#1 Polar Bear Ivory Carving (Thule/Inuit tradition), “Lying Still-Hunting.”

Material: Ivory
Date: Pre-contact (Thule period)

This small ivory carving represents a polar bear caught in the moment of still-hunting—an important strategy used by both bears and human hunters. He catches the powerful tension of the animal's body as he waits to strike. Pre-contact Inuit carvings were often used for practical or spiritual purposes rather than for decoration. Figures like this were used as amulets, teaching tools, and forms of memory preservation. They expressed Inuit understandings of animals as beings possessing agency and knowledge. The use of ivory reveals the intimate relationship between Inuit people and marine mammals, whose bodies provided food, materials, and spiritual meaning. This carving embodies Inuit expertise in reading the land and animal behavior, and reflects a worldview in which human and non-human lives are profoundly relational. This is a pre-contact object, showing the technical mastery of Inuit artists long before outside influence and the continuity of carving traditions that continue to thrive today.

#2“Early Inuit Carving of a European” (Thule era)

Material: Ivory
Date: Pre-contact

Although produced pre-Columbian, this carving portrays a European, indicating Inuit artists' awareness of the European presence. Such a carving defies the idea of a complete separation between Inuit and Europeans until the 19th century. Inuit artists were documenting European clothes, facial hair, and stance in their own terms, focusing on those aspects that were different. The carving demonstrates awareness and analysis on the part of the Inuit culture. Such an artwork might have informed community members about strangers, serving as a pictorial record when direct access to them was patchy across regions. The artwork demonstrates how Inuit culture assimilated information without discarding core cultural perspectives. In this artwork, instead of portraying Europeans through a colonial perspective, an Inuit viewpoint is portrayed.

#3"Mother’s Amauti" (Nunavimmiut)

Material: Animal hide, sinew, traditional construction

Date:1890-1897

The amauti—the traditional baby-carrying parka—is one of the most iconic expressions of Inuit women’s contributions to community life. This example from the late 19th century predates heavy colonial influence on clothing. The amauti’s design allowed warmth, nursing, mobility, and close bodily connection between mother and child, reinforcing Inuit values of kinship and protection. The construction reflects deep knowledge of caribou skin’s insulation properties and the skill of preparing hides and sinew. Decorative details also expressed regional identity and personal aesthetics. As an artwork, the amauti is a sophisticated sculptural form shaped by generations of practical knowledge. It embodies Inuit understandings of motherhood, survival, land-based expertise, and relational care. Its presence in this timeline demonstrates that Inuit art is not limited to sculpture or drawing—clothing itself is a medium of artistic, cultural, and spiritual expression.

#1 Lizzie Ittinuar, Beaded Amauti "Rankin Inlet"

Materials: Cotton cloth, beads, wool, lead

Date: c. 1970

In the 1970s, colonial economies and missionary settlements had altered the availability of materials in Inuit culture. Beadwork, which arrived through trade, emerged as an essential mode of creative expression, especially among women. Lizzie Ittinuar’s beaded amauti is a testament to this transitional phase in Inuit art. While in shape, an amauti adheres to Inuit tradition; in terms of materials, it shows new colonial inputs. Where before caribou skin and sinew were used, now commercially available fabric and glass beads are used in their place. However, in this amauti, the artist shows how beadwork can convey a sense of continuity rather than disjuncture. Through floral designs, this amauti situates Inuit artwork within a larger tradition of beadwork in the Arctic and sub-Arctic regions, which had come under colonial influence and had received textile introductions from missionaries.

#2 Pudlo Pudlat, "Imposed Migration"

Medium: Coloured pencil and ink

Date: 1986

Pudlo Pudlat is one of the most recognized Cape Dorset artists, and his work often explores the most dramatic transformations created by colonialism. Imposed Migration imagines forced relocations and the introduction of modern technologies-aircraft, boats, and machinery-into everyday Inuit life. The print shows how new systems uprooted relationships between land, autonomy, and seasonal movement. Rather than characterizing these changes as part of a narrative of progress, Pudlo depicts them as jarring impositions. Flattened shapes, bold lines, and a jarring juxtaposition of traditional and modern forms have been used to emphasize tension over harmony. It thus becomes both a historical document and a critique of state intervention. As a work from the contact era, the piece captures the emotional and cultural impact of settlement policies, at the same time as it evidences how Inuit artists were using new materials-pen and paper, which had been introduced through southern markets and arts cooperatives-to produce art.

