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
Dominique,
I really like your "Hockey Night" print. Hmm...it would be nice to have a baseball one. :)
What a great post. I'm also checking out the links.
Posted by: gypsyscarlett | February 24, 2009 at 03:36 PM
Gypsy-I couldn't resist "Hockey Night"...I had it framed at a local frame store, and the framer managed to find framing material and a mat that pretty closely matches the blues in the print.
Posted by: Dominique | February 26, 2009 at 02:55 PM