Rebecca Belmore wins $100,000 Audain Prize for the Visual Arts
Presenting the Anishinaabe artist with the award at today’s ceremony, Scott Watson described her as “one of not just Canada’s, but her generation’s most important artists”
Rebecca Belmore. Photo by Scott Benesiinabandan
2018's Tower, clay and shopping carts, installation view courtesy Art Gallery of Ontario
ANISHINAABE MULTIDISCIPLINARY ARTIST Rebecca Belmore, whose internationally acclaimed works often centre the political and social realities faced by Indigenous communities, has just been awarded the $100,000 Audain Prize for the Visual Arts.
Belmore accepted the Audain Prize today at a ceremony held at the Fairmont Hotel Vancouver. Considered B.C.’s most highly regarded arts accolade, the annual distinction is one of only three of its kind in Canada that comes with a six-figure cash prize.
“For the press release, I was asked to come up with a quote that kind of spoke about my feelings about art,” Belmore offered candidly while speaking before a crowd of guests at the ceremony. “So I thought about it over coffee a couple days ago, and I wrote, ‘We who work in the fields of art believe in its greatness.’ And I think today, in the world that we inhabit together, it’s becoming more and more difficult to believe. So it’s only through surrounding yourself with likeminded people, and people who work in the fields with you, that we can go back to believing again when we wake up the next day.”
The Audain Prize was presented to Belmore by Scott Watson, director emeritus and research fellow at the Morris and Helen Belkin Gallery. He was one of five independent jurors who selected her as winner, alongside Daina Augaitis, chief curator emerita of the Vancouver Art Gallery; Curtis Collins, director and chief curator of the Audain Art Museum; independent writer-critic-curator Robin Laurence; and Dana Claxton, last year’s recipient of the Audain Prize, who is head of the department of art history, visual art, and theory at UBC.
In his opening remarks, Watson noted that Belmore has a 30-year track record of creating “works that astonish with their beauty and rigour, touch deeply with their passion and intelligence, and always move us with their great courage”.
Rebecca Belmore's sister, installation view, at Audain Gallery at SFU. Photo by Henri Robideau, Kevin Schmidt/SFU Galleries
A member of the Lac Seul First Nation in Ontario, Belmore splits her time between Vancouver and Toronto. Her major solo exhibition Facing the Monumental, which debuted at the Art Gallery of Ontario in 2018, featured such striking works as Tower, in which the artist stacked shopping carts into the shape of a condominium that was more than 15 feet tall, offering pressing commentary on homelessness and the commodification of land in Vancouver. In its installation, it loomed over tarpaulin, the titular material draped over what appeared to be a human form.
Yet more of her pieces intertwine land-based themes with bodies and languages, including Hacer Memoria, a large-scale public-art piece commissioned by the Polygon Gallery in collaboration with the Burrard Arts Foundation that emphasized the resilience of Indigenous residential-school survivors through a series of blue and orange shirts made from tarpaulin.
“Much of Rebecca’s work has been an assertion not just of identity, but the assault on identity,” Watson said this afternoon.
One such piece that exemplifies this is Creation or Death: We Will Win, performed by Belmore in 1991 at the Castillo de la Real Fuerza bastion fort in Havana, Cuba, as part of the fourth-annual Bienal de la Habana. The artist frantically moved a pile of dirt up a winding staircase, step by step, in a powerful visualization of the long, complicated struggle faced by Indigenous people to reclaim their land and culture.
Watson described the work, which was shown in part during a video presented at the ceremony, as “a masterpiece of endurance, energy, and objection”.
At this afternoon’s ceremony, five $7,500 travel grants were also awarded to full-time B.C. college and university students in visual-arts programs: Rainy Huang at the University of Victoria, Sun S Manuel at Emily Carr University of Art + Design, Avideh Saadatpajouh at SFU, and Roland Samuel and Yuan Wen at UBC.
Belmore’s work continues into the present; recent solo exhibitions span 2021’s Turbulent Water at Griffith University in Brisbane, Australia and 2019’s Reservoir at the Audain Art Museum. Group exhibitions have taken her to New York City’s Whitney Biennial in 2022, the Istanbul Biennial in 2019, and the Venice Biennale in 2005.
“Rebecca has moved spectacularly in the new world,” said Watson of Belmore before the crowd. “She is one of not just Canada’s, but her generation’s most important artists.”
Added Watson: “Hers is a star that is still ascending.” 
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