A bright new day for the WAG Striking Qaumajuq Inuit art centre prepares to open doors to 'transformational' link between North and south to heal, inspire and fuel understanding By: Alan Small Posted: 7:00 PM CST Thursday, Mar. 11, 2021

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The Winnipeg Art Gallery showed just how bright and lit Qaumajuq is on Thursday.

Qaumajuq, which means “it is bright, it is lit” in Inuktitut, is the curvy, new 40,000 square-foot building the gallery has finished building beside its original home on Memorial Boulevard. The white granite-clad addition is devoted to Inuit art, and a virtual gallery tour held during a press conference offered glimpses of its architectural and artistic highlights.

It also announced a three-day grand opening that begins March 25 and includes an opening to all on March 27.

“Qaumajuq is connected to the WAG building on all levels,” said Stephen Borys, the WAG’s director and chief executive officer. “Qaumajuq also connects Canada’s North and south, promoting sharing and understanding and bringing communities together in the universal language of art.”

The new building’s highlights include a huge main gallery, Qilak — “sky” in Inuktitut — and its three-storey-tall ceiling. On Thursday morning its 22 skylights allowed light in to shine on the large art installations that are part of INUA, Qaumajuq’s inaugural exhibition.

Perhaps Qaumajuq’s most permanent artistic feature is its visible vault, which dominates the centre’s lobby. The three-storey glass structure exhibits nearly 5,000 stone sculptures assembled by the WAG and the Nunavut government. Prior to Qaumajuq, they had been mostly kept in the WAG’s private vault for safekeeping.

The virtual tour focused mostly on Qaumajuq’s striking architecture, which was designed by Michael Maltzan of Los Angeles. He said Thursday that a visit with Inuit artists and to northern communities such as Iqaluit, Nunavut’s capital, brought inspiration to the plan, and he showed a photograph of dozens of exterior proposals that were created and scrapped before the final wavy design was chosen.

“We studied many shapes and forms in the design process, searching for the right one that would create two unique buildings that also seem to strengthen each other,” Maltzan said, adding how much he admires the quality of Winnipeg’s light.

“It’s such a presence and a beauty, just like the light of the North. The scallops of the building’s facade allow the light and shadows to animate the facade while the white granite’s colour and texture were chosen to interact with the range of colour and the quality of light across the year.”

One of the driving forces behind Qaumajuq has been the calls from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, which included a commitment to preserve and promote Aboriginal languages and cultures. Borys said museums and galleries were among the institutions needing to examine their colonial assumptions and structures and change the way they present works.

“Qaumajuq is a response to the TRC’s calls to action,” Borys said. “This is a transformational shift in our way of thinking, doing and being. Throughout the development of the centre, we have declared loudly that art is a voice, it reflects and shapes our experiences.

“Art heals and inspires and fuels understanding.”

The WAG has added Indigenous and Inuit staff in recent years and has presented more exhibitions by Indigenous artists across Canada.

For INUA, it commissioned artists who represent the four regions of the Inuit Nunangat to serve as co-curators: Heather Igloliorte is an Inuk from Nunatsiavut, in Labrador; asinnajaq is from Nunavik in northern Quebec: Kablusiak hails from the western Arctic; and Krista Ulujuk Zawadski, curator for Inuit art for Nunavut, represents the Inuit of the central and eastern Arctic.

Igloliorte is also an art history professor at Montreal’s Concordia University and, along with University of Winnipeg prof Julie Nagam, co-chairs the WAG’s Indigenous advisory circle. She said INUA’s 100 works by 90 artists from Canada’s Arctic, Alaska and Greenland will challenge people’s perception of Inuit art.

“Emerging artists are celebrated alongside more senior and even elder artists,” she said. “It really speaks to where we come from and what we are grounded in as Inuit.”

The COVID-19 pandemic has forced the WAG to adjust its opening plans for Qaumajuq. A virtual celebration on March 25 at 6:30 p.m., that includes Indigenous performers from North and south, will be part of a presentation filmed by Eagle Vision, a Winnipeg-based television and film production company.

On March 26 at 6:30 p.m., elders from Inuit, First Nations and Métis communities across Canada will take part in Indigenous ceremonies that include welcoming Qaumajuq and the artworks to Treaty 1 territory.

Qaumajuq opens to the public March 27 from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. There is free admission that day — it is a Canada Life Free day at the WAG and Qaumajuq — but it will have timed ticketing to ensure the galleries follow provincial pandemic guidelines, which allow museums and galleries to open at 25 per cent capacity. Masks are mandatory.

alan.small@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter:@AlanDSmall