The carving of beads hanging down the middle of the mother’s jacket is typical of artists in Inukjuak, Akeeaktashuk’s home community. In the early 1950s, Akeeaktashuk was singled out as a special talent. He was one of the first Inuit artists to begin working on a larger scale once stone had supplanted ivory as the primary medium. His favourite subjects—resolute hunters and nurturing mothers—became iconic images of Inuit life. Akeeaktashuk and his family became “High Arctic exiles” in 1953, tricked into moving north to Ellesmere Island to reinforce Canada’s sovereignty. Tragically, the artist died in a hunting accident a year later.

George Swinton moved to Winnipeg in 1954 to serve on the faculty of the School of Art at the University of Manitoba. He had emigrated from Vienna in 1937; studied at the Art Students League in New York; was artist-in-residence at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario; and worked as a curator at the National Gallery of Canada and the Saskatoon Art Centre. He had bought his first Inuit carving when in Montreal in 1950, and this early interest soon lead to him assisting the Hudson Bay Company with assessing carvings after they arrived in Winnipeg in crates from the company’s Arctic trading posts. His passion for Inuit art was reinforced by his first trip to the arctic, to Inukjuak, in 1957. He wrote two books that are known to every student and collector of Inuit art: Eskimo Sculpture/Sculpture esquimaude (1965) and Sculpture of the Eskimo (1972).

In 1960 the Gallery made a serious commitment to collecting Inuit art when it purchased 139 major sculptures from Swinton. In 1976 the WAG purchased a second collection from George Swinton consisting of over 900 sculptures, prints, and drawings. An exhibition of the Swinton Collection was held several years later, in 1987, with an accompanying catalogue. In 1989, a further collection of 85 artworks was donated to the gallery.