Curating Culture: Curator Emily Henderson on Indigenous Sovereignty in the Arts

Hi everyone and welcome back to this week's episode of the Artilogue. Today I'm chatting with Emily Henderson, a Guelph-based Greenlandic Inuk and Settler. Curator and writer, a 2020 University of British Columbia graduate in anthropology, emily's work and writing centers Inuit and Indigenous self-determination in the arts. Her writing has appeared in titles such as the Inuit Art Quarterly, azure Studio Magazine and more. Her debut collection of poetry, hold Steady my Vision, was published in 2024 by Publication Studio Guelph. Emily is currently the Associate Curator of Indigenous Art and the McMichael Canadian Art Collection and was previously a member of the Indigenous and Canadian Curatorial Team at the Art Gallery of Ontario. She's currently working closely with the 90,000-piece Kinnite Drawings Archive at the McMichael, and her latest show, worlds on Paper, opens tomorrow at the McMichael, march 8, 2025. Emily, welcome to the Art-O-Log.

Hi, thanks so much for having me. How did you become a curator? So it's a funny story. It's one of these things where I had set out a goal in my mind many, not many, years ago, because I'm still early in my career. I began working in museums, I'd seen, when I was at the Museum of Anthropology in Vancouver and I was brought on as a museum assistant, which meant that I worked mostly in the gift shop, which was really exciting for me at the time because I had been studying anthropology at the school. I'd been there already for about four years and Museum of Anthropology was this mecca space that I knew that I wanted to get into, and I remember having really interesting conversations while I was there. I think sometimes people consider a gift shop to be a little bit of the afterthought in a museum, but to me that was where people would come through after they'd been exposed to all kinds of different ideas in the museum, and then they'd want to come through and know more. Either they'd want to take home a memento or, more often than not, they'd want to come through and take home a book. We had quite an extensive library of offerings. So I started having really interesting conversations with people there and noticed that there was this great communication aspect that was happening there.

I've always had an interest in museums. From the time that I was young that was something I used to do with my family and my parents was go to museums and really realizing at that time I would have been about 21 years old that, wow, you get a chance to be a translator when you work in museums years old, that, wow, you get a chance to be a translator when you work in museums, people are coming through and you get to break down complex ideas or complex history and do it in a way that's digestible and interesting and engaging. And so I got a little bit of my first taste of that, and that was then. At that point I decided I'm like one day I want to be a curator. At that time I was starting to get to know a few of the members of the curatorial team of Museum of Anthropology and I figured that the curatorial would be many years down the road with me, maybe into my 30s or 40s. I did not expect when I set that intention this is six years ago now that I would be working as a curator in the capacity that I am, and then I started doing one of the greatest things that I could have ever done for myself, and I was applying for jobs that I was in no way qualified for, and if there was anything that any young people that could take away from this, it's absolutely just the worst that can be said to you is no, I'll apply for the job. And I was working at this time at the Museum of Anthropology and then I was also quite involved in my department at the anthropology department at the University of British Columbia, and I was the co-editor, along with one of my other classmates, for the Ethnograph, which was our student journal. So at this point I have a little bit of museum experience, I have a little bit of editing experience, and a job opportunity comes up for the Inward Art Quarterly, which is the only magazine dedicated to circumpolar arts, and they're looking for an editor at large. So they're based in Toronto.

This time I was based in Vancouver and I remember thinking to myself I'm like, oh, this is perfect for me, because I now have, at that point, maybe three months of editing experience under my belt. I'd worked in museums. I grew up, my father was an inward artist, so to me I was just like great. This sounds like a perfect opportunity and I applied for it, even though it was well beyond my experience level, and I did not get that job with the Inward Art Foundation, but I did get a student role through that initial application that I made and that was funded by the Inward Futures Sure Grant. So that is another program that I totally credit with some of the beginnings of my time working in the arts and my beginnings of my time working security. So through that program and through being able to work with the Inward Art Foundation as a student, I got exposed really early on in my career to a lot of exciting things, so I got to go to Venice Biennale in 2019.

