Cape Dorset Prints - Kinngait Prints

The Kinngait Printmaking Studios

More than 1200 people live in Kinngait and most families count with one's one artist or more as carver, printer or drawer. The Kinngait hamlet is well-known on the international art market as the major art centre in the Canadian Arctic.

Kinngait-miut (people who live in Kinngait) launched out in printmaking creation fifty years ago when the first studio opened there. In 1959 was found the West-Baffin Eskimo Co-operative by the Inuit own selves to control the artworks distribution outside the Inuit territories and locally redistribute the profit of the sales.

Prints are realized in two studios depending the printmaking technique used: there is a studio for stonecut and another one for lithograph where work between five and ten printmakers in each studio.

The prints are one of their important methods of storytelling, thus continuing the transmission of traditional knowledge. These prints record Inuit family and individual histories, or their feelings about oral myths. They show with pride the Inuit territories, their animals and spirit creatures from the shamanic world.