Annie Pootoogook, a Canadian Inuit artist, was found dead in the Rideau River on Sept. 19.
Pootoogook was a renowned artist, using techniques involving pen, ink, and crayon. She was known for the honest and sincere depictions she created of Inuit culture.
Born in Cape Dorset in 1969 to a family of artists, Pootoogook moved to Ottawa in 2007 after her rise to Canadian fame in 2006.
Her breakthrough was marked by winning the $50,000 Sobey Art Award. While her artwork was being exhibited in numerous galleries, she became the first Inuit artist to participate in Germany’s Documenta in 2006. She also had a solo exhibit in The National Museum of the American Indian from 2009 to 2010.
In the midst of her fame, Pootoogook began sinking into a life of homelessness and struggle, eventually resorting to selling her artwork on the street.
But this is not what Heather Anderson, Carleton University Art Gallery’s curator, wants her to be remembered for.
“Annie Pootoogook’s death is a tragedy and points to larger systemic issues that we need to address as a society,” Anderson said via email. “She shared a lot of herself and life through the personal, candid nature of her art.”
Anderson emphasized the influence that Pootoogook’s art had on people, and the contribution that it made to Inuit, Canadian, and international art.
“Her art helped to—and will continue to—build bridges between people living in Canada’s north and south,” Anderson said.
“In a way, her art holds up a mirror to the south’s non-Inuit populations, for the way it makes us cognizant of the many assumptions and stereotypes we hold about Inuit culture and life in the North,” Anderson added. “Her art simultaneously reflects many very different, as well as shared experiences between northern and southern, Inuit and non-Inuit life.”
Heather Igloliorte, a Carleton graduate and Inuk art historian, created a tribute website for Pootoogook. The website says Pootoogook’s work revealed the realities of Inuit life.
According to Igloliorte, Pootoogook’s art “brought in new audiences, and new understanding of what Inuit art could be, while showing the north to the south in a manner it had never been seen before.”
A tribute to Pootoogook was held on Oct. 4 during a vigil for missing and murdered Indigenous women.
Ottawa police are now treating Pootoogook’s death as suspicious, despite initially ruling her death as non-suspicious when her body was discovered.
