Inuit artist Surusilutu Ashoona is honoured posthumously in a solo show for the first time | Canada Voices

In a small second-floor space at the Art Gallery of Ontario, staff have organized an exhibition of works by Surusilutu Ashoona. It’s the first time the Inuit artist, who died in 2011, has ever been featured in a solo show.

Mother of the current Inuit art star Shuvinai Ashoona and part of a clan that has produced at least 12 artists with that surname, Surusilutu was a regular contributor to the annual print releases from the co-op in Kinngait, Nunavut (formerly Cape Dorset). Encouraged to draw by her mother-in-law Pitseolak Ashoona, her drawings were selected to be made into coloured lithographs annually from the early 1960s until 1980. The AGO’s permanent collection has many of them, donated by collectors who would have bought the whole Cape Dorset portfolio year after year.

AGO curator Georgiana Uhlyarik has pulled about a dozen out of storage for a very specific reason: Surusilutu was identified by Toronto artist Joyce Wieland as her favourite Inuit artist, and the AGO is currently hosting a major Wieland retrospective. For Uhlyarik, showing Surusilutu’s art is a way of addressing Wieland’s approach to the North while recognizing a neglected artist.

“She really was focused on women’s lives and women’s games and all these things would have really appealed to Wieland,” Uhlyarik said, noting that Surusilutu was commissioned to do a series on Inuit games for the 1976 Montreal Olympics. The best-known of these images shows a woman tossed in the air from a whale-skin trampoline. Other works from the annual print releases depict human-animal metamorphosis or animals comically trying on human clothes. The amauti, a woman’s long-tailed or skirted parka with a pouch in the hood for a baby, is precisely illustrated in several.

The print releases of the 1960s and 1970s that included these images grouped the artists as a single school while Uhlyarik’s small show of Surusilutu’s art is part of the current trend toward distinguishing individual Inuit artists and artistic careers – and offering not only prints but also drawings. It’s a movement that has reached its heights with international recognition for Shuvinai Ashoona, the eldest of Surusilutu’s six children, and an artist known for her coloured drawings.

Wieland, who was politically concerned by the exploitation of resources in the Arctic, was probably introduced to Inuit art by her Toronto dealer, Avrom Isaacs, whose Innuit Gallery was the first to specialize in it. In 1977, or perhaps 1979, she travelled to Kinngait with the idea she would find another artist with whom she could collaborate.

“Her idea was that, being an artist from the South, she was going to meet another artist and that they were going to draw each other’s portrait. But when she did go up there, she realized that’s not necessarily how artists work in Kinngait. It’s a co-op system, a very different situation,” Uhlyarik said. She describes the workaday routine in which artists spent the day drawing in the Kinngait studio while James Houston, the government administrator who established the print-making co-op, bought the drawings he felt would make the best prints.

So, Wieland went through stacks of drawings by different artists, selected Surusilutu and went to her busy home full of children to draw her. Sketches and a final portrait, included in the Wieland retrospective, show the artist in profile “poised, beautiful and monumental, in the style of early Renaissance portraiture,” as Uhlyarik writes in her catalogue essay. (Wieland spelt the artist’s name Soroseelutu; it is also often spelt Sorosiluto.)

“Isaacs was one of the very early dealers to be interested in art from the North and he not only sold the art, but he brought the artists down to Toronto,” Uhlyarik said. “That made a big impact on Weiland in thinking about the North, not as this desolate faraway place, but rather a place that was very much alive. It is very different from anybody before, or really anybody from the South after that for quite some time, where it’s full of animals and full of plants and flowers and also full of culture and language.”

The curator argues that this engagement marked a significant departure from the idea of the mystic (and empty) North advanced by artists such as Lawren Harris. “Lawren Harris was interested in the Arctic and even though he makes paintings of Inuit tents in the sketches and in the drawings, they don’t make it into the final paintings.”

The encounter was not always simple, however. In a 1981 interview, Wieland noted the restrictions placed on the Inuit by settler culture, saying, “Bridging that gap is something a lot of whites think they have done but they’re kidding themselves.”

And her own use of Inuit themes in her Arctic work could be appropriative, Uhlyarik notes in her catalogue, most obviously in The Great Sea, a wool rug-hooking on burlap featuring a translation of an Inuit poem. It was created by Wieland well before her visit to Kinngait with the text crafted by the Acadian rug-hooker Evelyn Mombourquette Aucoin from Cheticamp, N.S. The concept was that the poem would appear in Inuktitut, English and French in three separate panels, but Aucoin rain out of steam before she made the French version.

Meanwhile, the Inuktitut syllabics are jumbled on the work so they couldn’t actually be read as a text – a confusion that Uhlyarik figures came about since neither Wieland nor Aucoin knew the language they were reproducing. Nonetheless, the mere insistence that the Inuit language should have equal place was novel when the piece was made in 1970, she points out. Today, the AGO routinely includes Inuktitut on the labels for Inuit art, figuring that Inuit visitors should be able to read the titles in their original language.

Wieland’s use of the syllabics was merely symbolic, but her encounter with Surusilutu, through a translator, made her understanding of what was at stake in the North more concrete.

Still, making these connections can remain challenging to this day. While there is a long-established community of other Indigenous curators, it’s only recently that some independent Inuit artists and scholars have emerged to curate Inuit art themselves. They are few, however, and since the departure of Indigenous curator Wanda Nanibush in 2023 and Inuit curator Taqralik Patridge last year, the AGO is now without professionals in the area.

Uhlyarik does not believe Indigenous art necessarily has to be curated by Indigenous curators: “That is a super complicated question and I haven’t spent a lot of time thinking about that. I just know that the work can change the way in which we think about what is art.”

Surusilutu Ashoona is showing at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto to Oct. 29.