Rebecca Belmore, Ayumee-aawach Oomama-mowan: Speaking to Their Mother 1991–96/2008 Courtesy Walter Phillips Gallery, Banff Centre / photo Sarah Ciurysek (Image 1/24)
Renowned Anishinaabe artist Rebecca Belmore has won the $50,000 Gershon Iskowitz Prize at the AGO.
The award, which is presented annually to an artist who has made an outstanding contribution to the visual arts in Canada, includes the $50,000 cash prize, as well as a solo exhibition at the AGO within two years.
As one juror remarked, Belmore’s “practice remains a contestation.” The initial seeds of her artistic inquiry appear as early as 1988 in Artifact #671B—in support of the Lubicon Cree against the Olympic Flame celebrations—and they continue to this day. Belmore’s work has huge scope and complexity, as seen in her installation of a massive blanket of beads for the Canadian Museum of Human Rights or the video installation The Blanket.
One of Belmore’s most iconic works is 1991’s Ayum-ee-aawach Oomama-mowan: Speaking to Their Mother. As Belmore’s website states, “This artwork was my response to what is now referred to in Canadian history as the “Oka Crisis.” During the summer of 1990, many protests were mounted in support of the Mohawk Nation of Kanesatake in their struggle to maintain their territory. This object was taken into many First Nations communities – reservation, rural, and urban. I was particularly interested in locating the Aboriginal voice on the land. Asking people to address the land directly was an attempt to hear political protest as poetic action.”
Belmore’s work will be part of the 2017 project Landmarks, which will tour Canada from coast to coast. She will also participate in Documenta 14 in Kassel.
“Rebecca Belmore is one of Canada’s most important visual artists as her work crosses disciplines between film, installation and performance. As the thirtieth winner of the prize she joins a distinguished group of Canadian artists,” said Thomas Bjarnason, president of the Iskowitz Foundation, in a release. “Rebecca is renowned for a consistently provocative interrogation of the status of our indigenous peoples through work that tests the relationship of audience, artist and art.”
Jurors for the 2016 prize included Barbara Fischer, director of the University of Toronto Art Centre and curator; Peggy Gale, foundation trustee and independent curator, writer and editor; Stephan Jost, director and CEO of the Art Gallery of Ontario; and Reid Shier, director/curator of Vancouver’s Presentation House Gallery and the future Polygon Gallery.
More details about Rebecca Belmore’s exhibition at the AGO in 2018 will be announced as they become available. Members of the jury encouraged consideration of expanding the medium, as Belmore does, and the exhibition itself beyond the institution.
