Artist and former AUArts Student Faye HeavyShield is the winner of the 2022 Gershon Iskowitz Prize from the Gershon Iskowitz Foundation and the Art Gallery of Ontario. As part of the honour, HeavyShield will receive $75,000 and a solo exhibition in 2023 at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto. Previous recipients of the award include Ken Lum, and Shuvinai Ashoona.
HeavyShield is a Kainai-Blood sculptor and installation artist. Her art draws upon Kainai ways of being, which are expressed through a relation to the land. Prairie grass, river coulees, and wind were all a part of her upbringing in Alberta. It is a place that has been described as wide-open or uninspiring—a monotonous expanse of earth and sky—but one in which boundaries are a foreign concept that tug against essence.
Jurors this year included artist and 2017 Gershon Iskowitz Prize winner Valérie Blass; Catherine Crowston, Director of the Art Gallery of Alberta, Edmonton; Felicia Gay, MITAC Curator at MacKenzie Art Gallery in Regina, as well as trustees of the Foundation Gerald McMaster, who is an artist, curator and professor at OCAD University, and Stephan Jost, the Michael and Sonja Koerner Director and CEO of the Art Gallery of Ontario.
Photo: "Blood, 2004" by Faye HeavyShield
