Tania Willard was named winner of the 2025 Sobey Artwork Award, Canada’s prime up to date artwork prize, at a celebration on Saturday night (8 November) on the Nationwide Gallery of Canada (NGC) in Ottawa. Final 12 months’s winner, Nico Williams, was available to announce the 2025 winner to rounds of applause.
Willard described the expertise of successful the Sobey Award as “a waking dream”. “Our goals are a strong a part of ourselves,” she tells The Artwork Newspaper. “I take into consideration basketry as a container of harvests, filled with berries and different issues, and of concepts. We see it as a vigorous, refined, up to date medium. It’s such a medium of the land.”
Willard, who’s a member of the Secwépemc First Nation, additionally has settler heritage and relies in Neskonlith, British Columbia, will pocket C$100,000 ($71,200). The 5 different Sobey finalists—Tarralik Duffy (representing the Circumpolar area), Nigerian-born Chukwudubem Ukaigwe (Prairies), Sandra Brewster (Ontario), Swapnaa Tamhane (Québec) and Hangama Amiri (Atlantic area)—every take house C$25,000 ($17,800).
The award recognises Canadian artists whose careers have reached a pivotal stage; it was established in 2002 and initially solely artists beneath age 40 have been eligible, although now it’s open to artists of all ages (Willard is 48). Works by all of the finalists are on view on the NGC till 8 February 2026.
Tania Willard, Snowbank and Different Investments, 2022 Courtesy the artist and Unit 17, Vancouver. © Tania Willard. Picture: Wes Battoclette, courtesy of the Up to date Arts Middle, Cincinnati
In accepting the award, Willard first expressed gratitude to her fast household after which to the broader group, the Secwépemc nation and all Indigenous folks “for carrying our languages and knowledges regardless of so many challenges that proceed right now—our tradition is our energy. I wish to additionally thank the land, all lands that maintain us.”
Willard’s apply spans basketry, sculpture, public artwork, music, large-scale set up, text-based work and extra. She can also be a distinguished curator, collaborating on the Indigenous-led, land-based, experimental and conceptual mission Bush Gallery, and co-curating museum exhibitions together with Beat Nation: Artwork, Hip Hop and Aboriginal Tradition on the Vancouver Artwork Gallery (2012) and Publicity: Native Artwork and Political Ecology on the Institute of American Indian Arts’ Museum of Up to date Native Arts (2021-22).
Jonathan Shaughnessy, the NGC’s director of curatorial initiatives and chair of the 2025 Sobey Award jury, says of the winner’s work: “Rooted in Secwépemc data, values and aesthetics, Willard’s multifaceted apply challenges us to develop our understanding of up to date artwork and the position of the artist.”
He provides: “She harvests berries to make ink drawings, harnesses wind and hearth to compose poems and operas and builds worlds along with her Bush Gallery collaborators. Within the face of precarity, shortage and battle, her work provides a mannequin of sustainability, abundance and connection. Above all, she amplifies the facility of the land.”
Tania Willard, Woodpile Rating, 2018 © Tania Willard. Picture: courtesy of the artist
Among the many 2025 jury members was 2021 Sobey winner Laakkuluk Williamson Bathory, Richmond Artwork Gallery curator Zoë Chan, Dunlop Artwork Gallery curator and director Alyssa Fearon, McMaster Museum of Artwork senior curator Betty Julian, Montreal Museum of High quality Arts curator of Québec and Canadian up to date artwork Anne-Marie St-Jean Aubre, curator and author Rose Bouthillier and the author, curator and researcher Carla Acevedo-Yates.
Willard tells The Artwork Newspaper that successful the Sobey Artwork Award will “enable for me to collaborate with the land and others in preventing for Indigenous resurgent apply and asserting a spot for inventive expression not solely within the metropolis, however rurally and on the reserve as nicely”. She provides: “I additionally wish to advocate and encourage all folks to spend time with artwork—we’d like extra of it in our lives, particularly now within the face of austerity and injustice around the globe.”
She additionally cited her mentor, Delores Purdaby, a grasp Secwépemc basketry artist who has acquired little recognition for her work over 4 a long time, from large items taking years to create to smaller works offered to help her group.
“Artwork can change the world,” Willard says. “It’s modified my world.”