#3 Pitseolak Ashoona, "Summer Camp Scene"

Medium: Coloured pencil drawing
Date: early 1970s

Pitseolak Ashoona's Summer Camp Scene speaks to the artist's determination to record the final generation of land-based Inuit, living a traditional lifestyle. Though drawn in the early 1970s, long after the beginning of the settlement period, the work is one of recollection, depicting her childhood when families migrated seasonally, hunted, prepared skins, and lived in tents made of skins. The brightly coloured figures fall into place with clarity and rhythm, echoing everyday communal activity over drama. Her minimalized forms and light tones are profoundly nostalgic yet concurrently reveal resilience. While the drawing employs southern art materials provided through the Cape Dorset printmaking program, the content preserves an Indigenous worldview shaped by mobility, kinship, and survival knowledge. Pitseolak's work bridges pre-contact memory with contact-era realities, making her drawings vital cultural records during a time of profound transformation.

#1 Annie Pootoogook, "My Mother and I"

Medium: Coloured pencil and ink

Date: 2004-2005

Annie Pootoogook transformed global understandings of Inuit art. Unlike earlier generations whose work often centered on animals or legends, Pootoogook depicted everyday domestic life—televisions, kitchen tables, family relationships, and moments of tenderness or hardship. "My Mother and I "presents an intimate scene of two women in a modern Inuit home. The style is clean and minimal, yet emotionally rich. By drawing contemporary lived experience rather than romanticized Arctic imagery, Pootoogook expanded Inuit art into new conceptual territory. Her work challenges southern expectations of what Inuit art “should” look like and asserts that modernity, colonial trauma, joy, and family life all belong within Inuit visual culture. This piece demonstrates how contemporary Inuit artists navigate multiple worlds while maintaining cultural identity.

#2 Jesse Tungilik, "Seal Skin Spacesuit"

Materials: Seal skin, acrylic, beadwork

Date: 2019

Seal Skin Spacesuit, a work of Inuit futurism, is a masterpiece by artist Jesse Tungilik and a great example of how he decodes traditional materials in a futuristic manner. With the Seal Skin Spacesuit, Tungilik successfully incorporates Inuit culture into a futuristic setting by using seal skin, an essential part of Inuit survival and culture, in the form and style of a NASA spacesuit. Therefore, Tungilik not only incorporates Inuit culture into a futuristic setting but also collides with colonial histories of Inuit culture by positioning it in a static present or a fixed past. The spacesuit serves both as a metaphor and a critique. Thus, it may symbolize the environmental crisis, focusing mainly on climate change and on how Arctic communities have suffered from this phenomenon. Further, it can comment on matters of land ownership and self-rule, suggesting that Inuit epistemology is a vital technology for coping with an uncertain future. Of course, this spacesuit signifies both protection and vulnerability, with a focus on survival rather than conquest.

With this hybrid object, Tungilik extends Inuit visual culture beyond the conventional parameters of craft or sculpture to a realm of speculative design. Here, tradition is shown not to be inimical but rather generative in facilitating a new artistic possibility in futurity.

#3 Shuvinai Ashoona, "Earth and Sky"

Medium: Coloured pencil and ink

Date:2008

Shuvinai Ashoona is highly regarded for her fantastical drawings that blend aspects of daily Inuit life with fantastic and space-based imagery. She creates an interdependent world in Earth and Sky, where humans, animals, and planetary forms come together in an unlikely and often unsettling harmony. The composition compresses land, sky, and sea, implying a universe in which all beings are relational rather than discrete. This worldview reflects Inuit cosmologies, which hold that humans, animals, and the environment are deeply interdependent. Ashoona’s work is a response to the modern Inuit experience, which is shaped by globalization, rapid social change, and environmental uncertainty. Globes, tentacles, hybrid creatures, and community scenes often populate her drawings, visual metaphors that illustrate the question of overlapping identities and the stresses on Arctic communities today. While her imagery may seem surrealist, it is anchored in the lived experience, oral storytelling, and collective memory.

Melding traditional Inuit ideas of transformation with modern graphic language, Ashoona subverts southern expectations for Inuit art-they must feature animals or "traditional" scenes-with an approach that pushes Inuit art into the realms of speculative and psychological. This is the work of someone who knows that Inuit are active contributors to global contemporary art. Her work resists colonial categorization and affirms the multitude of Inuit creativity as complex, innovative, and futures-based, and has contributed significantly to international recognition of contemporary Inuit art.