Documenting Inuit Prints from the Canadian ArcticAuthor(s): Jonathan FranklinSource: Art Documentation: Journal of the Art Libraries Society of North America, Vol. 24,No. 2 (Fall 2005), pp. 29-33Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of the Art Libraries Society of NorthAmericaStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/27949372 .

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Documenting Inuit Prints from the Canadian Arctic Jonathan Franklin

[This article describes a unique research tool, the Inuit Artists Print Workbook, compiled and edited by Sandra Barz, and marks its transition to a Web database format in the National Gallery of Canada Library.1 The article is based in part on an interview with Sandra Barz in New York City on March 14, 2005, and is dedi cated to the memory of James Houston, who died on April 17, 2005.]

Inuit Printmaking The history of Inuit printmaking begins, depending on how

one looks at it, either eons ago or with an Andy Warhol moment in the winter of 1957, a few years before the debut of 32 Campbell's Soup Cans. In Cape Dorset on Baffin Island, now part of the prov ince of Nunavut, Osuitok Ipeelee was enjoying a cigarette with

James Houston, a young artist working for the Canadian govern ment. Osuitok, a stone-carver, compared the printed sailor's head

trademarks on two cigarette packs and observed that it must have been very laborious for the artist to paint all those heads exactly the same on each packet. Houston set about explaining the unfa

miliar rudiments of printing, using an incised ivory tusk and some ink. To which Osuitok responded: "We could do that/'2 The result of this conversation was that, after several millennia of carving in stone and bone, the Inuit people began to apply their capacity for outstanding craft-work and vivid, often raw, image-making to the production of limited-edition prints for a southern market. In fact, had one been doing some unusually perceptive Christmas

shopping in Winnipeg the following December, one might have come away with a genuine piece of art history: twenty images from the first experimental collection were exhibited for sale at the Hudson's Bay Company store.

The early forays into printmaking in Cape Dorset mostly involved stonecuts. The surface of a smooth stone was carved

away to leave the design standing up in relief, ink was applied, and sheets of paper were laid upon the inked stone and rubbed to receive the impression. There were no presses, and frozen

ink was just one of many problems that had to be surmounted. Since stone-carving was the traditional art-form of the Inuit, the stonecut was felt to be a natural development of existing skills, and in fact similar stone was used for printing and for three dimensional sculptures.

A similar philosophy underlay the later decision to branch out into stencil printing, since Inuit women had traditionally used comparable seal- or caribou-skin applique work to embel lish clothing and other goods. Although sealskin was tried out for the earliest stencils, the results were unsatisfactory and it seemed like a waste of good sealskin, so wax-coated paper was used instead. Experiments were also made with linocuts but this was officially discouraged as less "authentic." In later develop ments, a lithographic press was purchased for Cape Dorset in 1972 and found favor with younger artists less patient with the laborious stone-carving techniques practised by their elders.

Figure 1. Artist: Kenojuak Ashevak; printer: Iyola Kingwatsiak. Rabbit Eating Seaweed. Sealskin stencil, 1958. Glenbow Museum, Calgary, Alberta.

Reproduced with the permission of the West Baffin Eskimo Cooperative, Cape Dorset, Nunavut. This early stencil by Kenojuak reproduces a design which the artist had also used earlier as an appliqu? on a sealskin bag.

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Communities, Cooperatives, Catalogs and Marks Several aspects of Inuit printmaking require background

explanation, notably its appearance in a handful of distinct and

individually isolated communities, the role of the co-operative or collective, the publication of annual illustrated catalogs, and the use of marks to identify the prints.

As we have seen, Cape Dorset on Baffin Island was the first Inuit community to explore printmaking in the late 1950s. It was followed in 1960 by Puvirnituq, situated on Hudson's Bay in

Northern Quebec, and a year later by Holman in the North West

Territories, the westernmost of the printmaking communities. The inland community of Baker Lake, west of Hudson's Bay, had a later but distinctive start in 1965. Other groups, notably Pangnirtung on Baffin Island, were not active until the 1970s. Marked differences exist between the different communities and even, especially in the case of Baker Lake, between different

groups within a single community, which are in turn reflected in the prints. There are contrasts in technique: in Cape Dorset the preference was to produce a drawing, then hand it over to a stonecutter and printer. In Puvirnituq, on the other hand, the

designer of the image would normally carve the stone directly and then bring it to the print-shop. The stylistic corollary is that

Puvirnituq images often preserve the grain and shape of the stone from which they are carved. The impact of a Baker Lake

print is more often bold and colorful, and shamanistic imagery is common, while in Cape Dorset subject matter favors the stylized representation of birds and animals.

