Jenna Swift and Sahar Te Win Art Writing Prizes

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Jenna Swift (photo by Baden Roth)

Two writers with connections to Calgary, Jenna Swift and Sahar Te, have picked up awards in a writing contest organized by the Southern Alberta Art Gallery in Lethbridge.

Calgary's Jenna Swift is the winner of the arts writing category of this year's SAAG Arts Writing Prize, offered to emerging writers in Alberta. 

Swift's essay considers Ontario artist Samuel de Lange's exhibition, Between the Salt of the Sun and the Light of the Sea, presented before the pandemic by Truck, an artist-run centre in Calgary.

Along with the $250 prize, Swift has the opportunity to publish an exhibition review in Galleries West. She previously won a 2013 national arts writing prize organized by the Canadian Art Foundation.

Meanwhile, Toronto-based multidisciplinary artist Sahar Te, born and raised in Tehran, is the winner of the $1,000 Aruna D'Souza arts writing category, open to  BIPOC writers across Canada, for Tales of an Ancient Whisperer.  

Te is a graduate of the Alberta University of the Arts in Calgary, where she lived from 2013 to 2017, and also holds a Master's degree in fine arts from the University of Toronto. Her practice exists at the intersection of text, installation and performance. She says her writing relates to confusion around concepts of originality and not being from anywhere, and how cultures overlap. She will be published in Canadian Art magazine.

Calgary's Pamela Medland won the poetry and prose category with In the Loggia dei Lanzi.

The jury was composed of art critic Aruna D'Souza, artist Hali Heavy Shield, and Kristy Trinier, the gallery's director.

All submissions will be included in the SAAG Arts Writing Prize Reader 2020. 

It's the first year the Aruna D’Souza prize has been offered. D'Souza writes about race in modern and contemporary art, intersectional feminisms, and how museums shape our views of each other and the world.

Her most recent book, Whitewalling: Art, Race, and Protest in 3 Acts (Badlands Unlimited), was named one of the best art books of 2018 by the New York Times.

She is editing two forthcoming volumes, Making It Modern: A Linda Nochlin Reader, and Lorraine O’Grady: Writing in Space 1973-2018.

Source: Southern Alberta Art Gallery