A Collection Built on Relationships

A Collection Built on Relationships: Inuit Art from the Art Gallery of Northumberland’s Permanent Collection

September 30, 2024 to February 28, 2025

Reception: Saturday, October 5 from 1 PM – 3 PM

Curated by Felicity Pope and Olinda Casimiro

In 1976, the AGN, then the Art Gallery of Cobourg, received a gift of approximately sixty Inuit carvings, sculptures, and materials. Dating from 1900 to 1970, the collection focused mostly on small carvings of arctic animals. Until recently little more was known than that it had been assembled over a period of forty years by Margaret Marsh, the wife of an Anglican minister, the 7th Bishop of Yukon. She had served as President of the Women’s Auxiliaries of the Diocese of the Arctic from 1948 through 1952.

On display after three years of research and consultation into their materials, source communities, and, where possible, the artists who created them, these objects offer a window into the evolution of Inuit art in the twentieth century. With origins in communities across Inuit Nunangat (the Inuit homeland), they are both works of art and evidence of people’s lived experience at a time of rapid cultural change caused by contact with traders, missionaries, and Canadian government officials. Above all, they are material expressions of Inuit Knowledge that is grounded the Inuit relationship to the land, the sea, the air, and all the living creatures supported therein.