The Far North of Canada is a faint concept to most people. Comprising three remote, diverse territories—the Yukon, the Northwest Territories, and Nunavut—it remains, in many respects, the way it always has been: sparsely populated, prohibitively cold, and outrageously expensive. Yet the Far North is not what it was. There are its natural resources, which climate change has been making gradually, indeed dangerously, available. Communications technology continues to be a significant factor in bridging North and South. Now more than ever, it is not merely southern populations, economies, and politics that are infiltrating the Far North; southern culture is staking its claim as well.

At the same time, Far North culture—in particular, Inuit art—is being introduced to a new audience in the South, for whom it often carries textbook colonial fascinations. This is not a novel phenomenon, although it is relatively recent; Inuit art has been a major dimension of the Canadian art world since the 1950s, when postwar government initiatives instated make-work projects in the hopes of stimulating the arctic economy.

A great deal of the Inuit art that has been most popular in the South does not have unvitiated ancient origins. Most remarkably, Japanese printmaking techniques were brought to Baffin Island (now in the territory of Nunavut), to a settlement called Cape Dorset, by the mid-twentieth-century Toronto artist, writer, and educator James Archibald Houston. The local population took to printmaking like gangbusters, and the market for it has grown extensively over the years—but, unlike carving, the art form is not indigenous.

A certain model of Inuit art-making has stabilized in the region: co-operatives, or “co-ops,” have sprung up, notably at Nunavut’s Baker Lake and Cape Dorset, where people come, often with no previous experience in art, to try to make a living. At present, an older generation of artists, popular when the co-ops first emerged, in the ’60s and ’70s, is seeing another generation take hold. Since Houston’s day, Inuit art has been successful in Canadian-art circles, collected by major museums, and represented by large, specialty commercial galleries in Toronto, Vancouver, Montreal, and even internationally, but not until now has it seen such curious integration with practices in the South.

Two middle-aged cousins from Cape Dorset, Annie Pootoogook and Shuvinai Ashoona, have become the leaders of this renaissance. Pootoogook was nominated for and won Canada’s top prize for young artists, the Sobey Art Award, and, a year later, in 2007, was one of two Canadian artists to participate in Kassel, Germany’s documenta, one of the benchmarks for career achievement in contemporary art.

Ashoona’s work has shown widely, at home and abroad, including at Art Basel. In 2010, a short film was made about her by Canadian...