Baffin print shops face uncertain future

For nearly 40 years Inuit-made prints helped sustain aboriginal culture while providing many northern artists with a comfortable livelihood. But waning interest in the industry among younger Inuit and a lack of financial support could soon bring the era of Inuit printmaking to a close.

“There’s not much fat left on the caribou,” Terry Ryan, manager of the West Baffin Eskimo Cooperative in Cape Dorset says of the print shop’s future.

The 1997 Cape Dorset Annual Collection recently hit galleries across North America, and serious art collectors all over the world eagerly snatched up this year’s prints.

Sales of works by Kenojuak Ashevak, Mary Pudlat, Napachie Pootoogook, and other well-known printmakers regularly bring in around $300,000 a year into the community.

But these printmakers are becoming older ­ and it’s not certain how long some of them may continue to produce.

Printmakers getting older

Efforts have been made to bring in the younger generation with workshops and other special activities.

But Jimmy Manning, manager of the print shop, says young people lack the huge store of traditional knowledge that older printmakers have called on for their images.

And many, he says, don’t even live at home or have much contact with community elders or their collective experience.

“It’s hard for them to fill up a blank piece of paper,” says Manning.

Younger artists, he adds, are also used to the immediate return that comes from carving sales. Although established printers may receive an hourly stipend, new print shop artists must rely on actual sales, which often don’t come in until a long time after the initial creative effort.

What’s lacking to bridge this gap, according to the Baffin co-op staff, is the government support that helped develop commercial Inuit art in the first place.

The West Baffin cooperative was started back in 1957 as a federal project, but since 1967 has been independent of all major financial assistance.

And Inuit birthright organizations have not yet shown any interest in helping out, say Ryan and Manning.

Meanwhile, Pangnirtung’s Uqqurmiut Artists Association faces a similar, but slightly different, set of challenges.

The association has excellent facilities, including a new $800,000. print shop that opened in May, 1996, but production is recovering from a 1994 fire that destroyed valuable equipment. That still hasn’t been fully replaced.

Although there are younger printmakers involved at the Pangnirtung shop and local high school art students regularly come in to observe and learn, the input from an older generation of artists is missed.

“We’re losing so many elders,” says Rose Okpik, the president of the Uqqurmiut Artists Association. “They used to do drawings for the printmakers. They were working very closely with us. Their drawings were more spiritual and told stories.”

The printmaking shop and other activities of the Uqqurmiut Artists Association also got money from the NWT Development Corporation, which holds 49 per cent ownership of the business.

Government support

“This place wouldn’t survive without government funding,” says general manager Geoff Ryan.

And that’s the real challenge for this print shop, to develop broader markets for its products.

This year’s print collection will be released in May instead of September, with the hope of selling to visiting tourists. These prints will also be sold via a “cybermall” on the Internet for Canadian aboriginal products.

Managers at both the Cape Dorset and Pangnirtung print shops are concerned about this art form’s future.

Printmaking stopped in the Nunavik community of Puvirnituq because of dwindling support, and the print shop in Holman is struggling to stay afloat.

“The return on print shops just isn’t great,” says Ryan. “And we can’t cajole and entice another generation to express itself graphically alone.”