This Winnipeg art gallery is a monument to Inuit culture
Qaumajuq is not only an artwork gallery or a trendy feat of structure. It is far more.
It’s inconceivable to divorce Qaumajuq from Canadian historical past itself. The $55-million, 36,000-square-foot addition to the Winnipeg Artwork Gallery, or WAG, opened in March of 2021, housing the museum’s 14,000 everlasting items of Inuit artwork—and eight,000 extra on long-term mortgage. It’s now the world’s largest public assortment of Inuit artwork, and a beacon of reconciliation mirrored by its Inuktitut title: pronounced “KOW-mah-yourk,” it means “it’s brilliant, it’s lit.”
The work of discovering a house for the gathering started seven a long time in the past, when the gallery began buying carvings. “The WAG is 110 years previous,” says Stephen Borys, Qaumajuq’s director and CEO. “Are you able to ever actually decolonize a colonial establishment? That’s up for debate. However you’ll be able to deliver important voices to the desk.”
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The Los Angeles–based mostly architect Michael Maltzan, who designed the gallery, was impressed by a 2013 analysis journey to Baffin Island, led by the WAG’s long-time curator of Inuit artwork, Darlene Coward Wight. Connected to Qaumajuq’s exterior is an undulating construction paying homage to the Cumberland Sound icebergs Maltzan noticed on his voyage. “After I got here again, the principle query was: how do I make one thing that infers the dimensions of the place the place the artwork is made?” he says.
The design workforce selected Bethel white granite from Vermont for the highest two-thirds of Qaumajuq’s facade, and flanked the primary 20 ft of the constructing’s perimeter in glass, which contrasts with the WAG’s windowless modernist exterior. The glass additionally provides guests a direct glimpse of the show-stopping Seen Vault, a three-storey curved construction displaying shut to five,000 stone and bone sculptures.
The areas inside Qaumajuq have their very own Inuktitut names. Jocelyn Piirainen, the museum’s affiliate curator of Inuit artwork, labored with the WAG’s Indigenous Advisory Circle, Inuit Elders and language keepers throughout the naming course of. “The doorway corridor is known as Ilavut, which interprets to ‘our relations,’ ” says Piirainen, who’s Inuk herself.
Members of Inuit communities acquired an early preview of the WAG’s assortment, an area the place the artwork of the North, their homeland, will likely be protected and celebrated. “It was fantastic to see them uncover that their households’ work was in our assortment,” Piirainen says. “It can hopefully encourage them to create issues of their very own.”
Skylights
Qilak is an 8,000-square-foot gallery whose title means “sky” in Inuktitut. It has 22 huge skylights—one in every of some ways Maltzan introduced the surface in. They every measure 12 ft in diameter and 16 ft tall, and the sunshine inside is subtly altered by passing clouds.
Seen Vault
The glass vault has 492 cabinets, displaying carvings from greater than 1,000 artists and 31 northern communities. Its three-storey construction—two above floor and one under, the place bone and antler sculptures are shielded from damaging mild—showcases conservators, curators and researchers working of their aspect.
Exterior
Qaumajuq’s facade was impressed by the icebergs of Cumberland Sound.
The Skeletoned Caribou (1974)
This work by William Noah, a graphic artist from Baker Lake, Nunavut, is a part of Qaumajuq’s current INUA exhibition.
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Michael Maltzan
Maltzan is the founder and principal architect on the Los Angeles–based mostly agency Michael Maltzan Structure. His different notable initiatives embrace the Star Residences complicated in L.A. and MoMA QNS in New York.
This text seems in print within the June 2022 subject of Maclean’s journal with the headline, “Northern publicity.” Subscribe to the month-to-month print journal here.
