Akinasi Silaapik Partridge (she/her) is 29 year-old two-spirit Inuk and Mohawk artist with beneficiary status from Kuujjuaq, Nunavik and paternal ties to Kahnawake Mohawk territory. She is currently enrolled in the Art Skills For Success online program led by N'we Jinan, that focuses on helping Indigenous youth artists build the necessary entrepreneurial skills to become successful professionals in their chosen artistic practice.
As a community-taught artist, her work primarily involves using pencil crayon, ink pens and markers to depict scenes of daily life as a queer urban Indigenous person, to Inuit traditional stories of transformation based on connections to land and nature, as well as Mohawk style raised beadwork. After learning how to do linocut printmaking as part of her self-guided final project in N’we Jinan’s Young Professional artist program last spring, she went on to apply for and partake in a two-week woodblock printing residency in Karuizawa, Japan in June 2024. Exploring the link between the Japanese printing tradition that provided the basis for many prolific Inuit print artists in the 1950’s and 60’s, she was able to create her very first woodblock prints, featured in the spring 2025 issue of Inuit Art Quarterly in the “artist profile” section.
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https://www.inuitartfoundation.org/inuit-art-quarterly/back-issues
Through her artwork she hopes to bring visibility to the realities faced by two-spirit, queer and gender variant Indigenous people to promote better understanding of these lived experiences. In her design work, she has previously created graphics for the Indigenous Youth Roots grant funding program, and has participated in multiple group exhibitions including the “Our Land Our Art '', on display through 2025 at the Canadian Museum of Nature.
She is now preparing to present a collaborative artwork with a First Nations and Torres Strait Islander artist at the 2025 iteration of YIRRAMBOI’s First Nations Festival in Melbourne, through the High Commission of Canada to Australia, Canberra. This work will combine South-eastern Indigenous Australian linework on Kangaroo skin, with traditional Haudenosaunee raised and Inuit flat stitch beadwork, to create a visual representation of the confluence of Indigenous cultures from Australia and Canada, and their inherent ties and reverence to land, water and creation itself. Focusing on the festival's 2025 theme, “Futures, Past”, this artwork is meant to tell the creation stories of their respective cultures, and mark the intergenerational gifts of ancestors to be commemorated and passed onto future generations.
As a community-taught artist, her work primarily involves using pencil crayon, ink pens and markers to depict scenes of daily life as a queer urban Indigenous person, to Inuit traditional stories of transformation based on connections to land and nature, as well as Mohawk style raised beadwork. After learning how to do linocut printmaking as part of her self-guided final project in N’we Jinan’s Young Professional artist program last spring, she went on to apply for and partake in a two-week woodblock printing residency in Karuizawa, Japan in June 2024. Exploring the link between the Japanese printing tradition that provided the basis for many prolific Inuit print artists in the 1950’s and 60’s, she was able to create her very first woodblock prints, featured in the spring 2025 issue of Inuit Art Quarterly in the “artist profile” section.
https://www.inuitartfoundation.org/inuit-art-quarterly/back-issuesThrough her artwork she hopes to bring visibility to the realities faced by two-spirit, queer and gender variant Indigenous people to promote better understanding of these lived experiences. In her design work, she has previously created graphics for the Indigenous Youth Roots grant funding program, and has participated in multiple group exhibitions including the “Our Land Our Art '', on display through 2025 at the Canadian Museum of Nature.
She is now preparing to present a collaborative artwork with a First Nations and Torres Strait Islander artist at the 2025 iteration of YIRRAMBOI’s First Nations Festival in Melbourne, through the High Commission of Canada to Australia, Canberra. This work will combine South-eastern Indigenous Australian linework on Kangaroo skin, with traditional Haudenosaunee raised and Inuit flat stitch beadwork, to create a visual representation of the confluence of Indigenous cultures from Australia and Canada, and their inherent ties and reverence to land, water and creation itself. Focusing on the festival's 2025 theme, “Futures, Past”, this artwork is meant to tell the creation stories of their respective cultures, and mark the intergenerational gifts of ancestors to be commemorated and passed onto future generations.