Feature

Art is a great way to get creative, fire up different parts of the brain, and see something in a new way. To make colourful, sustainable inks that don’t come with excess packaging or contain microplastics that end up in nature, just reach for plants from the kitchen, forest, or garden.

Born in Little Buffalo, a remote Alberta community ringed by oil extraction efforts, Melina Laboucan-Massimo knows the feeling of being helpless in the face of a warming planet. Every time her family drove across their traditional Lubicon Cree First Nation homelands, the landscape felt drier, its vegetation less vibrant.

The Tla-o-qui-aht Nation’s territory extends from one of the few remaining ancient temperate rainforests down to the Pacific Ocean. It is a place of thousand-year-old cedars up to 12 metres tall. Elk run through the misty woods, and black bears catch salmon as they migrate upstream, pulled back to rivers and streams by an unstoppable urge to spawn the next generation where they themselves hatched.

Now, Willard is an artist, curator, and assistant professor at the University of British Columbia (UBC), Okanagan. A mixed Secwépemc and settler, Willard’s research is focused in part on providing a view of the art world in small towns, rural centres, and on reserve. As an artist, curator, and educator, Holly Schmidt is trying to put a frame around something that is often taken for granted: the natural world around us.

Today at Pinnguaq, we’re celebrating World Art Day. It’s a day to promote the creation, diffusion and enjoyment of art. Art plays an important role in knowledge sharing and in the promotion of cultural diversity, and is a fundamental component of STEAM, along with science, technology, engineering and math.

For the Government of Canada’s 2019 Smart Cities Challenge, Pinnguaq partnered with a group of Nunavut-based organizations to submit a proposal on behalf of the 25 municipalities in Nunavut.

On August 14, 2020 Pinnguaq held a week long workshop partnered with Kids Help Phone to create an animated short video. Learn more about it inside!

Lindsay Makerspace teacher Becky writes about her favourite activities she had taught students! Read about the fun experiences had, and how these activities impacted the Lindsay Makerspace.

In August 2019 the Pinnguaq staff and some volunteers had the pleasure to work with youth members of Curve Lake First Nations, read about what happened!

Explore why and how Pinnguaq’s Lindsay Makerspace is using the Prusa MK3S 3D printer.

Here are some of our staff members that will be attending schooling in 2019, here’s what they have to say!

Meet our digital artist Alyssa Amell! She is a Métis person that lives in the Kawartha Lakes that works at Pinnguaq doing what she loves!

Pinnguaq’s Ryan Oliver spoke at a conference called “Indigenous Cultural Heritage and Technology in the Arctic” in Tromsø.

Pinnguaq’s Ryan Oliver spoke at a conference called “Indigenous Cultural Heritage and Technology in the Arctic” in Tromsø, Norway.