When I was 22 years old, I was able to work really closely on publication and I would say that those sort of early experiences in both working with the MOA and working in publication set the foundation for everything that was to do down the line. I was with the Internet Art Foundation for two years and then I would move on to a period of time with the Indigenous Curatorial Collective where I worked as an executive assistant, and so that was like that sort of felt like the next step towards this ultimate goal and dream in my head is I want to work in curatorial. So this is a way that I can sit and be in communication with curators and I can learn from curators, learn from people that work in curatorial and see what this is all about. And during that time, because I had a great gift where we were working on four-day work week, which gave me Friday to pursue all kinds of other things, and this was actually a really pivotal moment in my career because that was, I think, the bulk of my freelancing half of that, so I was producing written texts all the time. I was writing quite a lot. Then I wrote for CMag and StudioMag.

I did write a little bit more for the Inward Quarterly and then another opportunity came up on the horizon that I was in no way qualified for, and that was the Associate Curator of Indigenous Art, inward Art Focus at the Art Gallery of Ontario. And again, knowing I'm not qualified for this but the worst people could say is, no, the best case opportunity, they have my resume, I apply, and this is where so much of my career is really I have to give thanks to really powerful oftentimes women that have opened the door for me, and that was Wanda Nanablish of the Art Gallery of Ontario, that even though I wasn't quite in the career space that I could handle that commitment, I was totally in the career space to start on as a curatorial assistant. So she made sure that I got a role there at the AGO and from that point on I joined the curatorial team, the Art Gallery of Ontario, which was a really formative experience. And there I worked further with Takerlick Partridge, who I'd worked with before the Nordic Quarterly and other sort of other endeavors in my professional life, and I got to be nurtured by her and she was the one that sort of gave me my first gallery space to curate and that's actually currently still on view at the Art Gallery of Ontario. It's a Lucy Kanayi work show that's hung right now until February.

And so during this time I'm still continuing to write and that was when I got a commission to write for the McMichael Canadian art collection and that was I wrote on the 90,000 piece archival collection of drawings from Kianite Nunavut. So I went there, I produced a 2000 word essay for early days which is a massive like 70 plus author text that really explores in depth that collection and that was where I began my relationship with the McMichael Canadian Art Collection and sometime later an associate curator role came up and I was extremely lucky to be able to apply because I have already had a relationship with them through text and publication, and that was what led me to my next step about becoming a full-blown associate curator at a Canadian institution, and I'm really grateful for all the opportunities that came up along the way and the people that I got to meet and have been nurtured by.

Now that's an amazing career trajectory to go from museum shop assistant to associate curator in what less than 10 years. Yes, that's amazing. Yeah, I am just realizing now for people who are listening, maybe they don't even know what a curator is. Could you let me know what you think a curator is?

Yeah, this is a really great question. And when I was at the EGO there was a comic strip that was like it was like Dilbert or one of those sort of like news paper comics trips that was about it was riffing on curators and curation and it was thumbtacked up to one of the bulletin boards by my office and it was just about nobody really knows what a curator is or what they do. And I think it's. And it's funny too, because even I think when I was starting out at the MOA and I was like, wow, I got to know Sue Rowley there, jennifer Kramer, some of these amazing curators that were working there at the time, and I just admired them so much but I couldn't really fathom what their day-to-day looked like.

Curatorial to me. I just say that we steward collections. So for me, for example, working the McMichael Canadian Art Collection, that's a 7,000 piece permanent collection plus the 90,000-piece drawings collection that we have we hold in trust I'll get to that later and third, of that 7,000-piece permanent collection is Indigenous work. So it is my job to develop knowledge and relationships with those works and I'm always thinking like in a very relationship-based perspective and I'm always thinking like in a very relationship-based perspective. So my job is to think okay, so we have this existing collection, what's the makeup of that collection and how can we best engage with this collection so that it not only advances? And in my opinion, so it's just like how can we facilitate access towards these collections, how can we facilitate education and engagement around those collections? And so something that looks like what people know for most front facingfacing, I think, aspects of curation, which is we design shows and exhibitions. So we take those collections like either a permanent collection that we already have in-house and sometimes we facilitate loans with other institutions, like a lot of this is like. Again, that's the relationship building element is you are in contact with your colleagues at other institutions, you're in contact with private collectors and lenders and you're able to put together things in a harmonious, cohesive way that really tell a story. So that's the front facing work that I think a lot of people maybe understand from curator, like a curatorial work.

