Inuit Prints: Japanese Inspiration

Featuring exquisite and extraordinarily rare Inuit and Japanese prints from the late 1950s and early 1960s, this exhibition tells the little-known story of how, fifty years ago, the Canadian artist and “discoverer” of Inuit art, James Houston, traveled to Japan to study printmaking with one of the leading printmakers, Hiratsuka Un’ichi.  

Through his apprenticeship at Hiratsuka’s studio, Houston learned new print techniques which he brought to artists in Cape Dorset upon returning to the north in 1959. The five original artists in the Cape Dorset studio selectively borrowed and actively transformed these Japanese influences, adapting “foreign” print methods—inventing new ones—to fit their local circumstances. Cape Dorset released its first official collection of prints in the fall of 1959, the start of a fifty-year artistic odyssey.