Workshopped

In the mid-1950s, on the southwestern coast of Baffin Island, the artist and filmmaker James Houston saw Kenojuak Ashevak, a young Inuit artisan, walking along the beach with a sealskin bag on her shoulder. “It was not unlike other bags I had seen Inuit carrying,” Houston later wrote in Confessions of an Igloo Dweller, “but hers had something on it.” That something, she told him, was an appliqué design of a “rabbit thinking of eating seaweed.” After a few days, he brought pencils and paper to a community dance and handed them to Ashevak, asking her to draw the bag’s design. At this point, Houston had worked for the Arctic Division of Ottawa’s Department of Mines and Resources for a couple of years, with a mandate to develop a crafts industry. He would exceed expectations.

Ashevak went on to become the first woman to create a drawing for Kinngait Studios, which Houston established with the help of Kananginak Pootoogook, a printmaker. With their inaugural...