Additional Images

Note:

John Reeves studied at the Ontario College of Art (now OCAD University) graduating in 1961, later attending Sir George Williams University (now Concordia) for a year in Montreal. Known for his compelling and often intimate portraits of public figures, Reeves was also a key figure in the arts and literature program run by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC).
 
From 1968-1998 Reeves was invited by the Canadian Eskimo Arts Council to document Inuit artists of the West Baffin Eskimo Cooperative in Kinngait (Cape Dorset). Reeves recognized the important opportunity and produced an extensive photo essay, exhibited in part as “Inuit Art World,” at the Canadian Centre for Photography in 1981, and published as a 30-page segment in Cape Dorset Prints, in 2007. The portrait pictured here of Pitseolak Ashoona was photographed In 1982, just before her death in 1983.
 
Reeves’ work is included in public and corporate collections including the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography, the National Library of Canada, and the National Archives of Canada.
 
The present print is signed and inscribed in the artist's hand as a gift for Terry Ryan (1933 – 2017), the founding manager of the West Baffin Eskimo Co-operative (now called the Kinngait Studios). Ryan was a key figure in Kinngait’s art programs and in the celebration of Inuit art.

A closely related photograph from the same sitting is included in Leslie Boyd Ryan, Cape Dorset Prints: A Retrospective, (Petaluma, CA: Pomegranate Communications Inc., 2007), 161-177, 170. Leslie Boyd Ryan writes:

“In her youth Pitseolak Ashoona managed to walk more miles than many of her Southern sisters have driven, following her parents and then her first and only husband—the prodigious hunter Ashoona—across the trackless barrens of southern Baffin Island and northern Quebec in search of game. She bore Ashoona seventeen children. Only five survived. Windowed in the mid-1950s, Pitseolak settled in Kinngait, where drawing presented itself to her as a way to make money. Art making soon became an authentic obsession, and Pitseolak became the most prolific of all the Kinngait artists, cataloguing seven thousand works before her death, on May 28, 1983, aged seventy-nine. The earning power of her prolific pencil enabled her to create an art-based matriarchy fully capable of supporting her large expanded Inuit family as the hunting-based patriarchies of her father and her husband. This photograph was taken as part of a session the year before her death. Of death and drawing Pitseolak once said, ‘I am going to keep on doing them [drawings] until they tell me to stop. If no one tells me to stop, I shall make them even after I am dead’”