But then there's also many other aspects and one thing that I do a lot of my day-to-day looks like writing text. I write a lot of text. We often produce a catalog that goes with each of these shows, or we're producing wall labels or we're producing extended labels that explain specific works of art or specific items that we have on display, and those are all written by us as written by the curatorial team. So we do our own, at least in my institution. That's not necessarily the case for everybody, but we're the ones that are in charge of all the interpretation, or I would even say translation, of what you're looking at to an outside viewer, to the member of the public, to a school group, whoever it is coming in and engaging with the collection. So we do that, and then we are also in charge of not only stewarding the existing collection but also building on it.

Right, you have to be aware of artists at every level of their career, from emerging artists to established artists, and then how the artists that are currently active.

Right now, I have a very heavy focus on living artists, but of course you have to collect artists from previous generations as well, but just taking the pulse on what artists, what living artists, are currently doing, and then also the way that artists from previous generations their way, their work, is moving in the market, and then using that knowledge, and then the knowledge of your own collection, to build something that is even more fulsome, even more cohesive and even more in depth, because really what we do is this is we hold this for public education and enjoyment, and so that's a public service that we're performing in that way, not only to visitors to the museum, also to.

It's a really big deal, I think, for young artists or emerging artists or artists at any level of their career to be collected by an institution like McMichael or by the McMaster or major collections like that. Yeah, that's a little bit of that. And then, of course, there's a lot of other front-facing aspects doing public education, talks and tours, basically being a point of contact, I would say, for people to relate to the art.

I think that's a great way to sum it up. Were you involved in the acquisition at?

Art Toronto, yes, okay, do you want to talk about that? Yeah, so this was a bit of a different ballgame for me. This was my third Art Toronto. I came onto the McMichael team in November of 2023. And this is the first time that I was with an institution, that we were the co -hosts of Art Toronto, so that meant that we had to, of course, be very proactive with what it was that we were purchasing and make purchases that are going to really shine and be part of a big part of our collection. The one that I was most directly involved with because we do have a curatorial team for people was the Native Art Department painting that we acquired this year, or Hatch. Actually, we acquired on behalf of Hatch. Hatch was the company that provided us that funding to purchase that work, and we purchased that through Patel Brown Gallery. So Native Art Department is some people here are going to know these names Maria Hopfield and her husband, jason Lunghan and they're fabulous artists in their own right, and then they're even equally fabulous as collaborators and as a couple. So that was a work that we've been looking at for quite some time, and we knew that Art Toronto would be the perfect moment to make this acquisition and this actually was the realization of a goal that I had since beginning my time at the McMichael, or maybe even just before I came to McMichael and thinking about this up and thinking about this.

Something that we have in our collection is we have a very extensive collection of paintings in what we would call the woodland style. So this is works by a very recognizable name like Norabelle Morisot We've got lots of Norabelle Morisot in the collection and Daphne O'Jig although Daphne O'Jig never really considered herself to be a woodland painter, but that's a story for another time but this sort of style that emerged during this time and this was something that came up to the 60s, 70s, 80s. But now most of the woodland style paintings that we have in the collection are by artists that are now deceased now that are now deceased. So it's important again to think about living artists, because I always want to demonstrate with some of these things is that this is not something that stops with, maybe, the death of someone, like an icon, like Morris. So this is something that continues to be reinterpreted and explored further by contemporary artists, by artists that are living at this time.

So when I first got to the McMichael, we have a gallery Gallery 8, in the gallery, which is one of the kind of more classic, like log cabin style spaces that we have and it's a lot of. It's one of those spaces that people really think about when they think about the McMichael Canadian Art Collection and it's full of Morisot's and O'Jiggs, and one of my goals when I got there was like, okay, we need somebody in here who's a current living artist that's either painting in this style or responding to this style. So that was where we got the idea that Native Art Department is creating these works. There was a few that we were interested in, and what's great about curating in the 21st century is you can do so much in 3d modeling, right. So, as we know that our Toronto is coming up and we've got our eye on some of these works that are going to be an art fair, you can start to think you can take sort of renderings of those works, scale them and put them in a 3d modeled version of the gallery, right, so you get to play around. It's just what.

