Ningiukulu Teevee wins Kenojuak Ashevak Memorial Award

Expand

Ningiukulu Teevee (photo courtesy Inuit Art Quarterly)

Nunuvat graphic artist Ningiukulu Teevee, known for her bright and playful modern retellings of Inuit stories, has won this year's $20,000 Kenojuak Ashevak Memorial Award, which celebrates excellence in Inuit art.

The biennial award, announced Friday by the Inuit Art Foundation, supports an Inuk artist by facilitating opportunities for artistic development, including a residency and a solo exhibition with an exhibition catalogue at the Winnipeg Art Gallery-Qaumajuq. The gallery will also acquire one of Teevee’s works for its permanent collection. Teevee’s exhibition is scheduled for fall 2025, when the next award winner will be announced.

Foundation president Heather Igloliorte said Teevee has been making "storied, thoughtful, humorous and insightful works of art for nearly two decades." 

"She is an artist-storyteller of the highest caliber whose evocative prints and drawings have the power to transport viewers to familiar spaces and scenes in the North, whether she is picturing a pot of soup bubbling on the stove, or Inuit playing traditional games in the local gym."

Teevee, based in Kinngait, formerly known as Cape Dorset, has been included in more than 40 group exhibitions and 10 solo shows. Her work is in many public and private collections around the world, including 47 pieces at the WAG-Qaumajuq, 18 of them on loan from the Nunavut government. 

Her work started to gain wider recognition through her inclusion in the 2004 Cape Dorset Print Collection, followed in 2006 by her first solo exhibition, Ningiukulu Teevee: Drawings, at Feheley Fine Arts in Toronto.

The other artists on the short list were Billy Gauthier, Maureen Gruben, Gayle Uyagaqi Kabloona and Kablusiak. Their work is on view until Nov. 12 in the group show Anaanatta Unikkaangit (Our Mother’s Stories) at WAG-Qaumajuq. The short list artists each receive $5,000, while the additional five artists on the long list each receive $2,500

A show by the 2021 award winner, Tarralik Duffy, titled Gasoline Rainbows, is on view at the Winnipeg gallery until March 17.

The award honours the legacy of Ashevak, whose famous 1960 print, The Enchanted Owl,  was featured on a Canadian postal stamp. 

This year's all-Inuit jury was composed of artists Tarralik Duffy and Logan Ruben, and Jocelyn Piirainen, a curator at the National Gallery of Canada.

Source: Inuit Art Foundation