Figure 2. Artist: Kiakshuk; printer: lyola Kingwatsiak. Strange Scene.

Stonecut, 1964. Collection of The Winnipeg Art Gallery; The Swinton Collection (G-76-782). Reproduced with the permission of the West Baffin Eskimo Cooperative, Cape Dorset, Nunavut. Photograph: Ernest Mayer, The Winnipeg Art Gallery. The threatening figure on the left represents a Tunit giant, one of the Dorset people who preceded the Inuit, dying out in the 14th or 15th century.

Thus far I have used the word "artist" sparingly, not to diminish the status of these wonderful prints but to reflect Inuit culture. No word for "art" or "artist" exists in Inuktitut, and

traditionally anyone might sit and carve a small three-dimen sional sculpture in order to keep hands and mind busy during the long moments when the Arctic weather prevented other

activity. The carving might be discarded when finished, having served its function. Where someone else might readily identify

himself as an artist (or an actor or writer) rather than as a waiter

(or a librarian), the traditional Inuit would sooner claim the role of hunter or mother than that of artist. Since being an "artist" was not a separately defined role, many individuals tried their hand at printmaking in the early days. In Baker Lake, almost half the community did so and most produced a few prints before

turning to other activities. This absence of an individualistic art tradition was just one

factor contributing to the role of the co-operative or collective in Inuit printmaking. Another was the presence of intensely communal traditions among the Inuit, necessary for survival and

reflected, for example, in the identifying mark of the Puvirnituq printmaking community, which translates as "the people of

Puvirnituq independent through a common effort." There was also the natural division of labor between designer ("artist"), stonecutter and printer, not to mention the sheer practicality of

gathering tools and equipment in one place in each community. The activities of the co-operatives were never confined to print making, and the pattern has varied over the years. The West Baffin Eskimo Co-operative still issues the Cape Dorset annual

collection, but the Sanavik Co-operative at Baker Lake parted company with the printmaking program in 1997 to concentrate its resources on grocery supplies.

One function of the co-operative was to compile an annual illustrated catalog to enable its prints to be marketed "down south." These series began with Cape Dorset in 1959, followed by Puvirnituq in 1962, Holman in 1965, Baker Lake in 1970, Arctic

Quebec in 1972, Pangnirtung in 1973, and Clyde River in 1981. Not all of them have maintained annual publication up to the

present, owing to changing patterns of artistic production in the Arctic. Inuit printmaking is incontrovertibly an art of accultura

tion, and it would be unhistorical to omit the role of non-Inuit in the spread of printmaking from one isolated community to another as they emulated the innovations of James Houston and Osuitok in Cape Dorset. 1961 saw the establishment of a non Inuit regulatory body, the Canadian Eskimo Arts Committee, later the Canadian Eskimo Arts Council, to maintain standards and thus sustain the market. Although the Council's influence later waned as communities broke away from its control and it

was finally dissolved in 1989, it did administer an authentication

system to counter the fakes that were circulating within a few

years. Houston had spent several months in 1958/59 studying printmaking in Japan as background to the Arctic venture. He instigated the practice of adding distinguishing marks to the prints, akin to the seals and signatures which appear on

Japanese prints and which inspired Whistler's famous butterfly monogram. Practices have varied over time and between

communities, but the ideal model comprises the following (note that "syllables" are the characters, loosely based on Pitman

shorthand, used since the nineteenth century for writing in the Inuktitut language):

the print title written in either English or syllables the name of the artist, either represented by a syllabic

monogram, or written in syllables or Roman script the name of the printer, ditto

a monogram representing the community in which the

print was produced, e.g., an igloo symbol for Cape Dorset

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the authenticating mark of the Canadian Eskimo Arts Council (the Inuktitut syllables for "namatuk," meaning "genuine")

the year, usually in which the image was editioned

The marks were added to the image using "chops," indi vidual carved pieces, applied in the same way as a rubber stamp. The Japanese influence at Cape Dorset is most evident in the vertical arrangement of the marks. Sometimes they are printed in different colors from the image, and sometimes they are blind

stamped. Much less frequently are the names of artist and/or

printer incised in the printing block itself. Edition numbers were

generally added to the prints, e.g., 23/50, but only after the run of thirty to fifty impressions had been completed; consequently they bear no relation to the quality of the impressions.

