Few inhabited places on earth are as forbidding as where the Inuit live in the extreme north of Canada: a treeless land of sunless, minus-60 winters and cold muddy summers. This may seem like a world totally alien to people on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, but these two very different areas share some things in common. They’re parts of the same flyway. The Inuits’ Canada geese are Maryland’s Canada geese.
In July, visitors to the Dorchester Art Center in Cambridge can get a glimpse into that fiercely cold world, including Inuit depictions of Canada geese and other wildlife.
Jane and Steve Bailey of Tilghman Island, who collect and sell Inuit art, will be sharing their collection and some of their for-sale pieces in a show called “Sea, Land and Sky: Arctic Art.” It opens on Friday, July 5; an opening reception will be held on Saturday, July 6, from 5:00 p.m. to 7:30.
At the reception, which is sponsored by the Wednesday Morning Artists of Cambridge, gallery-goers will hear a presentation on Inuit art from Bernadette Driscoll Engelstad, an independent curator of Inuit art and cultural history. She has worked closely with Inuit artists and art-producing communities across the Canadian Arctic, organizing exhibitions at many museums in Canada and the United States, including the recent exhibition “Arctic Journeys/Ancient Memories: The Sculpture of Abraham Anghik Ruben” for the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian. She is a research collaborator with the Arctic Studies Center at the Smithsonian Institution.
The Baileys, who sell Inuit art through their online gallery, BaileyMajorArt.com, started collecting in 1996 when they happened upon a gallery of Inuit art during a visit to Vancouver, B.C. For the next 15 years, they added to their collection, buying at galleries in New York and Canada.
She said that in addition to showing Inuit life, legends and Arctic wildlife, the way these images are handled is unique. “Much of it depicts reality in a very different way from what we’re used to in the European tradition of art,” she said. “For example, some prints depict the inside and the outside of an igloo simultaneously, or show a scene from different perspectives at the same time.”
The Baileys focus on Inuit prints, all of them created in small editions by hand. Many are stone cuts, made by inscribing the image on a flat stone, inking it and pressing paper onto it. Others are stencils, etchings, aquatints and lithographs, all made in art studios in Arctic communities.
These Inuit graphics are a relatively new art form. For centuries, the Inuit people live nomadic lives and their only art was small, easily transported hand-held carvings. After World War II, that nomadic life was ending and the Canadian government wanted to make it possible for the Inuit to live on their own lands in new communities. The government hired John Houston, a Canadian who had studied print-making in Japan, to promote art creation as a livelihood among the Inuit.
The exhibition will run through Saturday, July 27. Two other exhibitions will be simultaneous with the Inuit show: watercolors by Kurt Plinke and driftwood art by Lynn Cegelski. On Saturday, July 13, the gallery will have a SecondSaturday Artists Reception from 5:30 p.m. to 7:30.
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