The winner of the Canada’s top contemporary art award, the 2024 Sobey Art Award, is artist Nico Williams. The C$100,000 ($72,000) prize was announced at a ceremony Saturday night (9 November) at the National Gallery of Canada (NGC), where an exhibition featuring all six shortlisted artists is on view until 6 April 2025. The remaining shortlisted artists—Taqralik Partridge, Judy Chartrand, Rhayne Vermette, June Clark and Mathieu Léger—will each receive C$25,000 ($18,000).
“I feel out of this world about receiving this award,” Williams tells The Art Newspaper. The 35-year-old Montréal based Anishinaabe artist is known for his multidisciplinary and often collaborative practice that is centred around sculptural beadwork and renderings of contemporary found objects, from bingo cards to lawn chairs.
“To receive this award validates my practice working with beads,” he says. “This has been a medium my ancestors have worked with for a long time. To be acknowledged for working with a material like this is breathing new life into the practice. And for curators, peers and the jury to be accepting of this practice feels wonderful.”
During the ceremony, with artists representing regions from coast to coast in attendance—including past winners and nominees like 2023 winner Kablusiak, who gave Williams the award—the director of curatorial initiatives at the NGC, Jonathan Shaughnessy, who also served as the jury chair for the 2024 Sobey Award Jury, praised Williams’s work.
“The jury felt compelled to recognise the undeniable energy and pertinence of Nico Williams’s approach to contemporary sculptural beadwork that allows us to imagine new possibilities for the medium,” Shaughnessy said. “His impeccably precise artworks transform everyday objects to the level of the spectacular and weave personal experiences into broadly relatable narratives. Working with and through community, Williams’s practice challenges the persistence of colonial legacies through the surfacing of collective memory and shared nostalgias.”
Nico Williams, Zhi-biindiged gwaya (in foreground), 2022. Glass beads, thread, plastic, metal and river rocks © Nico Williams. Photo: Toni Hafkenscheid
For the first time ever, the rest of the jury was comprised of six Canadian artists—all former Sobey Art Award finalists or winners, with representation from each of the regions—as well as an international juror. The jury, from West to East, consisted of asinnajaq (from the Circumpolar region), 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 money for the award now totals C$465,000 ($334,000). Funded by the Sobey Art Foundation, it is the richest award in contemporary art in the country and one of the most generous in the world.
This year, four of the six finalists were Indigenous artists and their works reflect issues of place, identity, community and belonging. “I feel like I’m wining this award both collectively and ancestrally,” Williams tells The Art Newspaper. “My studio will have seven to 11 people working on a project at any given time. Six of them were here tonight and I asked them to stand up and be applauded.”
Williams, whose beaded Ikea bag entitled Feast (2024) was featured in this year’s Art Toronto Focus exhibition, will have an exhibition later this year at Montréal’s Phi Foundation, and says that the prize money will “be a great support to my studio”.
In a statement, he added: “Ten years ago, one of my most influential role models, Nadia Myre, received this prize. I want to send out the same message to all the bush kids out there, we are doing it! Also, I am extremely grateful to all the people who have stood behind my practice since the very beginning! I wouldn’t be where I am today without you! Chi-miigwech!” (The Anishinaabe word for “thank you”.)
