The winner of the Canada’s high modern artwork award, the 2024 Sobey Artwork Award, is artist Nico Williams. The C$100,000 ($72,000) prize was introduced at a ceremony Saturday evening (9 November) on the Nationwide Gallery of Canada (NGC), the place an exhibition that includes all six shortlisted artists is on view till 6 April 2025. The remaining shortlisted artists—Taqralik Partridge, Judy Chartrand, Rhayne Vermette, June Clark and Mathieu Léger—will every obtain C$25,000 ($18,000).
“I really feel out of this world about receiving this award,” Williams tells The Artwork Newspaper. The 35-year-old Montréal primarily based Anishinaabe artist is thought for his multidisciplinary and sometimes collaborative apply that’s centred round sculptural beadwork and renderings of up to date discovered objects, from bingo playing cards to garden chairs.
“To obtain this award validates my apply working with beads,” he says. “This has been a medium my ancestors have labored with for a very long time. To be acknowledged for working with a cloth like that is respiratory new life into the apply. And for curators, friends and the jury to be accepting of this apply feels great.”
In the course of the ceremony, with artists representing areas from coast to coast in attendance—together with previous winners and nominees like 2023 winner Kablusiak, who gave Williams the award—the director of curatorial initiatives on the NGC, Jonathan Shaughnessy, who additionally served because the jury chair for the 2024 Sobey Award Jury, praised Williams’s work.
“The jury felt compelled to recognise the plain power and pertinence of Nico Williams’s method to modern sculptural beadwork that enables us to think about new potentialities for the medium,” Shaughnessy stated. “His impeccably exact artworks remodel on a regular basis objects to the extent of the spectacular and weave private experiences into broadly relatable narratives. Working with and thru group, Williams’s apply challenges the persistence of colonial legacies by means of the surfacing of collective reminiscence and shared nostalgias.”
Nico Williams, Zhi-biindiged gwaya (in foreground), 2022. Glass beads, thread, plastic, steel and river rocks © Nico Williams. Picture: Toni Hafkenscheid
For the primary time ever, the remainder of the jury was comprised of six Canadian artists—all former Sobey Artwork Award finalists or winners, with illustration from every of the areas—in addition to a global juror. The jury, from West to East, consisted of asinnajaq (from the Circumpolar area), Jeremy Shaw (Pacific), Divya Mehra (Prairies), Stephanie Comilang (Ontario), Caroline Monnet (Québec), Mario Doucette (Atlantic) and Zoé Whitley, the director of the Chisenhale Gallery. Prize cash for the award now totals C$465,000 ($334,000). Funded by the Sobey Artwork Basis, it’s the richest award in modern artwork within the nation and one of the vital beneficiant on the earth.
This yr, 4 of the six finalists have been Indigenous artists and their works replicate problems with place, identification, group and belonging. “I really feel like I’m wining this award each collectively and ancestrally,” Williams tells The Artwork Newspaper. “My studio may have seven to 11 individuals engaged on a undertaking at any given time. Six of them have been right here tonight and I requested them to face up and be applauded.”
Williams, whose beaded Ikea bag entitled Feast (2024) was featured on this yr’s Artwork Toronto Focus exhibition, may have an exhibition later this yr at Montréal’s Phi Basis, and says that the prize cash will “be an important assist to my studio”.
In an announcement, he added: “Ten years in the past, one in every of my most influential function fashions, Nadia Myre, obtained this prize. I need to ship out the identical message to all of the bush youngsters on the market, we’re doing it! Additionally, I’m extraordinarily grateful to all of the individuals who have stood behind my apply for the reason that very starting! I wouldn’t be the place I’m at this time with out you! Chi-miigwech!” (The Anishinaabe phrase for “thanks”.)
