The Collection

Shuvinai Ashoona is an Inuk artist celebrated for dense, meticulous drawings in pen, colored pencil, and ink that fuse everyday life in Inuit Nunangat with expansive, speculative worlds. Grounded in the land and community of Kinngait—yet unbound by realism—her compositions braid northern topographies, family interiors, and town scenes with shapeshifting beings, planetary births, and hybrid creatures. Human, animal, spirit, and cosmos coexist on the page, rendering a living cosmology where memory, ancestry, and contemporary Inuit experience are continuously in conversation.

Working daily through Kinngait Studios since the mid-1990s and drawing from a distinguished artistic lineage (Pitseolak, Kiugak, Sorosilutu, and Napachie Ashoona; cousin Annie Pootoogook), Ashoona has evolved a singular visual language: panoramic, teeming, and exacting in its detail. Her worlds feel both local and universal—maps of place and psyche—where the scale of the Arctic meets the intimacy of domestic space, and where the ordinary tilts into the visionary.

Ashoona’s collaborative spirit—seen in projects with artists such as Shary Boyle and John Noestheden—extends her imagery into shared myth-making across cultures and media. Her work has been widely recognized in Canada and internationally; selected honors include election to the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts (2016), the Gershon Iskowitz Prize (2019), a Special Mention at the 59th Venice Biennale (2022), and the Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts (2024).