Vancouver artist Krista Belle Stewart is the winner of this year's VIVA Award and curator Bruce Grenville is the recipient of the Alvin Balkind Curator’s Prize. Both receive $12,000.
Krista Belle Stewart, "Potato Gardens Band," (live performance as part of Stages: Drawing the Curtain, Plug-In ICA), 2017, contact microphones, guitar pedals and bucket filled with ancestral land. (photo from the artists and Plug In ICA)
Stewart, a member of the Upper Nicola Band of the Okanagan Nation in Douglas Lake, B.C., has earned critical and curatorial acclaim for her probing, multi-disciplinary practice, which includes video, photography, textiles, sound, mixed-media installation, performance and interventions on the land.
She often works with archival images and museum materials, posing questions about the ways records of Indigenous life and culture have been framed and contextualized, both historically and institutionally.
She has exhibited extensively, including at the Contemporary Art Gallery, the SFU Teck Gallery and Artspeak in Vancouver; Mercer Union and YYZ Artist Outlet in Toronto; Musée d’Art Contemporain and the Leonard and Bina Ellen Art Gallery in Montreal; the Esker Foundation and the New Gallery in Calgary; Plug In ICA in Winnipeg; the Independent Studio and Curatorial Program in New York; and the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin.
Stewart holds a BFA from Emily Carr University and an MFA from the Milton Avery School of the Arts at Bard College, New York.
Installation view of "The Uncanny Experiments in Cyborg Culture," exhibition curated by Bruce Grenville, Chief Curator, Vancouver Art Gallery, 2002 (photo courtesy of artists and the Vancouver Art Gallery)
Grenville, a senior curator at the Vancouver Art Gallery since 1997, has built a remarkable body of professional work, characterized by the depth and breadth of its themes and its dedication to inclusiveness. He has also worked as chief curator at the Mendel Art Gallery (now the Remai Modern) in Saskatoon and the Edmonton Art Gallery (now the Art Gallery of Alberta).
Grenville challenges hierarchical distinctions between “high” and “low” art, drawing his curatorial projects not only from the realm of contemporary visual art but also from the broader world of visual culture. His subjects range from architecture and design to new media, robotics, anime, manga, graphic novels and video games.
He has curated an extraordinary range of exhibitions in Vancouver, including Cabin Fever, MashUp, Grand Hotel, KRAZY, Home and Away, The Uncanny and Massive Change: The Future of Global Design. He has also organized numerous solo exhibitions by artists such as Stan Douglas, Janet Cardiff, Carol Sawyer, Michael Lin, Fiona Tan, Franz West, Wang Du, Gathie Falk, Dominique Blain, Arnaud Maggs, Christos Dikeakos, Ruth Cuthand, Mary Scop and Jack Goldstein.
Grenville is the award-winning author of numerous exhibition catalogues, essays, feature articles and reviews. He describes writing as “a way of coming to another understanding of the work.”
He holds a BA and an MA in art history from Queen’s University in Kingston, Ont.
Established in 1988, the VIVA Awards are funded by the Jack and Doris Shadbolt Foundation for the Visual Arts. The awards celebrate exemplary achievement by British Columbia mid-career artists, and are chosen by an independent jury.
Provided through the estate of Abraham Rogatnick to honour the memory of Vancouver curator Alvin Balkind, the Alvin Balkind Curator’s Prize is a biannual award that recognizes outstanding innovation, original research and critical engagement.
Source: The Jack and Doris Shadbolt Foundation