Tania Willard won the Sobey Art Award for work inspired by her Secwépemc ancestry.Billie Jean Gabriel Photography/Supplied
Tania Willard, a B.C. artist who makes ink from berries and sculptures from birchbark, has won the 2025 Sobey Art Award on Saturday. Willard is an artist of Indigenous and settler heritage whose work is inspired by her Secwépemc ancestry. She lives in Neskonlith, BC., just east of Kamloops.
Willard was awarded the $100,000 prize at a ceremony at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa.
“I want to thank my community and nation, Secwépemc people and all Indigenous people, for carrying our languages and knowledge despite so many challenges that continue today – our culture is our power,” she said in a statement accepting the award. “I want to also thank the land, all lands that hold us. I also want to advocate and encourage all people to spend time with art – we need more of it in our lives, especially now in the face of austerity and injustice around the world.”
Willard was represented in the annual Sobey Art Award exhibition by a variety of work, including abstract drawings coloured with the juice of Oregon grape berry and contemporary hamburger clamshells and takeout cups made from birchbark. She also contributed a series of mixed-media prints that refer to Indigenous relationships with the land, and Surrounded/Surrounding (Woodpile Score), an image of a woodpile in which the pattern of the logs provides a musical score. The exhibition also included a video of a singer performing that operatic piece.
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The Sobey Award, formerly an award for an emerging artist under 40, is now given annually to an artist at a “critical juncture in their career” who addresses the contemporary moment. Nominees represent six Canadian regions.
This year’s shortlist included Tarralik Duffy (Circumpolar), Chukwudubem Ukaigwe (Prairies), Sandra Brewster (Ontario), Swapnaa Tamhane (Quebec) and Hangama Amiri (Atlantic.) They will each receive $25,000.
This year’s jury, also representing the six regions, included the 2021 winner Laakkuluk Williamson Bathory from the Circumpolar region, and Zoë Chan, a curator at the Richmond Art Gallery in B.C., who nominated Willard in the Pacific category.
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The other members were Alyssa Fearon, former director at the Dunlop Art Gallery in Regina; Betty Julian, a curator at the McMaster Museum of Art in Hamilton; Anne-Marie St-Jean Aubre, a curator at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts; Rose Bouthillier, a curator from Maberly, N.L., and the international juror Carla Acevedo-Yates, a curator and writer of Puerto Rican heritage who works in the U.S., the Caribbean and Latin America.
The Sobey Art Award exhibition continues at the National Gallery to Feb. 8.