Which of these works sits in conversation, well, with some of the existing collection that we already have, and that was a great exercise to do, because I had actually been originally with the team, including myself. We've been leaning towards one work and then we had them rendered and we're still very interested in the other work. There was another work that wound up becoming a priority just because of the way that it worked in terms of theme and color and size and dimensions. It worked and played really beautifully with some of the existing woodland style paintings that we had and responded to it well in a very contemporary way.

I thought that was such a great initiative and it was such a way to breathe life into the art fair and also have institutions involved with the commercial art world which people often think don't work together, but they actually work very closely together.

We work very closely together and Art Toronto is interesting because you are getting places like the National Gallery and the McMichael Canadian Art Collection and we're public arts institutions, but they are also getting both public and private arts organizations and galleries, not just from across Canada, from across the world.

We're unique in our mandate at the McMichael, where we only collect works from Canadian artists, so usually we're pretty well limited to Canadian galleries, although not exclusively. There could be an international gallery that's carrying the Canadian artists. That would you know. In that case that would make sense. But yeah, it's an interesting, it's an interesting initiative. And then, throughout Art Toronto, we were able to put up nice big stickers beside the works that we had purchased to announce, especially because we are the host as you enter, when you're at the McMichael Canadian Art Booth, there was a stand that had the locations of everything we'd acquired. We acquired very early on an art fair, and so we were able to, for most of the run of the fair, have those acquisitions available for the public to come see, and then they'd be able to go see in different booths where the works that we had purchased were.

Nice. So back to you with your curation process.

My curation process. It really depends on what I'm working with, and so I think there is a traditional process that I've, of course, employed before, especially as the Art Gallery of Ontario and working with smaller selections, and I will go back to working this way after I've done my current project, which is where you're in the vaults you book time, you go down, you pull what you want to pull, you take a look at it very closely and then you build your checklist from there so that can be built this week. I usually build that in excel spreadsheet and that is, you start building out a long list of works that are interesting and for a particular theme or reason, and you put a small thumbnail dimensions, title and then acquisition number and so that way you start putting things together and then from that point, I would take that sort of small rendering and I would work with our curatorial assistant named Shi, who's a great guy, fabulous to work with. They would run the rendering in SketchUp, which is a 3D modeling program that we use and a lot of other galleries use, just to create a 3D model of where exactly you want to be putting things on the walls. It's very cool, it's like playing an art video game. So that is the one way that you do it. You go through, you have an idea of what you want, you've spent time in the vaults, you put it on a checklist, you put it in SketchUp. From that SketchUp you get your short list and then, from that short list, you get into matting and framing, conservation, or into loans if you need to make institutional private loans. Right now, I have been able to do an almost entirely virtual process for the work that I'm doing right now, of the work that I'm doing right now.

So in 2023, the McMichael Canadian Art Collection completed digitization on 90,000 works on paper. So that's like unprecedented. I had never heard of this kind of digitization happening before. I came to the McMichael and I came right at the very end as this digitization was happening. So I take I I am very much got the torch passed to me on this initiative. This is something that had been in the works since 1990. So 1990, the webeck or the west baffin cooperative that's in kenite, known as wood, formerly known as keep dorset, if some listeners maybe know it as keep dorset decided that they were going to take their complete drawings archive at the time, from 1959 to 1990, and they were going to ship it down to the McMichael Canadian Art Collection, basically for safekeeping, because we have climate control vaults. They are solely owners of that collection. But part of the agreement that was made when these works came down to us is that, eventually, that they are going to be digitized and made publicly available. This is 1990s.

We don't really have the same kind of technology as we do now, and I think there's been a little bit of a sense of oh, why did it take so long? And to me I would say we had to wait for certain technology to develop and so some digitization work was taken was that was begun in 2000s, the 2010s, and traditionally, like digitizing, you can maybe do a thousand works in a month, maybe if you're motoring at through taking pictures one at a time. But enter ed burkinski, the canadian photographer who invented this machine where there's a rotating table and a very sensitive camera overhead that can capture things as they spin past the lens, right. So this is fabulous. This was like the front page of the globe and mail at some point, summer 2023.

