Two sculptures of dogs by Davidialuk in the WAG Collection are related to stories told by the artist.* In this work, a harnessed dog carries a baby in a pack on its back. Projecting from another pack are two objects that look like the cloven hoofs of a caribou. This would seem to illustrate the story of the dog who ate the foot of the baby he was carrying. A woman travelling on foot had secured her baby in a pack on her dog’s back. The dog suddenly broke from its leash and vanished in pursuit of a caribou. Eventually the dog returned. Famished from the long chase, he had begun to eat the baby’s foot. The woman throttled the dog and the child recovered from its injury.
(*Bernard Saladin d’Anglure. La Parole changée en pierre: La vie et oeuvre de Davidialuk Alasuaq, artiste inuit du Quebec arctique. Quebec: Centre de documentation de la Direction de l’inventaire des biens culturels, 1978, p. 94.)

In 1971, the monumental Jerry Twomey Collection of 4,000 Inuit carvings was acquired by the WAG. Twomey was a geneticist and a co-founder of Winnipeg’s T&T Seeds. Beginning in 1952 and throughout the 1950s and 1960s, he collected sculpture from virtually every art-producing Inuit community. He was fascinated by the distribution of artistic talent within families and across generations and collected the work of individual artists in depth.

In 1969, Twomey decided to retire from the seed business and move to California to breed roses full-time. The disposition of his collection became a matter for intense negotiation with a number of museums and collectors. George Swinton persuaded then Premier Edward Schreyer of the collection’s importance and in August 1971 Schreyer quickly signed an Order-in-Council to raise $185,000, or two-thirds of the funds required to purchase the collection for the WAG. In June 1972, James Richardson, then federal minister of supply and services, presented a cheque for the remaining $75,000 at a ceremony at the Gallery. To celebrate both the opening of the new Gallery building on Memorial Boulevard and the acquisition of the Twomey Collection, a small show was installed in 1972. In 2003, a comprehensive WAG exhibition and catalogue revealed the incomparable record of the development of Inuit art in the 1950s and 1960s provided by the Twomey Collection.