Following the commercial success of the arts and crafts programs in places like Kinngait (Cape Dorset), Terry Ryan, then residing in Kinngait, applied for a Canada Council Art Grant to distribute drawing materials to the Inuit living in the North Baffin Island area. In the early winter months of 1964, Ryan travelled to Kangiqtugaapik (Clyde River). The trip, surely, was a homecoming of sorts for Ryan, who had been stationed there with the Department of Transport's Meteorological Division from 1956 to 1958. In his 1985 interviews with Jean Blodgett, Ryan recounted,

“I flew to Clyde River and re-acquainted myself with the people who I’d known quite well as I had lived there for two and a half years. When I lived there back in the mid-1950s there was just the DOT [Department of Transport] base and the Hudson’s Bay Company store. But I believe when I went back in 1964 there were just the beginnings of a community, a few of those matchbox houses being built at the sides of the hill” [1].

Although Terry notes that “by 1964 things had changed considerably” there had been no formalized art programs in the area at this time [2]. We know, however, that Ryan collected a carved caribou from artist Solomoie Tigullaraq during this visit [3]. In correspondence with the present Private Collection, the vendor, too, comments, “I don’t know who encouraged the production of carvings there, but at the time it was no more than a sideline” [4].

Gabriel Gély, who also was stationed in Kangiqtugaapik (Clyde River) in the 1950s with the Department of Transport as a cook, recalled his trip north with James and Alma Houston on the C.D. Howe [5]. Gély recalls the “exhibitions” of Inuit arts and handicrafts put on at the various settlements by the Houstons and that James was voraciously purchasing Inuit made works for distribution in Montreal [6]. These “shows” have been criticized in recent years; however, James Houston insists that the shows were for entertainment purposes only and not to influence the types of carving produced [7]. The present four lots, 47-50, undoubtedly reflect the works encouraged in Sunuyuksuk: Eskimo Handicrafts and speak to the complex role that Houston played as mediator in the promotion of the early years of commercial Inuit art.

1. Terry Ryan to Jean Blodgett, 24-23 October 1985, in Jean Blodgett, North Baffin Drawings: Collected by Terry Ryan on North Baffin Island in 1964, (Toronto: Art Gallery of Ontario, 1985), p. 9

2. Ibid., p. 10

3. See Canadian Eskimo Arts Council, Sculpture/Inuit: Masterworks of the Canadian Arctic, (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1971) cat. 141.

4. Present Private Collection email message to author, 17 August 2021

5. Gabriel Gély, “Clyde River: A Look Back in Time” in Baffin Island, (Winnipeg: Winnipeg Art Gallery, 1983, p. 22

6. Ibid.