This really revolutionized the way that digitization was able to happen, because, instead of doing a thousand works in maybe a month, you're able to do a thousand works in a day, but, as you can imagine, this sped up the process very quickly and they're all high-res images and they were uploaded to Inigat Iladi, which means a place for family, which is hosted on the McMichael website, and that's all 90,000 images available in high bandwidth and low bandwidth, freely available for the public.

And that name was chosen it means a place for family because when artists and students from CUNY were starting to engage with this collection, a lot of people started to say, oh, this is my uncle or oh, this is my grandmother, this is my mom.

People were recognizing their relatives in that archive, and so this is what I've been working with and, because it's been freely available and digitized, I can curate shows basically from my house or from my computer Now not this is a great starting point my computer.

Now, this is a great starting point. This is what we've been describing as unprecedented curatorial access where to create a show, because I've now produced a 215-piece show using these works that opens on March 8th, and if I were to do this traditionally and go down to the vaults and look through each and every work, this would take me years and I was able to make selections in the span of about nine months because I can see it on my computer. It's digitized as high res. And then from there I was able to build a quite long list. Then we made little sort of fact families of them. We spread them out on the floor and saw how things paired well together, cut lists from there, took that sort of shortened long list, put that into SketchUp, built the SketchUp from there, made more cuts and now everything is pretty well finalized through this process. That is a combination of being in person and also in the digital sphere.

When you're working at the McMichael, you're probably working with people who are much older than you, with much more experience. What's it like working as a young curator in such an established environment?

Yeah, I would say that I don't really feel my youth that much. It was really funny because I was talking about an artist recently and I was just like wow, that's so amazing that their practice is already so strong and they're so young. I'm only a year older than they were, and so it's funny because I don't think about it that often and nobody ever gives me a reason to think about it. I've been very fortunate to be in supportive working environments where I do feel like an equal at the table and I don't feel like I'm 28 years old, I think. When I was starting out and I was 22, I was really feeling. I was really feeling 22. And now I do really feel 28, but I don't feel. I don't feel it as much as I thought I would. I definitely do feel mentored, by my colleagues especially, but I feel that more in a sense of a lot of what I'm doing for the first time, because when you come to a new institution or you're learning new processes, you're always going to need someone who's going to know their ropes a little bit better than you are.

For me in particular, this year at Art Toronto is a great example, because I had done Art Toronto before I'd been opening night. This is my third Art Toronto. I thought I knew the drill, but it's a different game when you're the co-host. So I needed a little bit extra guidance for what that looked like when you're co-hosting with Art Toronto, Especially when I was at the Inward Art Foundation.

My job then and the grant that I was working on was all about emerging artists and I had to produce profiles on I think it was like 35 artists under 30 or something like that in a year.

So there I really got to take the pulse on what artists in my demographic and my age range were doing, and that's been invaluable because I feel like I got a little bit of a sneak peek into what's next and what's coming. I've got older colleagues that were present for things that to me are very abstract because I wasn't there, and they're able to relay a lot of information to me through their experience, and then in turn I'm able to say friends are artists. I worked with these artists, here's what's coming next, and it creates a really beautiful, more holistic way of looking at things. Right. So none of us. I never feel like. I feel like being on the younger side is an asset in that way because I'm very immersed in the next generation of artists and arts workers that are coming and getting to get a close sense on, maybe what the future is going to look like.

Yeah, Tenpennet. Could you tell me more about Indigenous sovereignty in the arts and what that looks like and how we can facilitate it?

arts and what that looks like and how we can facilitate it. Yes, so I would say that this is really the crux of what I do is all about Indigenous sovereignty over our own cultural and creative expression, and I don't know if I have a great single definition for what I mean when I say Indigenous sovereignty in the arts. To me, from my perspective, that simply means letting Indigenous people have control over their own representation in an institution or in the media or whatever creative field it is that you're working in, and I think especially because I work in galleries and museums and those are places that I think have traditionally been about Indigenous people that didn't really consider our presence as curators or arts workers or conservators or academics or thinkers or writers in any way when they came into many museums, I think came into being under the impression that Indigenous people were going to literally die out and it was their job to preserve or salvage what was going to be left of our culture. And all of a sudden, we're 100 years down the line and Indigenous people are quite far from disappearing. We're the largest, we're not the largest, we're the fastest growing population in Canada and we're the youngest population in Canada. Suddenly, we're these colonized people that are engaging with directly spaces that were built to further colonize.

