Wednesday, January 16, 2013

Academy Award nomination, 1964.




Kenojuak Ashevak, one of Canada’s most acclaimed graphic artists, died recently at the age 
of 85. At the time of her death, the Inuit art pioneer was living in a wood-frame house in 
Kinngait (Cape Dorset) on Baffin Island, not far from the igloo where she was born, in a camp 
area known as Ikirisaq.
Through her long and fruitful career, which spanned five decades and spawned 
thousands of drawings, etchings, and prints, many of them well-known, Ashevak received 
many great honours, among them the Order of Canada, membership to the Royal Canadian 
Academy of the Arts, two honorary doctorates, and induction, in 2001, to Canada’s Walk 
of Fame.
One of the NFB's documentary shorts, Eskimo Artist: Kenojuak (1963), captured the 
beauty and power of Ashevak’s work. The film, just over nineteen minutes in length, was 
nominated for an Academy Award in 1964. It follows the artist as she travels by dog team 
from her winter camp to Cape Dorset, to oversee stonecut prints being done after a drawing 
she made.

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