The Inuit Artists Print Workbook The Inuit Artists Print Workbook is, as its title suggests, a

working tool, designed to aid in the identification of Inuit prints. The existence of the annual catalogs and the system of identi

fying marks outlined above made the corpus of Inuit prints more

orderly, but there was an obvious need to compile the data into a single resource, and to supply information that was frequently missing or incomplete. The first edition of the Workbook appeared in 1981, in a single volume, containing entries for 3,600 prints, the earliest dating from 1959. The following printmaking commu nities were included: Arctic Quebec, Baker Lake, Cape Dorset, Holman, and Pangnirtung. By the time of the second edition in 1990, additional research and the publication of later annual

print catalogs had raised the number of entries to 5,000 prints, including experimental prints from 1957/8, as well as three annual catalogs from Clyde River. The third and most recent edition came out in 2004, listing 8,000 entries including a new

"Miscellaneous/Independent" section covering prints produced outside the familiar printmaking communities. At this point the number of annually issued print catalogs indexed in the Workbook exceeds 150.

The 2004 edition is arranged in two volumes. The first includes indexes by artist/printer names and by title, followed

by outline biographies of the artists and printers, which are described as "print-oriented" in that they focus on print activity rather than, for example, the sculptural output of the individual. Entries include reproductions of syllabic signatures and special and rare marks used to represent the artist's name. The second

volume contains the substance of the publication, namely the artist's print worksheets, arranged by community and then by artist. The entries include complete lists of prices of the prints at time of issue, subsequent auction prices, extensive footnotes with anecdotes, and excerpts from interviews. In addition to the contents of the annual catalogs, the section for each printmaking community also lists special collections and commissions,

cataloged and uncataloged, as well as experimental prints and collections and anomalies. These prints, which fall outside the

predictable orbit of the annual catalogs, are often the hardest to track down and identify.

A typical Workbook entry comprises the following fields:

artist's name, including alternate forms, disc number,

gender, and dates of birth and death

printer's name

print title

date of annual catalog in which the print appeared number of the print as it appears in the annual catalog

technique

color(s)

size of edition

date on print (may differ from catalog year) auction price(s)

Figure 3. Artist: Juanisialu Irqumia. Caribou Hunt. Stonecut, 1965.

Catalog no. POV 1966-322, image no. S90-7856. Photo ? Canadian

Museum of Civilization. Reproduced with the permission of La F?d?ration des Coop?ratives du Nouveau Qu?bec. Characteristic traits of this Puvirnituq

image are the grain and shape of the carved stone, and the multiple view

points (there is no single "right way up").

Research by Sandra Barz

The compiler of the Inuit Artists' Print Workbook, Sandra

Barz, first became interested in Inuit art during a mid-1960s visit to Ottawa, where she found a shop selling art from the north at the Canadian Pacific Ch?teau Laurier Hotel. Intrigued, she made some purchases and upon returning home to New York set out to discover the background to her new acquisitions. Information

proved hard to come by, but gradually she began to assemble the documentation that would form the nucleus of the Workbook. In November 1976 she began publishing Arts & Culture of the North, a newsletter devoted to Eskimo arts and culture. The first issue carried a page illustrating marks used by various co-operatives to identify the prints they produced, as well as a "Print catalog check list" identifying the annual print catalogs published by the communities up to that date. Arts & Culture of the North continued to be published quarterly until 1984, with cumulative indexes

being published for each volume.3 The business of gathering the documentation of Inuit prints into a published monograph began with eighty-five catalogs and a manual typewriter. At this time Sandra Barz was traveling frequently in the Arctic, where she has made about thirty trips in total over the years. As an

experienced traveler in the North she was able to facilitate visits and contacts for groups of people with an established interest in the arts of the Inuit, not just printmaking but sculpture and textile work also. Her approach to research was to assemble the

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material she had, identify the gaps, and then set about filling them. As she says in her introduction to the 2004 edition, "the retrieval process involved abstracting information from every print-related catalog, brochure, leaflet and published print resource including annual collection catalogs, special collec tion/commission offerings, major auction catalogs and principal reference books."

