NYC’s MoMA adds artwork by Nunavut artist Shuvinai Ashoona to collection
The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York has acquired two drawings by acclaimed Nunavut artist Shuvinai Ashoona, marking the first time her artwork is entering the museum’s permanent collection.
Feheley Fine Arts, the gallery that represents Ashoona in Toronto, and the MoMA curators jointly announced the acquisition of Full Moon (2008) and My Drawings (2006/07) by the New York cultural institution on Friday.
“MoMA was looking to round out its collection to represent not only work at the beginning like early prints, but also how Inuit art has moved into contemporary drawing, and I think they picked two pieces that not only represent Ashoona’s iconography, but also speak to Inuit tradition,” Elyse Jacobson, an associate at Feheley Fine Arts, told Eye on the Arctic in a phone interview.
Ashoona was born in 1961 in Kinngait in Nunavut where she still lives and works. There she developed a distinct visual language, often favouring coloured pencils and doing large-scale drawings incorporating aspects of Inuit culture along with fantastical, dream-like elements.
Ashoona’s unique style has led to group shows at Art Gallery of Ontario and the National Gallery of Canada; and solo shows across the country at The Power Plant, in Toronto, the Art Gallery of Alberta, the MacKenzie Art Gallery, in Regina and the Nunatta Sunakkutaangit Museum, in Iqaluit and at The Perimeter in London, England.
Her work has also been shown internationally including in Poland and South Korea.
Shuvinai Ashoona received the Art Gallery of Ontario’s 2018 Gershon Iskowitz Prize and a special mention in 2022 from the jury of the 59th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia. In 2024, she received the Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts in Canada.
“I see art in the forms that surround me,” Ashoona said in a video profile by the Canada Council for the Arts at the time of her Governor General Award.
“My forefathers who were artists made us who we are, gave us the eyes to see beauty around us.”
Two-year selection process
Jacobson said the MoMA acquisition was the result of a two-year collaboration that included several visits by the museum’s curators to Toronto.
“They really got to know her work and, with a fine-tooth comb, chose these two pieces specifically,” she said.
In Full Moon, Ashoona depicts a woman’s parka adorned with traditional Inuit tools alongside motifs such as walruses and pebbles.
“There’s so much representation in that drawing,” Jacobson said. “You can learn so much about the culture from the imagery, while it still feels completely in her unique style.”
My Drawings features layered imagery of skin tents, stones, and fantastical creatures in an intricate black-and-white composition.
“It’s a blockbuster piece,” Jacobson said. “It hits all the elements of her iconography—monsters, transformations, and the pebbled landscapes she’s known for.”
Jacobson noted that while MoMA already holds other Inuit works, Ashoona’s drawings extend the museum’s contemporary focus in an important way, offering her modern, imaginative perspective on life and culture in an Arctic Canadian community.
“For an artist living in a tiny hamlet on Baffin Island to now be in places like the MoMA—it’s really something special,” she said.
Comments, tips or story ideas? Contact Eilís at eilis.quinn(at)cbc.ca
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Sweden: New residency invites Indigenous artists to northern Sweden, The Canadian Press
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