I am very fortunate to have a team that is so supportive of me and gives me so much agency and autonomy and I get to call the shots in my own storytelling. That's been a very micro scale. That's just in my work. It's just. Do I have agency and autonomy? Do other Indigenous people that I work with? Do other Inuit people that I work with also have agency and autonomy, and are we being supported to tell the story that we need to tell?

Especially, you know, there's elements that are either just like, more culturally relevant, I think, when you have an Indigenous arts worker or writer or critic or curator but they're also culturally safer, right? So you're taking elements that are not only going to be more relevant to an Indigenous audience, but they're also going to represent us in a more fair and rounded way and not to say that non-Indigenous curators can't also be fair. But there's this element of we're the ones in charge and we're the ones that get to call the shots and we're the ones that get to set the tone. Something I'm always thinking about, too, with Indigenous people in art spaces is, yes, creative control, yes, curatorial control, yes, control over our stories, but then also real control over budgets and the way that money is moved and allocated, and so that this is between Indigenous people and institutions or Indigenous people and arts organizations, and not just one that's just for show Like. Indigenous people should be final decision makers in their own stories.

I think that's great. I want to talk about your writing. You talked so much about your writing there in a professional sense, because, as you mentioned, as a curator, there's a lot of writing happening there. But you're also a poet and you've just published a body of work, and so I'd love to A learn more about it but B find out if there's any ways that your writing as a poet and your work as a curator kind of overlap or intersect.

Yeah, of course I want to quote my friend and colleague, britt Gulpin, who when I started working as a curator she said to said to me oh, that's perfect, because I think to be a curator you need to have a lot of soul poetry, which I thought was a really beautiful way to put it. And I think it's really funny because I've worked with artists for like quite some time going on six years and of course I was raised by an artist and I've always been a writer and I've always been like I've always been writing poetry in the note that and in the margins of my notebooks and everything, but I never also considered myself to be an artist. To me, art it was just funny because, especially working with so many young artists, that I did when I was really early on in my career and I was constantly telling people like no, you're an artist, I believe in you. And they were like, oh, I don't know if I can qualify myself as an artist yet. So to me, first and foremost, my writing and my poetry in particular, I consider that my artist practice. So I get to be very fortunate where I not only get to work with art in a curatorial perspective but I also get to produce art myself. One of the funny things about working in curatorial and or even back when I was working more like I would loosely use the term critic when I was writing a lot about art it's I've developed all these opinions about art that I personally could never, ever make, like styles and skill sets that are well beyond me. But it's just OK, here is where I am producing work as an artist beyond me. But it says okay, here is where I am producing work as an artist.

And I think when I started the McMichael, a lot of that relationship began around this. It was ultimately a prose piece that I wrote for early days and that was something that really grabbed the attention of my now colleagues John Gagan and Sarah Milroy and John I'd worked with for years before but the fact that it wasn't just like an academic piece of writing, I was able to take what I was experiencing from the art and also my experience and engaging with the art, and turn it more into prose, and so I did weave a narrative through there, and I've done something very similar in the catalog that I'm producing now for my upcoming show, where I'm following the model that my colleagues set for early days where they allowed people to come in and write and respond to the work that they had been assigned to respond to in any way. If that was storytelling, if that was poetry, if that was prose, if that was academic writing, if that was storytelling, if that was poetry, if that was prose, if that was academic writing, that was up to them and that was in their control, and so I tried to hand that same control over to the writers I worked with that were majority Inuit writers responding to an Inuit collection, and I also gave myself that permission as well too. I think we're seeing a shift in the way that art is thought about. I think when I read text about art from 30, 40 years ago, it's a much more like academic tone than what I'm reading more so now, which is a lot more personal. It's not to say people weren't having personal and meaningful experiences with art 30, 40 years ago. We're having much more personal experiences with art than we are now, but I think there's a higher degree of permission to have these really emotive and personal experiences that we can translate into text that gets published, and so I think I'm coming up as coming up as a poet and a writer right now and as a curator simultaneously. This is the perfect moment in time for me to be doing this. I feel like it's like I have a specific kind of practice that could have only emerged right now, in the moment that we're having.

