A total of 111 Indigenous artworks are still missing from the Indigenous Art Centre’s (IAC) collection in Canada, almost two years after an internal audit revealed 132 unaccounted artworks, the Canadian Press reports.
In November 2024, IAC conducted an internal audit of its collection that tracked its operations from April 2019 to August 2024, which revealed that it could not locate 132 objects in its collection. Neither the missing works nor their value have been publicly identified.
Since then, the Crown-Indigenous Relations and Northern Affairs Canada (CIRNAC), a federal department under which the IAC falls, has found 17 missing artworks, with an additional four flagged as possible duplicate entries in IAC’s database. The department is reportedly still looking for the missing works in regional federal government buildings.
The audit warned of an “increased risk of theft and security breaches” due to a relocation of the center’s collection to temporary storage facilities in 2022, while its former storage site was being renovated.
IAC’s collection was started in 1965 by the Government of Canada to support “the creation, preservation and promotion of contemporary Indigenous art in Canada,” per its website. The center’s holdings include some 5,000 works by First Nations, Métis, and Inuit artists—including Norval Morrisseau, Christi Belcourt, Elisapee Ishulutaq, and Kent Monkman—and is valued at an estimated C$14.4 million ($10.4 million).
“Crown-Indigenous Relations and Northern Affairs Canada understands the importance of its responsibility to the collection and to Canadians. That is why we will continue to appropriately care for these national treasures, improve our art management practices, and strive for excellence,” CIRNAC spokesperson Jacinthe Goulet told Canadian Press. She added that the department is working to improve its art management and recordkeeping, and reinforcing security and contracting rules.
“An ‘unaccounted for’ designation does not mean an artwork is lost or stolen,” Maryéva Métellus, another CIRNAC spokesperson, told the Art Newspaper. “Rather, it is an inventory and records-management designation assigned to an artwork whose location cannot be confirmed through available documentation. It indicates that further review and reconciliation of records is required before the artwork’s status can be confirmed. There are no criminal investigations underway. Of the remaining 111 artworks still to be accounted for, 20 are reproductions.”
Despite more recent efforts, however, others do not share the same optimism about the return of these unaccounted-for works. “This is just another example of government incompetence,” Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun, a Cowichan (Hul’q’umi’num Coast Salish) and Okanagan (Syilx) artist whose painting Leaving My Reservation to Go to Ottawa and Fight for a New Constitution (1985) is among the IAC collection, told the Art Newspaper.
Yuxweluptun called for the Indigenous Art Centre to be shut down and its collection to be transferred to other institutions who “can do a better job and be more responsible for native art.” He added, “This needs to be rectified.”
