Montreal Museum of Fine Arts places Inuit work at its core

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In two rooms at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts that once held Greco-Roman antiquities, staff have taken down window coverings to expose views of the city, painted the walls pink and installed 70 works by Inuit artists. Classical statuary has been replaced with colourful prints, soapstone carvings and a motorcycle sidecar with antlers and scales.

The decision to place 20th-century and contemporary Inuit art on the ground floor of the museum’s historic north wing is symbolic – a statement that Indigenous rather than Western art is foundational.

“We think it’s more in keeping with our mission and our understanding of what art is about,” museum director Stéphane Aquin said at an unveiling last week.

The MMFA has been collecting Inuit art since 1953, when a previous curator, F. Cleveland Morgan, purchased sculptures from the nearby Canadian Handicrafts Guild (now La Guilde) and insisted they would be displayed as art, not as ethnographic material or craft.

Although Inuktitut does not have a specific word for art, the distinction between the work of a recognized artist and an unknown artisan is equally important to asinnajaq, the Montreal curator from Inukjuak in northern Quebec who oversaw the two new installations. In assembling a collection of 129 pieces to be rotated through the galleries, they picked works from the 1940s on, almost all of them by named artists, from the museum’s permanent collection. They did not turn to the MMFA’s small collection, about 30 pieces, of older Inuit material mainly retrieved during archeological digs and dating prior to contact with Europeans.

“I wanted to focus that these are artworks we are looking at. In museums I am sometimes uncomfortable with the blurring of art and ethnography,” they said. “It’s very clear this is an art exhibition.”

Tucked behind the pillars of the Hornstein Pavilion’s classical facade with high windows offering views of Sherbrooke Street, the first gallery makes that statement emphatically. The showstopping centrepiece is Iqualuullamiluuq (First Mermaid) That Can Manoeuvre on the Land, a 2016 modification of a motorcycle sidecar topped with a mask and antlers and featuring a body of giant green scales that ends in a swooping fish tail. This startling object, attached to an unmodified blue BMW motorcycle, is the work of Mattiusi Iyaituk in collaboration with Quebec metalsmith Étienne Guay.

Iyaituk is a senior artist from Ivujivik in northern Quebec who is also known for making more familiar assemblages of bone and stone. The collection here also includes one of his early soapstone works, from 1978, that shows a human figure changing into an owl, the parka becoming feathers and the feet growing claws. For all its colourful disruption, his sidecar construction fits neatly within the Inuit artistic tradition of using both sculpture and graphics to depict metamorphosis.

And it is the exchange of energy – whether geographic or molecular, human or biological – that asinnajaq picked as their theme as they sorted through the hundreds of pieces in the MMFA collection, looking for works that jumped out, demanding to be shown. The current display includes Jessica Winters’s deceptive image of lichen hugging a stone – a 2023 acrylic painting of nature in close-up that could easily be read as an aerial photograph of an icy forest. A true aerial photograph by Eldren Allen from 2021 turns footprints and snowmobile tracks into a dynamic abstract pattern.

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Elsewhere in the galleries are multiple small sculptures of humans and animals, and a collection of graphic artworks that establish a powerful visual vocabulary for dramatic moments of interchange and interdependency. In a piece from the late 1960s or early 1970s attributed to Bobby Quppaapik Tarkirk, a caribou antler becomes a tree on which to perch soapstone and serpentine birds. A soapstone piece from the 1950s by an unnamed ancestor shows the dramatic moment where one figure rescues another, pulling them out of the ice. In Naming the Children After Grandmother, a red-and-brown 1986 print by Françoise Oklaga, the children’s small bodies fit within the grandmother’s ferocious mask-like face.

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That piece is one of the highlights of the second gallery, where the graphics are on display in a room that doesn’t have windows. They can only be exposed to light for short periods and will be swapped regularly.

In both rooms the walls are painted flattering shades of pink (peach for the sculptures and mauve for the works on paper) that asinnajaq requested after asking an advisory committee of Inuit experts what they liked to see in exhibitions of their art – and what they didn’t. They replied that all the references to cold in stark white galleries were getting tired.

“It was to have a more complex understanding of our beautiful lands. It is cold, there is no denying it,” asinnajaq said. “The peachy pink? We were inspired by sunrise glistening on snow.”

Uummaqutik: Essence of Life continues indefinitely at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. La Guilde, which was the first organization in southern Canada to sell Inuit art, is also organizing an exhibition of 10 contemporary Inuit printmakers who work outside the co-op system: Amisut continues to Dec. 10 at 1356 Sherbrooke St. W.