CMA Outstanding Achievement
Stewardship of Collections
For excellence in stewardship of collections, for example, in their physical care, in the preservation of intangible culture heritage, including relevant digital practices and documentation
McMichael Canadian Art Collection | Kinngait Archive
Drawing from the Kinngait Archive. Photo — McMichael Canadian Art Collection.
McMichael has been the custodian of the Kinngait (formerly Cape Dorset) Drawings Archive since 1990. The Archive is a unique corpus of 89,000 drawings made between the 1950s and 1980s, a period of dramatic transformation of Inuit way of life when patterns of seasonal relocation gave way to life in permanent community settings. For decades, Kinngait prints, now well known throughout the world, were derived from these drawings.
Digitization of the Archive was essential to enabling the preservation and broad access to this unique body of work, especially to its home community of Kinngait and to the artists’ descendants. Over the course of eight years, funding was secured from many different sources to digitize the Archive and to build an accessible website to publish them online.
Digitization moved very slowly until McMichael partnered with Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky, who had developed a technology that could efficiently digitize two-dimensional art at high resolution. Nearly 25,000 drawings were digitized using this platform in late 2019 and early 2020; the remaining 60,000 drawings were digitized in 2023.
The website that hosts the Archive is low-bandwidth-enabled and trilingual (English, French and Inuktitut), providing the opportunity for Inuit in Kinngait and across the north, as well as a global audience, to access the Archive.
The digitization of the archive has enabled McMichael’s Associate Curator, Indigenous Art and Culture Emily Laurent Henderson to curate a large-scale exhibition. It will be presented at McMichael in Spring 2025, accompanied by a major catalogue.
“This project fulfills the promise that McMichael made to the West Baffin Eskimo Cooperative in 1990 when we were entrusted with the stewardship of the Kinngait (Cape Dorset) Drawings Archive. It was a very ambitious and meaningful undertaking for us, and we are honoured to have that recognized by the CMA.”
— Jennifer Withrow, Deputy Chief Curator, McMichael Canadian Art Collection
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