The Winnipeg Art Gallery (WAG) will add a large amount of rare and new pieces of Inuit art to its already vast collection.

Nearly 8,000 new pieces will soon be on display at the WAG – which already boasts the largest collection of Inuit art in the world – on long-term loan from the Nunavut Government.

The pieces travelled more than 6,000 kilometres from Yellowknife, Iqaluit, Peterborough and Toronto and arrived in Winnipeg last week and will be on display at the WAG and help to form part of its Inuit Art Centre.

WAG Director and CEO Stephen Borys said it took months of work to get the pieces from Nunavut to Winnipeg. But now that they’re here, he says it was worth it.

“It’s a national collection and represents pretty well all of the Inuit communities,” Borys said of the exhibit. “Since Nunavut became a territory in 1999 it was not on view for years before it was kept in storage.”

“This is the first time it’s really come out to the public.”

Borys said the new works will be with the WAG for approximately five years, but they hope to send them back to Nunavut eventually.

“Right now there isn’t a facility in Nunavut for it,” he said. “But we hope one day there will be."

Curator of Inuit Art for the WAG, Darlene Coward Wight says this collection fills gaps in the education and history of their existing collection.

“Our collection is largely from 1949 onward,” said Coward Wight. “This collection has pieces that date in the first 50 years of the century so it has pieces that were done in ivory.”

Coward Wight says a number of factors led to Inuit artists switching from ivory to stone. She says when the Inuit were moving off of the land they didn’t have any means of income and couldn’t make large statues with an ivory tusk from a walrus. Eventually they switched to stone because they realized they could build bigger and more creative works and help develop their art form.

Another issue is oftentimes ivory bones are located in archeological sites and can’t be touched.

Coward Wight says adding these new works to their collection will give people a more thorough history of Inuit art.

“We now have a really large collection of ivory from these works,” said she said. “We have a tremendous amount of wall hangings from Baker Lake which will be exciting to explore, we always had a weak collection of prints and we’re getting 3500 prints from this collection.”

“There are all these pockets of gaps that will be filled by these pieces.”

The WAG says they will host exclusive shows of the artworks, and will also look into touring parts of the collection across Canada – including Nunavut – and Europe as well.

For more information, visit wag.ca/iac. 

Here are some photos from today's sneak peak: