James A. Houston, Writer on Eskimo Life
NY Times
James A. Houston, a writer and artist almost single-handedly responsible for introducing contemporary Eskimo art to an international audience, died on Sunday in New London, Conn. He was 83 and lived in Stonington, Conn.
The cause was complications of a heart attack, his wife, Alice, said.
A Canadian who lived in the United States since the early 1960’s, Mr. Houston spent more than a decade among the Inuit of Canada’s eastern Arctic in the years after World War II. There, he introduced local people to printmaking, helped them establish a profitable crafts cooperative to sell their prints and sculpture, and brought their work, then virtually unknown to outsiders, to the attention of museums and collectors worldwide.
