It’s not often that two interests as seemingly
divergent as art and hockey collide, but when I strolled into the store at
Traverse City Michigan’s Dennos Museum Center several years ago and spotted a
small print of a jubilant Inuit hockey player celebrating his success on an
outdoor rink, this huge hockey fan had to have it.
The colorful print hangs in my family room and
reminds me of the fabulous Inuit art collection housed at Dennos. We recently
revisited the museum, finding the Inuit Art Gallery and rest of the museum collection
as beautiful and interesting as ever.
Dennos Museum Center opened in 1991 on the campus of
Northwestern Michigan College and received the Governor’s Award for Arts and
Culture from ArtServe Michigan in 2000.
Dennos has three changing exhibit galleries, a
sculpture court, and a hands-on kid-friendly Discovery Gallery that features an
interactive Weiss Wall where touching various panels produces different musical
notes and tones. The museum also treats the grounds as a public gallery, by
showing several large installations in the outdoor area surrounding the
building.
We’ve enjoyed visiting the museum’s changing
collections over the years, including some interesting photography shows like a
recent showing of Andy Warhol photos, but my favorite gallery remains the
showroom dedicated to the museum’s well-regarded collection of Inuit art.
The Inuit Art Gallery started as a rare collection
of Inuit carvings owned by Wilbur Munnecke and donated to the Osterlin Library
on NMC’s campus. Munnecke, a Chicago publishing executive who summered in
nearby Leland, donated the collection in 1960.
The library organized an exhibition and sale of the
carvings to finance a permanent exhibition of the remaining carvings, as well
as newly purchased Inuit stone-cut and stencil prints.
By 1964, the Canadian government designated the museum
as an official Inuit art outlet in the United States.
The collection remained at the library for 30 years
before moving to the then-new Dennos Museum Center.
Today, the collection holds 1,000 objects that
include: original stone-cut, stencil and lithograph prints; drawings;
sculptures of whalebone and stone; textiles and other artifacts. Dennos,
regarded as the most historically complete collection of Contemporary Inuit Art
in the United States, showcases selected items from the large collection on a rotating
basis.
Indigenous people in the Arctic regions of Canada
and Alaska, as well as other locations like Greenland and Russia, produce much
of the Inuit art.
Much of the Inuit art in the Dennos collection comes
from Cape Dorset, the self-billed Capital of Inuit Art. Cape Dorset is a small
community of 1,200 residents (as of 2006) near the southern tip of Baffin
Island in Nunavut, Canada that became a hub for Inuit drawing, carving and
printmaking in the 1950s. Printmaking and carving still drive Cape Dorset’s economy
today, with the largest percentage (22 percent) of the community’s labor force employed
in the arts.
Yukon-based batik artist Lynn Blaikie created my “Hockey
Night” print. Blaikie grew up in southern Ontario, moving to the Yukon
Territory at age 18. She discovered batik while living in a small, now-vacated,
mining community called Elsa. Blaikie fell in love with the vibrant colors of
batik that brightened some very dark days for her when the town endured a
nine-month mining strike.
The museum store has a small collection of Inuit
art, including some large prints, on sale. They also offer some Inuit pieces,
primarily small carvings, for sale online.
Dennos Museum Center visitors should also search out
the museum’s excellent Inuit Art Collection brochure, with information about Inuit
life and culture, as well as details of collection’s history and an overview of
Inuit Art from the Prehistoric period 4,000 to 5,000 years ago through the contemporary
era.
© Dominique King 2009
