Pauta Saila is known for Inuit sculpture..
Pauta Saila, R.C.A., ᐸᐊ ᓯᓪ
Settlement: Cape Dorset / Kinngait
(1916-2009) — E7-990
Pauta Saila was born in 1916 at his father's camp near the present-day community of Cape Dorset (Kinngait).
Pauta Saila (1916 or 1917–2009) was an Inuit artist from Kilaparutua, Baffin Island, Canada who resided in Cape Dorset, Nunavut.
Of seven children, only Pauta and his sister, Sharni, would survive to adulthood. In 1937 he married Mukshowya, a young woman from the same region. After Mukshowya died while giving birth to twins (the couple's forth and fifth children), Pauta moved to Iqaluit where he met his second wife, Pitaloosie.
Sometime in the early 1960s Pauta and his now large family moved south to Cape Dorset, and by 1962 he was contributing engraved images to the community's annual print collections.
Like Pitaloosie before him, he also began making drawings, some of which would later be published as stonecuts and stencils. But it was his massively formed stone sculptures of bears and other northern animals that most caught the attention of southern critics and connoisseurs.
In the 1970s he began m