I'm a big fan of the work of Inuit artist Alice Nanogak (1925-2001), including for her fantastic illustrations for the book of Inuit folk tales,"Tales of the Igloo," several copies of which I've had in the shop--and which I need to find a few more of! I've also had a couple of other prints from the same series as this one, hand-printed at the Holman Eskimo Co-operative in Holman, NWT, c. 1970s, and executed in dark green ink on rice paper. I really love the interplay of positive and negative on this, and especially the wonderful composition of this girl's parka--and the detail of her braided hair! And then this sweet fish jumping up through the hole in the ice to catch her line.
Paper size: 9 x 6 1/8". Framed: 13 3/8" x 9 3/4". The print, which is backed by a piece of gray stock with the Holman logo, is simply floated atop of piece of black construction paper and placed in a simple black stained wooden frame, but having a new mat cut at least would probably be a good idea. The print is in very good condition, with tape on the backside adhering the print to the Holman backing paper visible at top corners through the thin cream colored paper.
A little bio: Alice Nanogak (Goose) was born in the Baillie Islands, Northwest Territories and settled in Holman with her family when she was 14 years old. Her mother was a Mackenzie Delta Inuit and her father from Alaska, who travelled to the Canadian Arctic with Icelandic explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson (1879-1962). Nanogak was one of the first artists to provide drawings for The Holman Eskimo Co-operative-- founded by a group of artists and Father Henri Tardy, an Oblate missionary, in 1961-which released their first set of prints in 1965, and to which she continued to contribute work for prints for several decades. Her work includes original illustrations for two books of Inuit legends, "Tales from the Igloo" in 1972 and "More Tales from the Igloo" (1986), which she also narrated. In 1985 she received an honorary degree from Mount Saint Vincent University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, and was honored with a retrospective at Winnipeg Art Gallery in 2002.
