Annie Pootoogook

Sobey Art Award Winner Annie Pootoogook

When Annie Pootoogook won the Sobey Art Award in 2006, she cracked the glass ceiling for Inuit art, securing its place in contemporary Canadian art discourse and establishing herself as an artist of international importance. Her achievement sparked critical discussion around contemporary art as well as the absence, and growing presence, of Inuit art: an important conversation that continues to this day.

The life and death of Annie Pootoogook is a story of national significance. The complex narratives weaving through her short life speak to possibility and heartbreak, truth and reconciliation, the richness of community, and the depths of tragedy. These complexities are recorded in her arresting pencil crayon compositions. Her frank, sometimes challenging, sometimes amusing images of everyday life, acutely observed and marked by a linear control as taut as a wire, declare her as a major contributor to the landscape of contemporary Inuit art.

Family Scene illustrates Pootoogook “…drawing out of personal experience, but also out of shared cultural experience,” as said by Heather Igloliorte, Concordia University Research Chair in Indigenous Art History. That had been a feature of her mother and grandmother’s art too, said Ms. Igloliorte, but Inuit life had changed, and Ms. Pootoogook had been born into a new reality.

“I didn’t see any igloos in my life,” the artist said. “Only Skidoo, Honda, the house, things inside the house.”