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Napachie was born in 1938 at Sako, a small camp on south Baffin Island. She died in December, 2002, of cancer. Napachie was the only daughter of the well-known artist Pitseolak Ashoona. Napachie began to draw in the late 1950's while living at Keakto, a camp near Cape Dorset. Several people living at the camp, including Napachie's mother and Kenojuak Ashevak had already begun to draw, encouraged by James Houston. Napachies' early drawing exhibited a free and uninhibited style, still very evident in her contemporary works. For all but a few years in the early 1970's, she drew consistently. In the mid-1970's she experimented with mixed media works using coloured pencil and black felt pen in conjunction with acrylic paints. In 1979 and 1980, solo exhibitions of these works were held at Gallery One, in Toronto. More recently, her work was included in the Canadian Museum of Civilization’s 1994 exhibition entitled Isumavut: The Artistic Expression of Nine Cape Dorset Women. Napachies' work in recent years focused on local history and stories about people and events in the Cape Dorset area, often with accompanying text to explain the circumstances. She thought of herself in her maturing years as an historian and chronicler of local oral history. A selection of these contemporary drawings, along with a retrospective of her earlier work was exhibited and catalogued by the McMichael Canadian Art Collection in their 1999 exhibition "Three Women, Three Generations" which also featured the work of her mother, Pitseolak Ashoona, and her niece, Suvinai Ashoona. (Biographical information from the website of Dorset Fine Arts.)

Born: 1938
Died: 2002