Aamjiwnaang artist wins Canada’s richest prize for contemporary art

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Nico Williams, an artist from Aamjiwnaang First Nation near Sarnia, has won the $100,000 2024 Sobey art award, Canada’s richest prize for contemporary art.

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Williams, who has been based at his studio in Montreal for several years, was nominated for the Sobey prize by Sonya Blazek, curator of the Judith and Norman Art Gallery in Sarnia.

“The jury felt compelled to recognize the undeniable energy and pertinence of Nico Williams’ approach to contemporary sculptural beadwork that allows us to imagine new possibilities for the medium,” jury chairperson Jonathan Shaughnessy said in a news release from the National Gallery of Canada.

“His impeccably precise artworks transform everyday objects to the level of the spectacular and weave personal experiences into broadly relatable narratives,” Shaughnessy said.

Williams grew up at Aamjiwnaang and Froomfield, attending elementary school in Corunna and high school in Sarnia before moving to London’s Beal secondary school and attending its art program.

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From there, he went to the Ontario College of Art and Design University in Toronto before moving more than a decade ago to Montreal where he earned a Master of Fine Arts at Concordia University and was awarded the $60,000 Claudine and Stephen Bronfman fellowship in contemporary art in 2021. He began beading in 2014.

“It has just been bonkers,” Williams said about how messages and requests for media interviews have flooded in since the Sobey prize was announced. “I’m floored.”

An exhibition of work by Williams and the other prize finalists is on view at the National Gallery of Canada until April 6.

“It was a very exciting moment,” Williams said of the announcement. “The roster of the artists . . . was just out of this world.”

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While accepting the award, Williams acknowledged artist Nadia Myre who received it a decade ago and was a “big inspiration for me” because she also worked with beads.

“To see an Anishinaabe artist get that prize, it gave me hope,” he said.

Now 35, Williams left Aamjiwnaang at 16 but said he returns often, including for an exhibition last year at the art gallery in Sarnia.

“To be celebrated like that with this practice, my main focus for the last 10 years, it just feels really great,” Williams said about the Sobey prize.

Beads as a material for art were actually introduced by colonizers “and then Indigenous people took that material and made it into something the world had never seen before,” he said.

Williams approaches his work as “sort of soft sculpture” and often replicates found items he sees in his daily life.

“I’ll be going on a lunch break, and I’ll see a piece of caution tape, rip it off the fence and bring it to the studio and we’ll start beading it,” he said.

“It’s exciting to be working with this material . . . and to be giving a new language to it.”

It has been a busy time for Williams who also recently opened shows in Brooklyn, New York and at Ojibwe Cultural Foundation on Manitoulin Island.

“It has been a whirlwind,” he said. “I’m very grateful and excited.”

pmorden@postmedia.com

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