NEW YORK, NY.- The Metropolitan Museum of Art announced today the landmark gift of the René Balcer and Carolyn Hsu-Balcer Inuit Print Collection, which features over 500 relief prints by renowned Inuit printmakers from multiple regions across Nunavut and Nunavik, the semiautonomous Arctic homeland of Canada's Inuit population. This important collection, gifted to The Met by René Balcer and Carolyn Hsu-Balcer, is among the strongest examples of Inuit graphic art in the United States. With works ranging from the mid-1940s to the present day, it includes major works by some of the most influential Indigenous women artists in history and will significantly enhance The Met’s collections of Inuit objects. The Balcer Collection represents diverse Inuit printmaking methods, including sealskin and paper stencils; monoprints; and carved stone, or stone-cuts, on paper, and features imagery of birds, animals, Inuit peoples, transformative figures, dreams, cosmologies, and hunting scenes.
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"We are deeply grateful to René Balcer and Carolyn Hsu-Balcer for this extraordinary gift, which is a leading collection of Inuit masterworks in a U.S. museum,” said Max Hollein, The Met’s Marina Kellen French Director and Chief Executive Officer. “Mr. and Mrs. Balcer’s dedication to the support of Inuit artists is evident in this magnificent and comprehensive collection that celebrates the remarkable artistry of Native and Indigenous individuals and communities, and we are thrilled to be able to share these prints with visitors in our American Wing galleries.”
René Balcer began collecting Inuit art in Montreal, Canada, in the late 1970s. The René Balcer and Carolyn Hsu-Balcer Inuit Print Collection highlights the famous artists’ collective and printmaking studio at Baffin Island’s Cape Dorset, the source of Inuit printmaking that was established in the 1950s. The original artists working at Cape Dorset collectively identified as the West Baffin Eskimo Co-operative, and in 1960 they released their first official catalogued collection of 41 prints to great critical acclaim. The René Balcer and Carolyn Hsu-Balcer Inuit Print Collection includes some of the most celebrated Inuit artists associated with the collective, such as Jessie Oonark (1906–1985) and Kenojuak Ashevak (1927–2013), whose print The Enchanted Owl (1960) was featured on a commemorative Canadian postal stamp in 1970 and was on view in The Met exhibition A Decade on Paper: Recent Acquisitions, 2014–2024 (August 26, 2024–February 23, 2025). Looking ahead, select works in the Balcer Collection will be included as part of ongoing annual rotations in the Art of Native America installation in the Museum’s American Wing.
“This is an aesthetically and culturally significant gift, and it has been an absolute pleasure to work with René Balcer and Carolyn Hsu-Balcer in our mutual goal to more strongly represent Inuit artists in The Met collection,” said Patricia Marroquin Norby (P’ urhépecha), Associate Curator of Native American Art in the American Wing. “The arrival of this beautifully curated collection aligns with our departmental vision to prioritize previously underrepresented artists and the presence, voices, and experiences of peoples and communities who have contributed greatly to our cultural and national identities. We look forward to collaborating with Inuit communities and individual artists to highlight these works in our galleries and programming.”
René Balcer and Carolyn Hsu-Balcer said, “One of the greatest challenges the Inuit face vis-à-vis the southern world is invisibility. At best, the Inuit and their brethren in the Circumpolar region are an abstraction to the rest of the world, glimpsed mostly through the distorted lens of pop history. At worst, the reaction the Inuit get when meeting non-Indigenous people is, ‘Oh, I thought you all died off years ago.’ It is our modest hope that this collection will demonstrate that the Inuit and their culture are very much alive and very much engaged in the modern world (to wit, Annie Pootoogook’s Watching Jerry Springer from 2003). My wife, Carolyn, and I are very grateful to The Met for accepting the collection and committing its vast resources and reach to showcase to the world the creative brilliance, wisdom, and humor of Inuit artists.”
René Balcer is an Emmy-winning writer, producer, and creator of critically acclaimed TV series and documentaries. René’s engagement with the Canadian North began as a teenager working in lumber mills, hydro projects, and construction on airstrips in remote communities, often alongside First Nations and Inuit coworkers.
Among other artistic endeavors across North America and Asia, René and Carolyn recently organized and participated in a multiyear artist’s residency with Chinese artist Wu Jian’an and Inuit artists at the Uqqurmiut Centre for Arts and Crafts in Pangnirtung, Nunavut, and with renowned artists Shuvinai Ashoona, Ningiukulu Teevee, and Qavavau Manumie at Kinngait Studios (Cape Dorset). René’s poignant photographs of the Arctic have been featured in gallery exhibitions in New York and appear in his recently published portfolio, Seeing As (ACC Art Books UK).
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