Carving out a space for Inuit art in Montreal
“You’re going to be so impressed with the work we have here!” beamed Makivik Corporation consultant Sylvie Cornez, curator of the exhibition Taku (“see” in Inuktitut), which featured the work of Inuit sculptors from Montreal’s Native Friendship Centre (NFC) and the related Mikinak Youth Co-op.
The exhibition, which ran from July 30 to August 5 during the First Peoples’ Festival, took place at Galerie Carte Blanche in downtown Montreal. Carvers did daily demonstrations of their work, and guides offered to lead spectators to see the finished pieces up close.
The Makivik Corporation participated in organizing the show, in partnership with the NFC, Mikinak, the Chez Doris women’s shelter, the Open Door homeless outreach organization that serves many of the city’s homeless Inuit people, and the Projet Autochtone Québec, which offers a night shelter for Aboriginal people.
At the Mikinak Co-op, Inuit sculptors – many of whom are extremely poor – have long gathered to enjoy one another’s company and to work on their art. They’re locally known for producing breathtaking work, but have struggled for years to gain compensation reflecting the value of their art.
“The objective behind the project is to develop economic opportunities for the carvers,” Cornez explained. “Makivik has had a plan of action for the last five years to help Inuits in difficulty in Montreal. Mikinak helps the Inuit youth through carving and helps them sell their work through the co-op, and this project is an extension of that.”
Mikinak offers a space where the carvers can work, and Cornez says that Makivik invested to upgrade the space with ventilation in order to allow the carvers to do larger and more personally innovative work.
“But,” she adds, “it’s still a carving room in which you can do pieces of a certain size. We had to rent other carving rooms to do larger pieces, because you’re involving electrical tools, and it creates a lot of dust. So we’re still struggling with all that, but it’s been a great learning experience in that sense – when you produce bigger pieces, you need better ventilation for the carvers, things like that.”
The carvers are used to producing pieces small enough to hold in one hand, so Cornez said they needed at first to be encouraged to take advantage of the larger pieces of stone the Makivik investment in the program provided them.
“We got a grant from the Urban Partnership. We certainly were able to buy nice stones and produce a good show,” she said. “I’ve been pushing them to go big, really big. I say, ‘I’m giving you this stone – use it!’ It’s funny to see the evolution. Now you see the result and we can show the artists: ‘Look at what you’ve done: this is what you were doing before, and here’s what you did today!’ And hopefully we’ll be able to sell them.”
Native and Inuit artists have traditionally found it hard to make a decent profit on their works in Montreal. Many non-Indigenous galleries take a cut of up to 80% of any money earned on their pieces. Following on the fair-trade examples of galleries like the Ashukan Cultural Space and the Canadian Guild of Crafts, Makivik offers the artists a 50/50 split.
“Even with that, they didn’t understand why they were giving so much to us,” Cornez said. “We had to show them what we’re doing – I put in a lot of hours. There’s communications. The carvings don’t sell by themselves. What does it cost to have a gallery, to produce posters? Those are all the things we’re looking at with this project.”
All those aspects are part of the eventual goal of the project, which is to help the carvers mount their own Inuit art space, with a properly outfitted carving area in the back, and a gallery in the front to sell their art.
“This is their dream,” said Cornez, “and this is where we’re going. We want to give them that opportunity to realize their dream. We’re pretty much convinced this is the beginning of a series of Taku. And we hope Taku will grow into the space they want it to be.”