Canada's insider blog

This November, for the first time since 2008, the Pangnirtung Tapestry Studio at the Uqqurmiut Centre for Arts and Crafts in Pangnirtung, Nunavut, will be releasing a new collection. The 10 works will be woven renditions of drawings by Inuit artists including a rare guest collaboration with iconic Cape Dorset printmaker Kenojuak Ashevak.

Started in 1970, the studio is one of only four in the world employing weavers to interpret artists’ work into tapestry: the others are in Scotland, England and Australia. The studio has produced thousands of limited edition and specially commissioned tapestries that now adorn the National Gallery of Canada and the Canadian Museum of Civilization as well as embassies, universities and government buildings like the Nunavut Legislative Assembly. One tapestry, Achieving a Dream, was created for the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympic Games and now hangs in the Richmond Oval in British Columbia.

The 2011 collection will showcase traditional and contemporary aspects of Inuit life and will tour throughout 2011 and 2012. The mid-November debut will be at Toronto’s Guild Shop Nov. 17 to Dec. 24. Then the  exhibition travels to Montréal’s Canadian Guild of Crafts March 29 until May 12, where the new pieces will join the best from the past as part an exhibiton celebrating the 40th Anniversary of the Guild's first exhibition of Pangnirtung tapestries from March 1972. It then moves on to US and Canadian venues before heading to Europe.