Jack and Doris Shadbolt Foundation Announces 2024 VIVA Awards Winners
T’uy’t’tanat Cease Wyss (photo by Mavreen David) and Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill (photo by Aaron Leon)
The Jack and Doris Shadbolt Foundation for the Visual Arts has announced the winners of the 2024 VIVA Awards.
Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill and Hilland T’uy’t’tanat Cease Wyss are this year's winners.
The awards ceremony will take place March 26 at Emily Carr University of Art + Design in Vancouver. It will be the first in-person VIVA Awards celebration since 2019.
“The jury was unanimous in their support for Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill and T’uy’t’tanat Cease Wyss as the 2024 VIVA Awards recipients,” said Melanie O’Brian in a news release. O'Brian is associate director and curator of the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery at the University of British Columbia and chair of the Shadbolt Foundation.
“We acknowledge these two artists’ outstanding contributions as committed and visible members in the local, regional, and national art communities. The jury additionally noted that both artists’ practices address land, politics, and economies in significant material processes.”
The annual VIVA Awards were created by Jack and Doris Shadbolt in 1988. They are ppresented to mid-career visual artists in British Columbia who demonstrate exceptional creative ability and commitment to the visual arts. This year's jury included Sean Alward, Charles Campbell, Laiwan, Hazel Meyer and Samuel Roy-Bois.
L’Hirondelle Hill holds a master of fine arts from the California College of the Arts, as well as degrees from Simon Fraser University. Her work has been shown extensively including at the Museum of Modern Art, the Venice Biennale and the Vancouver Art Gallery. A member of the Indigenous artist collective BUSH gallery, she is an artist and writer who explores the history of found materials in her work, which often addresses capitalism and its vulnerabilities.
A Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, Sto:lo, Hawaiian, and Swiss interdisciplinary artist, educator, and Indigenous ethnobotanist, T’uy’t’tanat Cease Wyss works in various mediums including digital media and weaving. Her work explores storytelling and collaboration centred around Indigenous plant knowledge and natural space restoration, and she has shown her work at the Vancouver Art Gallery and the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery.
Daina Augaitis and Makiko Hara, recipients of the two most recent Alvin Balkind Curator’s Prize, will also be honoured on March 26.
Source: Jack and Doris Shadbolt Foundation for the Visual Arts
