“The future is built with values.”

So says Inuk artist asinnajaq who applies that belief to her life, artmaking, and guest curation of a new presentation of Inuit art at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts debuting November 8, 2024. Spanning from Alaska through the circumpolar regions of Canada, to Kalaallit Nunaat (Greenland), ᐆᒻᒪᖁᑎᒃ uummaqutik: essence of life invites meditations on the rhythms of life particular to these territories known together as Inuit Nunangat.

The exhibition brings together the carvings and works on paper traditionally presented by the museum, along with new expressions of creativity including the first paintings, first photography, first works in glass, and first ceramics acquired by Inuit artists. Newly commissioned artworks feature in the galleries alongside pieces dating back to the museum’s initial engagement with Inuit art collecting in 1953. Artists born in the 1890s and 1990s will be shown together, asinnajaq favoring a storytelling, regional, and intergenerational approach to the display as opposed to the typical timeline.

“Everything bounces off of each other and augments each other’s meanings,” asinnajaq told Forbes.com. “For this opening, there’s a photo by Eldred Allen that has tracks in the snow, and then next to the tracks in the snow is a watercolor work by Niap that’s of our traditional markings called kakiniit, and that’s like traces on the skin; they’re next to each other, and they’re completely different subjects, but when you see them together, they’re clearly the same thing, and one’s on the land, one’s on our body. Seeing them (together) brings whole new worlds of meaning. The way (artworks) are placed next to each other and set, when (visitors) go through, you can connect all of these meanings to each other.”

Works on paper in the exhibition like the photography and watercolor painting asinnajaq mentioned will rotate every four months, protecting the art and keeping the presentation fresh.

Sunlight further freshens the presentation. Museums have long relegated Indigenous artworks to darkened, lower level, corner, out-of-the way galleries. Not so at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.

“The windows of the gallery space were revealed as the building was getting upgrades and I was really excited, personally, to be able to keep them open; that is another thing that completely changes this presentation, the presence of light; natural light can never be celebrated enough,” asinnajaq said.

Light and color.

“It’s not a white cube, it’s more like a peach, pink vibe in terms of the wall color in the main space, and then in the smaller works on paper and textiles gallery, there’s a more purple, dark lilac hue,” curator of Indigenous arts at MMFA and exhibition co-curator Léuli Eshrāghi told Forbes.com. “It’s very different than the kind of stark, white paint–stereotypical exhibitions around the north have all these tropes around ice–here, we’re not at all thinking of that, we’re thinking about deep time through geology and a lot of the colors are inspired from images asinnajaq has taken on their territory.”

The Museum has made 12 artworks accessible through audio description, extending the tour so people can come to the museum and be guided the whole way, from entry to gallery, walking through the space and hearing the exhibition instead of, or along with, looking.

“The audio guide begins with the enriched text labels, and on the enriched text labels, I made a great effort to have descriptions expanding on artworks in a way that isn’t just about what they’re made from, or how they’re made, or those kinds of details, but I tried to write something that’s at times more poetic, really trying to connect us with our emotions and the deeper parts of ourselves to the exhibition,” asinnajaq said. “The way that the audio description can start to go more into this realm is really through the poetic and through trying to connect with people, not just with what’s physically there, but with the other more intangible, indescribable, things that the artworks can do.”

Intangible. Indescribable. Inuit.

“Within our art, what makes it Inuit art, is not necessarily the aesthetic values, but what is at the very core and spirit of it, that’s what makes it what it is, and that’s the only thing that can make it that,” asinnajaq added. “I think a lot about the future, about what we pass on to the future, and when I’m thinking about the nieces and nephews and all the kids that we’re raising that will be the holders of the future, I’m not giving them a look or just purely esthetics. Our culture has esthetics qualities to it, but where the culture actually lives is within the values and the way that you are living yourself and being a person.”

asinnajaq brings a primary Inuit voice to the presentation of the museum’s Inuit artwork; the museum’s previous display, opened in 2011, did not. That doesn’t mean, however, the exhibition is designed exclusively, or even primarily, for Inuit people. Curators of Indigenous artwork walk a tightrope, trying to simultaneously serve two distinct audiences with greatly different understandings of the material and cultures on view.

Guiding asinnajaq was a saying from her father about thinking of visitors as ripples.

“You have your core audience and you’re really focusing on them and really thinking about them, but no one else should be excluded,” she said. “Trying to find a balance of important information that should be understood, and is there something that it’s okay if it kind of doesn’t land on everyone? Not everything has to be legible or understood by every single person that comes into the gallery. Generosity is one of the guiding values of the exhibition, making sure that even if you don’t get everything, you feel like you are getting something.”

Cultural beliefs like generosity, like how the future is built with values, are the greatest takeaways visitors to the exhibition can have. Artists share their views on the simple and extraordinary moments of life, including childbirth, child rearing, everyday activities, and seasonal community work. Also evoked are the lives of the non-humans with whom we coexist: animals, plants, stones, and stars. Together, the works portray these moments as the sharing of energy, the transference of energy, and the power of life as a constant release and absorption of the universe’s energy.

Further engagement with Indigenous art, culture, and history from what is today Canada can be found less than a half mile from the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts at the McCord Stewart Museum where a striking permanent exhibition “Indigenous Voices of Today: Knowledge, Trauma, Resilience” is routinely joined by special presentations like Manasie Akpaliapik’s “Inuit Universe” on view now through March 9, 2025.