Inuit prints are quite amenable to documentation in some

respects. They have a definite and relatively recent start date.

They developed, initially at least, in a highly controlled milieu, not only with local communities concentrating printmaking activity in a few locations but also with the umbrella organi zation, the Canadian Eskimo Arts Committee (later Canadian Eskimo Arts Council), coordinating and authenticating the

output. And the prints were documented for the most part in the

annually published catalogs of the printmaking communities. That said, they do present their own particular challenges, some

obvious, others less so.

The identities of artists and printers could prove difficult to determine when the same names recurred frequently. It should be noted that the Canadian government, faced with similar prob lems in monitoring the Eskimo population, had introduced in 1941 a system of "disc numbers" identifying every individual

by their community and a unique number, e.g., W2-951. The

system was not phased out until 1971, and consequently the entries for most of the nearly 700 artists listed in the Workbook include this identifier. Only the relatively young artists such as

Jose Pitseolak, born in 1975, are entered with "no disc number." Moreover, the transliteration of Inuktitut names for people and

places has varied considerably over the years, with, for instance,

Puvirnituq, "place of the dung of many animals," being more often conventionally transcribed as Povungnituk.

Dates also could be a challenge, as the date inscribed on the

print might reflect the date of the annual catalog in which it was

published, while the print itself had been created the previous year but not released. In the earliest years of printmaking this

might be because the short summer transport season, when

ships could gain access to the Arctic, was already over, and the

print had to wait for the next summer to travel south. Much of Barz's research over the years has been devoted to untangling confusion over the dates of particular prints.

Documentation At the outset, no one had any idea that the Inuit print market

would take off in the way that it did, prompting an article,

"Prosperous Eskimo Print-Makers," in, of all places, Canadian Banker magazine for 1962.4 Consequently, the need for careful documentation was not always apparent to those involved. Even

Cape Dorset, the doyen of all the printmaking communities, did not publish printer attributions in the catalogs until 1977, while Holman did not identify printers at all until the late 1970s. The Canadian Eskimo Arts Council let pass an offer by Barz herself to write a guide for the communities setting out the international standards for print documentation.

Sometimes, either inadvertently or, in the case of the 1977 Baker Lake catalog, by design, the standard name order of artist followed by printer was reversed in order to honor the notable skills of the printer. Nothing, however, explained this to the reader. Certainly the roles of designer, cutter, and printer were

differently combined in different printmaking communities. As Barz writes, "sometimes proofs and editions have different attri butions and/or someone did not finish the entire edition ... by looking at the 8,000 images multiple times I sometimes found different attributions ... In some of the early prints for Cape Dorset you will see multiple names for some of these processes, as there were multiple stamps or I was told in many interviews that someone else also participated."5 There was also a notation, an inverted "L," whereby a surrogate could "sign" the print in the absence of the original printmaker, usually a relative signing for someone unable to do so owing to illness, death, or absence. Even Inuit humor could get in the way of accurate documen

tation, as in the case of some minor images signed "Kumuak,"

apparently a facetious made-up name meaning "louse." Such

lack of consistency could lead to confusion in the annual

published catalogs. Accordingly, Barz treated the catalogs as a

working tool but took care to derive her data from the prints themselves. Over the years she has inspected examples of almost

every Inuit print image at least once, some up to three times or

more, in cooperatives, museums, dealers' and private collec

tions, and at auction houses.

Figure 4. Artist: Pudlo Pudlat; printer: Pitseolak Niviaqsi. The Seasons.

Color lithograph, 1976. National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, Ontario. Gift of the Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development, 1989. Reproduced with the permission of the West Baffin Eskimo Cooperative, Cape Dorset, Nunavut. Pudlo incorporates non-traditional imagery into his

very personal renderings of the Arctic.

