Winners of Barbara Spohr Memorial Award Announced

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Anna Binta Diallo, “Wanderings,” 2020, installation view at Access Gallery (photo by Rachel Topham Photography)

Montreal-based artist Anna Binta Diallo and Logan MacDonald, a professor at the University of Waterloo, are the recipients of the Barbara Spohr Memorial Award. Created by the friends and family of the late artist Barbara Spohr, the biennial award provides Canadian artists working in photography with $6,000 towards a visual arts residency at the Banff Centre.

Diallo's work investigates memory and nostalgia to create unexpected narratives surrounding identity. She will develop her project, Voyageur / Almanac: an exploration of the connections between human life, nature, and our ecological surroundings.

"We live in a moment where we need imaginative storytelling as much as ever, the kind of artistic expressions that can help us understand the complexities of our coexistence," says Diallo, who was born in Dakar, Senegal, and raised in Saint-Boniface, Man.

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Logan MacDonald, "Baetha Repatriate," 2020

installation view at Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin, (image courtesy the artist)

MacDonald, of European and Mi'kmaq ancestry, examines the visual imagery of colonial and dominant historic narratives in an attempt to confront and subvert them. 

He plans to explore 19th-century photographic portraiture of Indigenous peoples, particularly the utopic landscape backdrops placed behind subjects regardless of distinctions between individuals, communities or territory.

Recent winners of the award include Laurie Kang, Lorna Bauer, Elise Rasmussen, Colin Miner, Celia Perrin Sidarous, Maegan Hill-Carroll, Ramona Ramlochland, Justin Waddell, Dianne Bos and David McMillan.

It is open to artists who have attended the Banff Centre's visual arts residency program in the previous two years.

Source: Walter Phillips Gallery, Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity