Napatsi Folger

An Inuk comic artist and writer from Iqaluit, NU, Napatsi Folger resides in Vancouver, BC, where she is completing an MFA at the University of British Columbia. Her work has appeared in The Walrus, The Puritan Literary Magazine, Matrix Magazine, and Taddle Creek, among others, and her first book, Joy of Apex, was published by Inhabit Media in 2011.

As a contributing editor for Inuit Art Quarterly, Folger produced a limited series of comics at IAQ Online in 2020, the final of which is featured on this issue’s cover. The Inuit Art Icons in Comics ser ies draws its inspiration from the unique st yle of each ar t ist, usi ng rea l-l i fe works and quotes, i n addit ion to Folger’s own exper iences, to form original narratives from the legacies left behind by giants in the Inuit art world such as Kenojuak Ashevak, Helen Kalvak, Joe Talirunili, or Tivi Etook.

This panel from her Karoo Ashevak comic made it to the cover of our Spring issue because of the new life it breathes into a beloved piece of the past, activating a conversation with us as viewers or even as listeners about the place of Inuit in broader art movements. Folger has taken the signature details of Ashevak’s sculpture—a highly expressive face stretched from front to back, a gaping mouth and a tipped-forward, assertive pose— and given it a similarly assertive opinion on modern art history and Ashevak’s place in it.

Find the whole series at inuitartfoundation.org/iconsincomics