Curtis Talwst Santiago in his Munich studio (photo by Constantin Mirbach)
The winners of the 2024 Hnatyshyn Foundation Mid-Career Awards have been announced.
Curtis Talwst Santiago has been awarded The Hnatyshyn Foundation Mid-Career Award for Excellence in Visual Arts. He will receive $30,000.
Santiago is a Trinidadian-Canadian artist who was born in 1979 in Alberta. He studied at new York Studio School and was an artist in residence at Pioneer Works in Brooklyn, followed by a residency at Black Rock in Senegal. His work is found in the permanent collections of the National Gallery of Canada, Lenbachhaus-Munich, Studio Museum-Harlem and the Nevada Museum of Art. He currently lives in Munich, Germany.
Jurors for this year’s mid-career award include Tairone Bastien, Lori Blondeau, Stanley Février, Lindsey Sharman and Scott Watson.
“Best known for his miniature dioramas staged within antique jewelry boxes, Santiago is also an accomplished painter, drawer and incorporates these elements into immersive installation-based projects,” said Sharman in a news release. “His work often seeks out ancestors. Not stymied by the unknowability of his ancestral past, he instead plays with the ways history, archaeology or museology present uncertainty with assured authority. Santiago’s work expands and collapses scale—time scales and size scales—to rework and rethink monumentality, reality, authority, and control.”
Wanda Nanibush (photo by Nadya Kwandibens, Red Works Studio)
And Wanda Nanibush is this year’s recipient of The Hnatyshyn Foundation Mid-Career Award for Curatorial Excellence. She will receive $20,000.
Based in Toronto, Nanibush is an Anishinaabe-kwe curator and community organizer from Beausoleil First Nation. She is the founding director of aabaakwad, an annual international gathering of Indigenous curators, writers and artists. She recently won the Toronto Book Award for her co-authored book, Moving the Museum, about her time at the Art Gallery of Ontario as the inaugural curator of Indigenous Art, a position she left last fall amid controversy.
“In 2025, Nanibush will be the Helen Frankenthaler Visiting Professor in Curating in the Ph.D. Program in Art History at CUNY in the Graduate Department of Art History in 2025,” according to the news release. “She is also part of the curatorial team for Counterpublic 2026, the triennial in St. Louis.”
Jurors for the curatorial award included Sylvette Babin, Michael Belmore, Brandy Dahrouge, Divya Mehra and Riva Symko. “If we're talking about curatorial work this year at all, we're talking about Wanda,” Symko said in the release. “If we're talking about sticking to your guns, fierceness, courage, challenging the institution, we're talking about Wanda.”
Source: The Hnatyshyn Foundation, Galleries West