Lola Sheppard Co-Curates Arctic Housing Exhibition

Waterloo Architecture Professor Lola Sheppard is co-curator of Sikumit Aisimajugut / At Home on Ice- ᓯᑯᒥᑦᐊᐃᓯᒪᔪᒍᑦ, an exhibition exploring ideas of home and housing across Inuit Nunangat.

Sikumit Aisimajugut / At Home on Ice - ᓯᑯᒥᑦᐊᐃᓯᒪᔪᒍᑦ

December 9, 2025 – February 16, 2026
Larry Wayne Richards Gallery, Daniels Faculty, University of Toronto
Weekdays, 9:00 a.m. – 7:00 p.m.

The exhibition brings together a striking, wall-sized panoramic drawing that illustrates the dual perspectives of “inside-out” and “outside-in” in Arctic housing, alongside archival materials and documents embedded in ice-floe-shaped tables that create inviting reading rooms. Visitors can browse decades of housing history across the four regions of Inuit Nunangat. Artist and designer Mark Bennett contributes a custom typeface inspired by writings found on buildings in Labrador in the 1970s, as well as reconstructed seasonal homes integrated into the gallery niches. Together, these elements offer a layered and immersive experience that reflects on what constitutes a house, a home, and a community in Arctic contexts, challenging southern Canadian notions of housing as commodity and property.

Complementing the exhibition, a roundtable discussion will take place on January 16, 2026, at the Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design. Organized around two panels, the event brings together speakers with expertise and lived experience in housing across Inuit Nunangat to examine cultural understandings of home and the external forces shaping housing in the North.

Learn more by visiting the Sikumit Aisimajugut / At Home on Ice site.