Shuvinai Ashoona

b. 1961 · Kinngait, Nunavut, Canada

In the Arctic studios where her grandmother once drew, Shuvinai Ashoona fills sheet after sheet with a Kinngait where mermaids, human-animal hybrids and whole planets are part of daily life.

The life

Ashoona was born in 1961 in Cape Dorset, now Kinngait, Nunavut, into one of Canada’s great artistic families: her grandmother was the celebrated Pitseolak Ashoona, her father the sculptor Kiugak Ashoona, and she is related to the artists Napachie and Annie Pootoogook. She began working at Kinngait Studios, the community-run cooperative incorporated in 1959, around 1993, moving from small monochrome landscapes into colour in the early 2000s. She was elected to the Royal Canadian Academy in 2016, won the Gershon Iskowitz Prize in 2018 and received the Governor General’s Award in 2024.

The work

Intricate drawings in ink, graphite and coloured pencil at every scale, where the tools and textures of northern life, eggs, oil lamps, ulu knives, tents, share the page with mermaids, hybrid creatures and cosmic visions, including a mother’s nourishing breast transformed into the Earth itself. Her work is held by the National Gallery of Canada, the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Winnipeg Art Gallery and the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington.

Why we love them

Proof that tradition is a launchpad, not a cage. Three generations deep, and she still draws like the ice has just opened.

Go deeper

• Shuvinai Ashoona at the Outsider Art Fair
• Shuvinai Ashoona on Wikipedia
• Feheley Fine Arts
• Where to see outsider art, our full list of museums and collections.
• The glossary, if any of the terms here are new.

Kindred spirits

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