Three Westerners Win 2020 Governor General's Awards

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Three Westerners – Dana Claxton, Ken Lum and Ruth Cuthand – are among the winners of this year's Governor General’s Awards in Visual and Media Arts.

The other winners are Deanna Bowen, Michael Fernandes and Jorge Lozano Lorza.

Anna Torma, a Hungarian-born textile artist from New Brunswick, was given the Saidye Bronfman Award, which recognizes achievements in fine craft. As well, Zainub Verjee, an Ontario artist, cultural administrator, arts advocate and critic, received an outstanding contribution award.

The awards, announced by the Canada Council for the Arts, recognize exceptional careers and remarkable contributions to the visual arts, media arts and fine craft. The winners, selected by a peer committee, each receive $25,000 and a special-edition bronze medallion.

Their work will be displayed at the Art Gallery of Alberta in Edmonton from July 3 to Sept. 27.

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Kenneth Robert Lum

Lum, a longtime Vancouver artist, is now based in Philadelphia, where he teaches at the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Design. He makes politically engaged, conceptual and representational work in a number of media, including large-scale public art and architectural projects, painting, sculpture and photography. 

Lum was nominated by Brian McBay, co-founder and executive director of 221A in Vancouver, who describes Lum as "a living national treasure" whose work deals with "an uncomfortable nation, fractured by historical trauma and made up of diverse peoples.”

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Dana Claxton

Claxton is a Vancouver-based filmmaker, photographer and performance artist who looks at stereotypes and the historical context of Indigenous peoples. Her nominator, curator Denise Ryner, describes Claxton as "a restless artist who continues to expand the representational and relational possibilities of each medium and format that she takes up." Claxton was born in Yorkton, Sask., of Hunkpapa Lakota heritage, and grew up in Moose Jaw. 

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Ruth Cuthand

Cuthand, a Saskatoon mixed-media artist of Plains Cree and Scottish ancestry, is known for her unflinching interpretations of racism and colonialism. Her nominators cited Cuthand's role in building an infrastructure for contemporary Indigenous art in Canada.

Bowen, a Toronto interdisciplinary artist, creates videos, installations and performance works that use a repertoire of artistic gestures to define the Black body and trace its presence and movement in place and time. A descendant of two Alabama- and Kentucky-born pioneer families from Amber Valley and Campsie, Alta., her family history has been a central pivot of her auto-ethnographic interdisciplinary works. 

Fernandes is a Trinidad-born experimental artist who came to Canada in the 1960s. His works often stand against facade and spectacle in favour of activism. He is based in Nova Scotia.

Filmmaker Lozano was born in Colombia and now lives in Toronto. He  has made more than 150 movies that live not in-between, but within cultures. His work investigates different ways of thinking, feeling and doing.

Source: Canada Council for the Arts