By Josh Niland

It was a trip to the Arctic that gave a Los Angeles-based architect the inspiration for the new 36,000 sqft expansion of the Winnipeg Art Gallery opening this weekend in the nation's seventh-largest city.

Michael Maltzan's design for Qaumajuq, a center for Inuit art almost a decade in the making sprang out of an excursion he took in 2013 with the museum's director Stephen Borys.

After being tapped the year before for the design and completion of the IAC, Maltzan began studying both the artistic traditions and topographies endemic to the Inuit people in areas hundreds of miles to the north.

“It changed everything,” Borys told the New York Times. “When he got back to L.A., Michael went back to the drawing board and created a whole new schematic. It wasn’t just about seeing the land and seeing the art and context. It was also the conversations that took place.”

In collaboration with Canadian firm Cibinel Architecture, Maltzan took into consideration the uniqueness of the light in both Winnipeg and the Arctic to fashion a vibrant scalloped facade that is as in tune with the seasons as it is with the geometry of the original building, designed in 1971 by Gustavo de Rosa.

Anchored by a glass vault that offers views of the center's conservation and curatorial workers to the public, the four-story structure also features a theatre, studios, café, roof terrace, and 8,000-square-foot gallery, all of which are meant to democratize the WAG to the public in ways that echo the transparency pushes undertaken by similar museums in recent years.

In an effort to bridge long-existing divides between the museum and several tribes of the region, the 109-year-old institution began working with Indigenous communities around Manitoba in an effort to declonize its presence and give a platform to the over 14,000 pieces of Inuit art that it has collected since the 1950s. The opening of the center will coincide with an exhibition of contemporary Inuit artists titled Inua that will also feature a series of virtual programming aimed at reframing the formerly co-opted narrative around Indigenous Canadian art as organized by Heather Igloliorte and three other curators from the different regional Inuit communities.

Maltzan hopes Qaumajuq will provide a new perspective into the process and history of the art his long-awaited project now houses.

"I believe that the scale of the space was truly important to try to at least infer the scale that a lot of the work that will be displayed here was made in," he said in a video posted to the WAG's Youtube Page. "Here the scale and the power of the space in relationship to the power and the scale of the art in this collection is really trying to at least recall some of the place that that work was made in." 

Inua (an acronym that stands for "Inuit Moving Forward Together" in the original language) opens today and will run until December 19th.

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