Artist Nico Williams, winner of the 2024 Sobey Art Award for his intricate beadwork sculptures.Dave Chan/Supplied
An Anishinaabe artist who makes beaded versions of contemporary objects is the winner of the 2024 Sobey Art Award: Nico Williams received the $100,000 prize at a ceremony in Ottawa on Saturday.
Williams, a member of the Aamjiwnaang First Nation in Sarnia, Ont., uses traditional beading techniques to reproduce commercial signage and consumer goods in a comment on value systems and the intersection of Indigenous and settler cultures. Using tiny seed beads, he creates highly realistic three-dimensional sculptures of objects such as a J-cloth, a plaid shirt and a length of caution tape. The current show of the Sobey finalists’ art at the National Gallery of Canada also includes his note-perfect beaded reproductions of lottery tickets and supermarket flyers – including one for Sobey’s.
Williams, representing Quebec on the Sobey shortlist, lives and works in Montreal where he has exhibited work at the Musée d’art contemporain and at the PHI Foundation. He was included in recent group exhibitions at the James Fuentes Gallery in New York City and the Hessel Museum of Art in Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y. At the National Gallery, his work was also seen last summer in Radical Stitch, a show devoted to contemporary beadwork that opens at the Beaverbrook Art Gallery in Fredericton this month.
In 2021, Williams was awarded the Claudine and Stephen Bronfman Fellowship in Contemporary Art.
“The jury felt compelled to recognize the undeniable energy and pertinence of Nico Williams’s approach to contemporary sculptural beadwork that allows us to imagine new possibilities for the medium,” Jonathan Shaughnessy, the gallery’s director of curatorial initiatives and chair of the Sobey jury, said in a statement. “His impeccably precise artworks transform everyday objects to the level of the spectacular and weave personal experiences into broadly relatable narratives.”
Williams thanked Nadia Myre, the Algonquin artist from Montreal who also works in beads, in a statement: “Ten years ago, one of the 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!”
The Sobey Art Award, originally conceived as a prize for emerging artists under 40, dropped the age requirement in 2021 and now simply recognizes an artist at a “critical juncture” in their career whose work “reflects upon and speaks of our contemporary moment nationally and globally.”
This year, the circumpolar region was added to the five geographic regions from which the Sobey longlist and shortlist are drawn. The other finalists from the other five regions – Taqralik Partridge (Circumpolar), Judy Chartrand (Pacific), Rhayne Vermette (Prairies), June Clark (Ontario) and Mathieu Léger (Atlantic) – will receive $25,000 each. The remaining longlisted artists receive $10,000 each.
With these prizes totalling $465,000, the Sobey remains one of the most generous visual arts prizes in the world and one of the top cultural prizes in Canada. It is rivalled by the Audain Prize for a senior B.C. artist, the Siminovitch Prize for a mid-career theatre professional, the Giller Prize for fiction writers and the Rogers prizes for best Canadian film and documentary.
Also, for the first time, the jury was composed of six artists, all former Sobey winners or finalists, including asinnajaq, Jeremy Shaw, Divya Mehra, Stephanie Comilang, Caroline Monnet, Mario Doucette, as well as Shaughnessy and the international juror, Zoé Whitley, director of the Chisenhale Gallery, an artists’ centre in London.