It’s impossible to divorce Qaumajuq from Canadian history itself. The $55-million, 36,000-square-foot addition to the Winnipeg Art Gallery, or WAG, opened in March of 2021, housing the museum’s 14,000 permanent pieces of Inuit art—and 8,000 more on long-term loan.
The design team chose Bethel white granite from Vermont for the top two-thirds of Qaumajuq’s facade, and flanked the first 20 feet of the building’s perimeter in glass, which contrasts with the WAG’s windowless modernist exterior. The glass also gives visitors an immediate glimpse of the show-stopping Visible Vault, a three-storey curved structure displaying close to 5,000 stone and bone sculptures.
The spaces within Qaumajuq have their own Inuktitut names. Jocelyn Piirainen, the museum’s associate curator of Inuit art, worked with the WAG’s Indigenous Advisory Circle, Inuit Elders and language keepers during the naming process. “The entrance hall is called Ilavut, which translates to ‘our relatives,’ ” says Piirainen, who is Inuk herself.
Members of Inuit communities received an early preview of the WAG’s collection, a space where the art of the North, their homeland, will be protected and celebrated. “It was wonderful to see them discover that their families’ work was in our collection,” Piirainen says. “It will hopefully inspire them to create things of their own.”Qilak is an 8,000-square-foot gallery whose name means “sky” in Inuktitut. It has 22 massive skylights—one of many ways Maltzan brought the outside in.