The way that I think about poetry is it's it's almost like a series of word associations that turn into verse. So I'll be out walking and associating words, and that's the way my brain works, and then I can take these sort of feels like disparate meanings and concepts and weave them in together and diverse, and that's very much the way that I curate as well, too, because you'll take one drawing over here by one artist that depicts something, and there's another drawing over here by different artists that depicts something, and there's another drawing over here by different artists that depict something else entirely different, and you're like, okay, how do we put these in conversation together and what is the thread that connects them? Is there a color palette that makes sense here? Is there subject matter? Is there even a backstory with within the artist's own lives that are juxtaposed together here? Really well, what is it that we can take these sort of? They feel nebulous and floating, but when you put it in the hands of a poet or a curator. Then you suddenly got a braid.

Well, we've talked a little bit about your show coming up, but can you tell me more about Worlds on Paper?

Yes, so I'm very excited about Worlds on Paper. Worlds on Paper has been one of the great challenges of my very early career, and that was simply because it's just you're put in front of 90,000 drawings and it just says go, I've had free reign. What am I going to do with these 90,000 drawings? How am I supposed to? And they're all like they're drawings by legends. Some of these works, and some of them, are drawings by people that we that have really not made it into the canon, and so it's a really fabulous and unique opportunity to take a look at these works by like hundreds of artists from Cape Dorset. Now can I and see okay, how am I supposed to make a show that honors this? And it was really a show that it's to commemorate the digitization of the works. It's supposed to be a nicely grouped ensemble show.

So early on in that time around this time last year I was saving things that were like I was in a really rough early sketches of what this show was going to be and I know that I had about three gallery spaces at the McMichael DFill and I was looking at maybe 150, maybe 200 works that he could get on the books. So I'm going through and I'm saving things because I'm very tactile. I think I was originally saving things on color and pattern and what is it that's visually interesting? How do I begin to thin this down? And so it became really massive Excel sheets of things that I was just saving and I started to notice a pattern at some point that I was really focusing on figurative works and works in particular from the everyday and works that showed everyday life. And that was when I got this thought.

1959, 1990 when is there a more enormous tectonic plate shift in inuit culture and life and worldview than occurred during this time frame right 59? We're starting to see inuit that are moving. They're coerced basically not even basically being coerced off of out of semi-nomadic traditional settlements and ways of being and into permanent sedentary settlements. So that in itself is a reckoning. We're seeing the introduction of Christianity and Christianization. Clergy and police are suddenly a huge presence in the community. You've got tourists coming through for the very first time. Your children are being taken to residential schools. You've got tourists coming through for the very first time. Your children are being taken to residential schools. Some of your neighbors are being sent to the South. If not, you yourself are maybe being sent to the South for years on end, sometimes because there's tuberculosis epidemic. So everything is shifting. Your whole world changes and that's what colonization does right. Your whole world changes and you have to adapt very quickly over the space of a generation.

And this is where I think to spread back to my early interest in anthropology I do have a degree in anthropology from the British University of British Columbia is, I realized I'm like, where do we have this much primary source material of a moment of transition as we have here, right, right, especially the community of kin night nowadays? I don't know what the makeup was like during this period, but today 25 of the adult population are working artists. That's one of the highest uh concentrations of working artists in a community the world over. We have this huge adult population that is translating their worldview onto paper. So, and we've got a really unique opportunity to explore that. So that really became the focus of what I was doing, and so I was saving things where it was just like what does what's people's everyday life like? I'm saving really early drawings of people that are there.

I guess we call it meta. They're drawing themselves a drawing. They're drawing life in the studio. They're drawing life, trading and selling, because this thing it's like inward art is renowned the world over. But I think it's an afterthought that inward art emerged in as it is now. This trade emerged as a response to people being colonized and settled into permanent living situations. Because, all of a sudden, if your traditional economy depends on you being able to move with the seasons or with different prey, and then suddenly you're in a cash economy and you're not going anywhere, how are you going to feed yourself, your family? So this is a solution. This is one solution. An art tree develops.

