Dancing Bear

This bronze sculpture, created in 1999, is located in the Jeanne d’Arc Court in the ByWard Market, in Ottawa.

Dancing Bear is the first public art by an Inuit artist from Nunavut to be placed in Ottawa. The artist, Pauta Saila, grew up on Baffin Island, and began carving in the 1950s to supplement his livelihood as a hunter.

Saila is widely known for his powerful, somewhat abstract, dancing bears. However, he has claimed that they are not dancing, but only playing, in the same way as when he has watched them on the icefield while hunting.