Not only were the published catalogs prone to error, but not all prints were featured in the annual catalogs. The story of the "experimental" prints is especially fascinating. Since, as mentioned earlier, being an "artist" was not a separately defined

role, many people tried their hand at printmaking, but inclu sion in the catalogs resulted from a selection process usually conducted by the community's non-Inuit art adviser in consulta tion with established printmakers. The Canadian Eskimo Arts Committee was preoccupied with ensuring a high standard of

printmaking, in order to sustain the market, and was reportedly not amused when James Houston illustrated his book Eskimo Prints* with two images that had failed to make the annual

catalog (a kind of salon des refus?s). Today it is the documentation of these experimental and rejected prints that poses a particular challenge, in contrast with the relatively well documented prints included in the annual catalogs.

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Oral Testimony The phenomenon of the experimental prints raises another

documentation issue, the use of oral testimony. Barz's experi ence was that these "experimental" printmakers could prove more reliable in the information they gave her than those who

stayed in the printing programs, simply because they had spent maybe only one season in the printshop and were thus less likely to confuse different dates and events than someone whose career

spanned several years. The gathering of oral history became more urgent in the

1980s and 1990s as Barz realized that "many of the people are old or have passed on, and we will never know about some of the

participants otherwise, as they might not have had their stamps on the prints or their names in the catalogs or any other litera ture."7 Conducting successful oral history interviews (using an

interpreter, for the most part) called for persistence and, to an

extent, knowing the answer before asking the question; in other

words, knowing the right question to ask. Interpretation of the

reply was also paramount. Given the nomadic traditions of the

Inuit, the attempt to locate a person might elicit the response that he was not in the community, which might mean that he had died, had moved to another community, or was out on the land hunting. Then again "out on the land hunting" might

mean a distance of hundreds of miles or merely a few hundred

yards. On one expedition to Baker Lake in 1994 Barz regaled members of the community with a slide-show of experimental prints for which gaps existed in the documentation, an expe rience which apparently proved as enjoyable for the audience as it was informative for her. Needless to say, the advent of

faxes, photocopiers, and still more recently e-mail, has made

communication and documentation infinitely easier than at the

beginning of the project. Interestingly, Barz found that the Inuit, though prone to

memory lapses like anyone else, were very straightforward in their attribution of prints, almost never seeking to maximize their own contribution or minimize that of others. Ironically, the testimony of some of the non-Inuit participants in the early development of Inuit printmaking seems on occasion to have been more skewed,

owing to a well meant desire to stress the authenticity and freedom from outside influence of the prints produced.

The Transition to Online

Sandra Barz began transferring her library collections to the National Gallery of Canada Library in late 1994, with the delivery of eight boxes of material, to be followed by several more up until 2001. In 2003, anticipating the third edition of the Inuit Artists Print Workbook, a plan was developed for the creation of an online version. The WordPerfect files comprising the contents were transmitted to the Library, and discussions were held in the

spring of 2004 with an Ottawa firm that would convert the data from word-processing files into a database-ready format, which

was delivered in September of that year. Over the following months Philip Dombowsky compared the converted files in detail with the original Workbook to verify the accuracy of the transferred

data, and meetings were held with the Gallery's Information

Technology Services staff to determine the software to be used for mounting the database on the Web. By mid-February 2005 the verification process was complete, and the construction of

the database was underway. When completed, the database will be made freely available to researchers from the Web site of the National Gallery of Canada at http: / /www.gallery.ca.

Acknowledgments I would like to thank Sandra Barz, and also Philip

Dombowsky, for assistance in the preparation of this article.

Notes 1. Sandra . Barz, ed., The Inuit Artists Print Workbook, 3rd

edition (New York: Arts & Culture of the North, 2004). 2. James Houston, Confessions of an Igloo Dweller

(Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1995), 263. 3. Arts & Culture of the North: A Newsletter Devoted to Eskimo

Art & Culture (New York: Arts and Culture of the North, 1976

1984). Quarterly, ISSN 0275-6927. 4. Peter Martin, "Prosperous Eskimo Print-Makers," Cana

dian Banker 69, no.3 (Autumn 1962): 32-41. 5. Sandra Barz, e-mail message to author, May 24, 2004.

6. James Houston, Eskimo Prints (Barre, MA: Barre

Publishers, 1967). 7. Sandra Barz, e-mail message to author, May 24, 2004.

Jonathan Franklin, Head of Collections and Database Management, National Gallery of Canada Library, Ottawa, Ontario,

jfrankli@gallery. ca

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