Annie Pootoogook Remembered

Nancy Campbell's new book ponders the fateful decision to give an Inuit artist one of Canada's most prestigious art prizes. A decade later, her body was found in Ottawa's Rideau River.

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When Annie Pootoogook won the Sobey Art Award in 2006, it was an important moment in Canada’s art history, says the author of a new book about the late Inuit artist.

“Annie’s work cracked the glass ceiling for Inuit art and its place in contemporary Canadian art discourse,” Nancy Campbell writes in Cutting Ice, an impressive companion book to an exhibition that closed last month at the McMichael Canadian Art Collection in Kleinburg, Ont.

But while the prestigious prize influenced the art world – and a generation of Inuit artists – was it good for Pootoogook?

“That’s the big question everyone has,” Campbell said in a recent interview. “We can’t really say if it was good or bad.”

Pootoogook had little exposure to the world outside Cape Dorset, Nunavut, when she won the $50,000 award for coloured pencil drawings that juxtapose traditional Inuit life with modern realities. Suddenly she had money. She travelled to European exhibitions. Everyone seemed to want a piece of her. She left the North for Montreal and then Ottawa, where she became homeless, selling her art on street corners for a pittance to buy alcohol.

Her body was found Sept. 19, 2016 in the Rideau River in Ottawa. Police ruled the cause of the 47-year-old artist’s death “inconclusive,” meaning it could have been an accident, suicide or murder. The case remains open.

Campbell, a freelance curator from Winnipeg now based in Toronto, says Pootoogook’s problems with domestic violence and substance abuse predate the Sobey, given annually to promising artists aged 40 and under.

Some of the drawings that first brought Pootoogook to national attention dealt with these very topics. And they are among the 62 full-colour images in Cutting Ice, along with drawings of more tranquil scenes of contemporary Inuit life – hunting, fishing, watching television, playing Nintendo and celebrating Christmas.

In her book, a hardcover co-published by the McMichael and Goose Lane Editions in Fredericton, Campbell reveals how Pootoogook was almost bypassed for the Sobey award because of strong opposition from some jurors.

The story comes from one of the jurors, Wayne Baerwaldt, a former director of Calgary’s Illingworth Kerr Gallery.

“There were so many people on the jury at that time who were resistant to Annie winning,” Baerwaldt is quoted as saying in Cutting Ice. “They said because she was from the North that she wasn’t ‘informed’ enough, hadn’t been exposed to modernism and hadn’t had formal training at art college like other artists did. For me, that was like listening to some 19th century discourse.”

Baerwaldt convinced the jury to honour Pootoogook. But the decision did not go over well with at least one Sobey finalist that year. In the interview, Campbell said this other artist, who she declined to name, refused to shake Pootoogook’s hand at a reception.

Shortly after Pootoogook’s death, Campbell began organizing the Cutting Ice exhibition for the McMichael. It ran from Sept. 2 last year until Feb. 11. Part of the show will be remounted this summer in Britain at the Tate Liverpool contemporary art biennial. There, Pootoogook will be showcased alongside a few dozen international artists, including two other Sobey winners, Brian Jungen (2002) and Duane Linklater (2013).

The Liverpool biennial is called Beautiful world, where are you? It’s a question Pootoogook herself must have asked in her last troubled years. ■