B.C.’s Roger Lee and Carole Itter among winners for Governor General’s Awards in Visual and Media Arts
Vancouver-based art historian and artist join six other laureates from across the country recognized for their contributions to Canadian culture
Carol Itter’s Where Streets are Paved with Gold: A Tribute to a Canadian Immigrant Neighbourhood, gold lacquer on found objects and organ, etc., 1991, courtesy the Canadian Art Bank
Roger Lee
THE CANADA COUNCIL for the Arts has just announced this year’s winners of the Governor General’s Awards in Visual and Media Arts, with two local names making the list: art historian Roger Lee and interdisciplinary artist and filmmaker Carole Itter.
Lee has been named for the Outstanding Contribution Award, which recognizes individuals who have made significant contributions to Canada’s visual arts, media arts, and fine crafts scene in a volunteer or professional capacity. The Vancouver-born art historian and philanthropist studied art in Vancouver, Mexico, and France before becoming Canada’s first Chinese Canadian art history professor, teaching at the University of Regina for more than three decades. In the early 1970s, Lee established the university’s Department of Visual Arts Gallery; in 1997, he helped to bring the student-run Fifth Parallel Gallery to its current home, later funding its renovation in 2023. His donations extend to the Vancouver Art Gallery’s Centre for Global Asias fund and the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, which houses the Roger Lee Gallery of Asian Art. He’s also an avid collector of art and art objects, including an extraordinary Yixing teapot collection.
“Across decades, Roger Lee has helped reshape the cultural landscape of Canada. Through his work with museums, galleries and universities, he has championed acquisitions and exhibitions that bring diasporic, cross-cultural and historically marginalized perspectives into the centre of institutional narratives,” said his nominator, Dr. Melissa Karmen Lee, CEO of the Chinese Canadian Museum, in the awards announcement today. “His influence has helped move diversity beyond representation alone, insisting instead that these histories are fundamental to how we understand Canadian art, culture and identity.”
Itter, known for diverse works that range from sculptures and installations to performances and film, is honoured with an Artistic Achievement Award. Born and raised in Vancouver, she began her studies at UBC, before pursuing further education at the Vancouver School of Art and Accademia di Belle Arti in Rome. Some of Itter’s influential projects include 1972’s Personal Baggage, in which a cedar log from Roberts Creek was disassembled and transported to Nova Scotia, where it was reassembled. Where the Streets are Paved with Gold: A Tribute to a Canadian Neighbourhood, created in 1991, is a 29-foot-long floor installation built from cast-off objects the artist had collected, then painted and gilded, in her own Strathcona neighbourhood; it honours the community’s elderly immigrants and their belief in Canada as a place “where the streets are paved with gold”. Itter collaborated extensively with artist Al Neil from the 1970s, both working out of The Blue Cabin that now lives on as a floating artist residency. This fall, Itter’s work is set to appear in Here to Play: Variation for Sixteen Hands—a group exhibition exploring play as a way to understand material value and established systems—at the new Gibson Art Museum at SFU Burnaby.
“Itter championed feminist and ecological art practices when attention largely focused on her male photo-conceptualist peers in Vancouver. Her perseverance and integrity have yielded a remarkable body of work that continues to speak directly to our current concerns. It was always speaking to these concerns—we just needed to catch up,” said her nominators, Emily Carr University of Art + Design artist and assistant professor Allison Hrabluik and Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery associate director and curator Melanie O’Brian.
Other recipients of the Artistic Achievement Award include Kainai First Nation artist Faye HeavyShield; Inuk filmmaker Zacharias Kunuk; Mansonville visual artist Lyne Lapointe; Gatineau photographer Marie-Jeanne Musiol; and Kanien’kehá:ka artist Skawennati. This year’s honouree for the Saidye Bronfman Award is textile artist Chung-Im Kim, from Cookstown, Ontario.
An exhibition featuring the artists’ selected works opens at the Beaverbrook Art Gallery in Fredericton, New Brunswick, on November 7.
Along with a $25,000 prize and bronze medallion, each winner is the subject of a short video portrait, commissioned by the Canada Council for the Arts in partnership with the Independent Media Arts Alliance.
The films can be viewed below and at the Canada Council website here. 
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