The records of Eskimo Art, Inc. is valuable for their documentation of the firm's role in bringing awareness of Inuit art and culture to the United States, and its attempt to prevent the commercialization of this artwork. The records have been arranged into four series: Correspondence files, Informational, Scrapbooks, and Cape Dorset Annual Exhibit.
Eugene Power launched Eskimo Art Inc. in 1953 as a non-profit corporation "to promote an interest and appreciation of Eskimo art in the US." Over four decades, Power's company was instrumental in bringing worldwide attention to the prints, sculptures and engravings of the Inuit Eskimos of Cape Dorset, West Baffin Island in Northern Canada. Power's son Philip Power dissolved the company shortly after his father's death in 1993.
A graduate of the University of Michigan, Power founded University Microfilms International. (UMI) in 1938 and by 1953 had become a wealthy Ann Arborite and well known philanthropist and supporter of the arts. Eskimo Art Inc. was in part the result of Power's personal relationship with James Houston, a Canadian artist and authority on printmaking. In the late 1950s, Houston both introduced and trained selected Inuit men and women in printmaking techniques based on traditional Japanese methods, with the goal that they might sell their artwork to supplement their hunting activities. Before this time, several Inuit men at Cape Dorset produced sculptures.
For more than three decades, Houston and his wife published and lectured widely, while working closely with the Canadian Handicrafts Guild, the Canadian government, and the Hudson's Bay Company to distribute Inuit artwork to the world. Eskimo Art Inc. maintained relationships with all three organizations, becoming the US distributor for Canada's Department of Northern Affairs and Natural Resources, the body charged with the supervision of Canadian Eskimo cooperatives. Houston, in turn, served on the Board of Trustees for Eskimo Art Inc., retaining a personal relationship with Power.
Eskimo Art Inc.'s main endeavor included the organization of permanent and traveling exhibitions of Inuit art in Ann Arbor and around the United States. The company worked primarily in conjunction with the Smithsonian Institution and the Canadian galleries. Eskimo Art Inc. also loaned and sold artwork to individual collectors, dealers, galleries and museums. The company sponsored events and lectures in Ann Arbor, raised money for the Inuit causes (such as for the purchase a hunting boat in 1960), and returned "a great" but untold part of its one million in sales to the Inuit people.
Several Cape Dorset artist whose work Eskimo Art Inc. distributed in the early days, became extremely well known, in particular Lucy Quinnjauak and Kenojuak Ashevak. In 1964, Canada's National Film Board produced a film on Kenojuak and in 1977, Power purchased her The Enchanted Owl, one of the most famous prints ever produced in the Canadian North, for $10,000. Inuit works which sold for $10 or $15 in the early days of the company sold for as much as $18,000 by the late 1970's.
