Born 1961, Kinngait, Qikiqtaaluk Region
Hailing from a long tradition of painters, printmakers, and stone carvers, Inuit artist Shuvinai Ashoona (b. 1961) creates her work at the Kinngait Studios. The community-run art-making cooperative and her fellow Studio members–her aunts Napachie Pootoogook, Mayoreak Ashoona, and Kenojuak Ashevak–have made a profound influence on her art. Working primarily with colored pencils, Ashoona explores historical and contemporary Inuit life situated in dreamlike landscapes, in which imagery associated with animism and shamanism is intertwined with ATVs, Walkmans, and camping gear. Ashoona’s works have always been unplanned and free-flowing: she describes her process as “not knowing what [a drawing] really means. Just making it appear.”
Ashoona first came to prominence in the late 1990s, when her work was included in the 1997 Cape Dorset Annual Print Collection. Recent solo presentations of her work include When I Draw at The Perimeter, London (2024), Holding on to Universes at Centre for Contemporary Arts, Glasgow (2020), and Mapping Worlds, organized by the Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery, Toronto (2019), which toured venues across Canada. Her work is in a number of public collections including the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, the Winnipeg Art Gallery, the Canadian Museum of History, Ottawa/Gatineau, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and the National Museum of the American Indian, Washington DC. In 2018, Ashoona received the prestigious Gershon Iskowitz Prize.
