For Beaucage, story is medicine. Her more than 40 films hold space for difference, giving voice to those often unheard in mainstream stories. Watch the Canada Council video on her work below (or here)

Go to the Marjorie Beaucage page at the GG Visual Arts & Media Awards, here.

Her recent book of poetry, leave some for the birds, documents her own movements for justice. 

Staats’s photography work combines language, mnemonics, and the landscape of Six Nations. He said he returns there because it was and still is a safe and sacred place for rejuvenation. Staats said he conceptualizes Haudenosaunee culture through relationships of trauma and renewal.

The best way to appreciate Statts’ approach is to view this video, one of eight created by the Canada Council to celebrate the 2024 recipients of the presitigious awards.

Greg Staats website, here.

Governor General’s Awards in Visual and Media Arts, here.

The Inuit printmaker was a national treasure who died in 2013. Kenouak was born in an igloo on the southern coast of Baffin Island in 1927, and is considered one of Canada’s most influential artists.

The Enchanted Owl, a colour stonecut on laid paper, is one of her most recognized works and one of the most enduring and iconic images in Canadian art ( see the video above and on YouTube here.)   It is one of my own favourites and is the logo for Canadian Art Junkie, on the title banner above.

30 Ways to Describe an Owl

Kenojuak’s snowy owls and other Arctic birds are legendary. Scroll through this Inuit Art Foundation list of “30 Ways to Describe an Owl, according to Kenojuak Ashevak“ She rendered the feathers of these birds in elongated and curved lines which radiate outwards with a sense of frenetic energy.

As an early participant in the first Inuit printmaking program, set up by James Houston in Cape Dorset in the late 1950s, Kenoujuak helped define a new aesthetic language with her drawings and prints. Some of her never-before-seen prints in stonecut, lithography and etching are on exhibition through April at Beaverbrook gallery in New Brunswick (here)

In 2004 Kenojuak designed a window for the chapel of Appleby College in Oakville, the first stained glass window ever designed by an Inuit artist (more here) . Titled Iggalaaq (Where the Light Comes Through), the window portrays a large, snowy owl and an arctic char — both symbols of Canada’s north.

Her stylized prints featuring birds, fish, humans, and other animals are perhaps most widely recognized for their presence on postage stamps and currency. But Kenojuak’s intense and imaginative visual language originates in larger-scale drawings, as well as soapstone carvings and textiles.

She is the matriarch of the modern Inuit art movement – exemplifying incredible skill and creativity of the movement based out of Kinngait — formerly Cape Dorset — that Kenojuak helped found.

The nationally touring exhibition of her work through April at the Beaverbrook gallery includes drawings, from the archives of the West Baffin Eskimo Cooperative, which inspired some of Kenojuak’s most emblematic prints. (Above, video of the catalog)

Nearly every Cape Dorset Annual Print Release since 1959 and until her death in 2013, has featured work by Kenojuak. Her images have been exhibited throughout Canada, United States, France, Germany, United Kingdom, Switzerland, Czech Republic, Sweden, South Korea and Japan among other countries. Her work is in numerous public and private collections internationally.

Dorset Fine Arts / Kenojuak Ashevak, here

At the National Gallery of Canada, here.

Travelling exhibition site, here.

Heritage Minute (video) on CBC, here.

This is No. 60 in 150 Artists, an ongoing series on Canadian artists you should know.

Done with oil pastel animation by Inuk artist Megan Kyak-Monteith, it paints the childhood memories of Taqralik Partridge over how English caused the loss of her grandmother’s Scottish Gaelic and her father’s Inuktitut languages.

It’s part of How to Lose Everything, an Indigenous series of animated films here.

About Megan Kyak-Monteith, here.

Grape Soda in the Parking Lot is the fifth and final episode in the series of Indigenous animated short films, How to Lose Everything. The story behind the series, here.

With 12 festivals and counting, Grape Soda in the Parking Lot has been on big screens around the world and is now available on YouTube and on on CBC Gem.

Directed by @mk.monteith and Taqralik Partridge
Written and performed by Taqralik Partridge
Music by Inge Thomson