So you're seeing depictions of people drawing and selling to the co-op as early as the late 50s, early 1960s, whereas at this time people are like this is when Enchanted Owl was being produced. This is when some of the most iconic in-order art prints are happening. And then it moves into the 70s and 80s where there's still this time. Between this period of time, we're seeing just over 2,000 prints from Can I Hit the Market, but we have 90,000 drawings that never became prints. And there's a very heavy editorial process that's happening at this time. That's directed by Southerners, that's art collectors and curators and art dealers. They form committees and sometimes this process is informal and sometimes it's very formal to decide what actually hit the market and what is catered to southern tastes, and so you're not really seeing things like prefabricated houses or skidoos or things like dog teams and traditional hunting scenes are very popular and this is still a huge part of Inuit life.

I was very conscious I didn't want to create a binary between on the land and off the land, or then and now, or traditional heavy quotes and modern heavy quotes, but just to say that there was this massive shift that happens.

It appears in the, it appears in the art, it appears in what people are producing every day, but we never almost never see it in the archive. But we do get to see it in this archive. So a lot of the works that are going in this show it's 40 artists, 215 works a lot of them deal directly with gathering and food, and I do a whole big room that's devoted just to portraiture and people drawing themselves and each other, because portraiture is also not really something that we closely associate with in-wood prints or works on paper or drawings, at least not from this time frame. So that's yeah, that's a little bit there, and then we're doing a contemporary hang in a fourth gallery at the end of the show that sort of demonstrates that in drawing this is all drawing. It's not prints at all. Some of them are drawings for prints, but trying to show that drawing is a medium unto itself that is important and worthy of consideration and has gone on and only become more and more popular.

Thank you so much for that, Emily. That was so insightful and such a wonderful quick overview of production in Inuit art. I lost myself there for a minute. I was like, finally, what advice would you have for someone who wants to become a curator?

I would say I think has touched on this a little bit. First of all, just always apply for the jobs, even if you think that you're not qualified. The worst they can say is no. Best case scenario they say yes and then a medium kind of scenario that's also can turn into something really great is either they have your resume on hand or, if you're like me and this happened to me twice you get a sort of different position that is still adjacent to the direction you want to be going, and so I'd say that and I would also say publish.

I don't think that the emphasis between writing and communication and curatorial work is emphasized enough. And when it came to doing what I do now and getting into what I've gotten into, what set me apart at least in my opinion opinion, I don't know, I was never the one reviewing my own resume, but the fact that I had there was a good four to six pages of my CV that was dedicated to publications was an asset. Not that you have to publish that much, but going from like having some job experience or internship to having job experience or an internship plus having your name on a publication makes a world of difference, and that's something I say to young people all the time as well is that there are publications in Canada and, I'm sure, in the United States and abroad are always looking for reviews of shows and you're not always necessarily, you don't always have to be like published very widely to be producing a review, but also just like monitoring, I would say like CMAG or Studio Magazine, monitoring different arts and arts adjacent publications for when they do their submissions, especially to having worked in publishing sometimes I think what holds people back is they think oh, there's so many other people submitting or maybe my writing isn't good enough. That's not the truth there's. You're maybe up against a handful of other people sometimes and oftentimes, especially if you're a young writer, because a lot of these publications I can say from a Canadian perspective and an arts perspective in particular I can't speak for anything else there is a desire to nurture younger writers, so that is such a great place to get started.

And then, if you're in school as well, seeing what programs are available to you while you're in your undergraduate or even in your graduate program, wherever it is you are, that go beyond just doing your program, because I came out with a degree in anthropology but I also came out with having done what was called an IARUMP Indigenous Undergraduate Research Mentorship Program, and so that was like after I had started working at the MOAN, I was able to work. I applied for this program, and so that was like after I had started working at the Moab, I was able to work. I applied for this program and got in, and I was able to work under Jennifer Kramer, who was a curator at the Moab, which is shocking to me that I forgot to mention this in the beginning. This was important.

This was maybe this was over one term, it was four months, but that was important. Both it looked it looks good on a c, but then also it was like very practical looks at the day-to-day of what goes on in a museum. I remember being able to sit at, sit in on a meeting at the gallery and like, oh my gosh, I'm in a museum meeting right now. This is crazy to me. That was special. So, yeah, anything like that, always seeking out the extras, it's going to make a big difference.

Awesome. Thank you, emily. That's such great advice. I really appreciate your time today, thank you. Thank you so much, madison. It's been a pleasure.