July 31, 2002
Tarnow travels to Arctic for art
Dennos Museum store manager attends Inuit art festival in Northwest Territories
By Carol South
Herald contributing writer
In the land of the midnight sun, Terry Tarnow found abundant beauty.
Traveling with her husband, Michael, to the northwest corner of the Northwest Territories in Canada, Terry Tarnow attended the Great Northern Art Festival earlier this month. There, the buyer and manager for the Dennos Museum store made many contacts with Inuit and other native artists from the western portion of Canada. More than 60 artists, not all of them native people, participated in the festival's galleries, workshops and demonstrations during the week.
The Dennos Museum in Traverse City is known in the United States and Canada for its extensive, permanent Inuit collection. Because of this, Tarnow and three other gallery or museum buyers were specifically invited by the Canadian Consulate to attend the festival and learn more about the artists. Consulate representatives also hoped these visitors would help the artists navigate the intricacies of distributing their art to a larger audience, especially in the United States.
"It was an educational trip," Tarnow said. "I made lots of contacts with very fine artists and hope to be able to purchase things from them for resale here."
While the festival is held in the town of Inuvik, in an obscure corner of the world, Tarnow said that people come from all over the world to attend it.
"It was interesting because it was a pretty remote place," she said. "The show has built up a reputation as being a destination."
Tarnow has traveled two times to the eastern Arctic area of Canada, to Baffin Island above the Hudson Bay, for buying and educational trips. She noted that the bulk of the Dennos Museum's collection is from the eastern Arctic but her latest venture gives her an opportunity to learn about works of other native people.
"This trip gave me a lot of exposure to things I don't normally see," she noted. "There's some wonderful work being done there."
Eugene Jenneman, director of the Dennos Museum, noted that the museum's Inuit collection is a cornerstone of both the exhibits and the store.
"Last year more than a third of our store business was Inuit related," he said. "As people gain an appreciation for the Inuit art, they are more interested in buying it, in sculptures, prints or calendars."
Tarnow and her husband also took some interesting side trips, exploring the country by plane and boat to visit native villages and natural sites. They saw numerous bald and golden eagles in the wild. In one village, they watched residents process a Baluga whale that had been caught the previous day.
"Even though these communities have access to almost anything we do, their main subsistence is still native foods: whale, seal, caribou and musk ox," Tarnow said. "We ate those in restaurants."
The houses in these villages are built on stilts because of the layer of permafrost just six inches below the surface. In addition, the residents paint their homes in bright colors, making a walk down a residential street a colorful experience. She also found residents oddly devoted to a British custom.
"Inuit people drink tea like crazy, they love it," said Tarnow, who has worked at the museum since 1991. "We were served tea and bannocks, little biscuits with raisins."
As she had done on previous trips to the Arctic region, Tarnow took along dried cherries, baggies of which she bestowed on people she met either casually or through the arts festival.
"I gave them out to lots of people up there, that's my way of sharing Traverse City," she said.
Tarnow and her husband also took a day trip by plane to Tuktoyaktuk, known as Tuk. This town is right on the Arctic Circle and they made sure to dip their feet in the Arctic Ocean - which proved to be less chilling than they imagined.
"We were all saying that Lake Michigan is colder than this," Tarnow noted.
Having 24 hours of daylight also took some getting used to, even though the hotel rooms had black out curtains to block out the midnight sun.
"That first night I had trouble sleeping, it was a mental thing," Tarnow said.