Article

Kananginak Pootoogook

Published Online April 3, 2012

Last Edited March 4, 2015

In 1980 Kananginak Pootoogook was elected a member of the Royal Canadian Academy of the Arts, and in 2010 he was the recipient of a National Aboriginal Achievement Award.
Kananginak Pootoogook
President of the West-Baffin Co-operative, in Cape Dorset, Nunavut in 1960. Image: Rosemary Gilliat Eaton / Library and Archives Canada/e010975349-v8.
Kananginak Pootoogook
Image: Rosemary Gilliat Eaton / Library and Archives Canada/ 3964367.
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Kananginak Pootoogook, sculptor, designer, draughtsman, printmaker (born at Ikerrasak camp, South Baffin I, NWT 1935; died at Ottawa 23 Nov 2010). Son of the great camp leader Pootoogook, he came to Cape Dorset in 1957. In 1958, when James Houston brought printmaking to the North, he became one of the 4 original printers. Kananginak worked in all media, but he excelled as an engraver and lithographer, particularly of wildlife art, which he has mastered completely while retaining a personal style with definite abstract qualities. Later, he made baroquely detailed sculptures, exhibiting the same skill that he showed in his engravings.

Eider Ducks
Lithograph on paper by Kananginak Pootoogook, Cape Dorset (University of Lethbridge Art Collection).

In 1980 Kananginak Pootoogook was elected a member of the Royal Canadian Academy of the Arts, and in 2010 he was the recipient of a National Aboriginal Achievement Award.

Kananginak Pootoogook
Cape Dorset Inuit artist Kananginak Pootoogook. Image: Library and Archives Canada.

See also Inuit Printmaking.