid-20th century, Inuit artists no longer lived wholly in tandem with the land, though paper, coloring pigments, fabric, and beads became more widely available to artists. It is also a period of the development of arts organizations like the Cape Dorset Print Cooperative, which provided artists with the means to gain global publicity. At the same time, however, Inuit art came with enormous continuity. Animals and the land were never absent from the artwork, nor were narrative, humor, memory, or spiritual associations.
Today, Inuit art flourishes with creativity in forms such as installation art, photography, performance art, conceptual art, drawings, sculpting, and even futurism. Artists such as Annie Pootoogook, Oviloo Tunnillie, Jesse Tungilik, among many others, engage with global concepts such as colonial violence, climate change, futurism, family, and reality, while still drawing on their own Inuit systems of understanding. Inuit artists challenge stereotypes through their artwork, insisting on their sovereignty.
This timeline explores the history of Inuit art across three periods: pre-contact art, the contact period, and contemporary Inuit art. Every piece of art is the living embodiment of a history that keeps developing while taking with it the history of the past. Examples of such artworks, drawn from texts used in the course, indicate that Inuit art is not static but is constantly dynamic, innovative, and linked to both the past and the future.
