B.C. artist Tania Willard wins 2025 Sobey Art Award
Rooted in Secwépemc knowledge, Willard’s work sits in collections at the Vancouver Art Gallery and elsewhere
Tania Willard at the Sobey Art Award ceremony.
B.C. ARTIST Tania Willard has just been announced as the winner of the 2025 Sobey Art Award, Canada’s $100,000 contemporary visual-arts prize. The announcement was made at a celebration at the National Gallery of Canada tonight. The artist of Secwépemc and settler heritage is based in Neskonlith, B.C., and was the Pacific region nominee.
“Rooted in Secwépemc knowledge, values and aesthetics, Tania Willard’s multifaceted practice challenges us to expand our understanding of contemporary art and the role of the artist,” said Jonathan Shaughnessy, director of curatorial initiatives at the National Gallery and chair of the 2025 Sobey Award jury, speaking on behalf of the jury members. “She harvests berries to make ink drawings, harnesses wind and fire to compose poems and operas, and builds worlds with her BUSH Gallery collaborators. In the face of precarity, scarcity and conflict, her work offers a model of sustainability, abundance and connection. Above all, she amplifies the power of the land.”
Willard’s work is included in the collections of the Vancouver Art Gallery, Forge Project, Kamloops Art Gallery, and the Anchorage Museum, among others. Her artistic and curatorial work includes Beat Nation: Art, Hip Hop and Aboriginal Culture, a major show at the Vancouver Art Gallery from 2012 to 2014. In 2020, the Shadbolt Foundation awarded her its VIVA Award for outstanding achievement and commitment in her art practice, and in 2022 she was named a Forge Project Fellow for her land-based, community-engaged artistic practice. She helped establish the BUSH Gallery on her Neskonlith reserve and is also an assistant professor in the Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies at UBC Okanagan, in Syilx territories.
Willard moves fluidly across media. Indigenous basketry recurs regularly throughout her practice, in such pieces as the large, cubelike We Know the Land and the Land Knows Us / R Tmicw Tsxestelt ell Tselxstem r Tmicw (2023), a public art project inspired by a cedar-root basket in Banff’s Whyte Museum, and celebrating the sophistication of vibrant Secwépemc weaving traditions and the artist’s own connection to her ancestors. Her mixed-media prints Surrounded/Surrounding (Woodpile Score) capture the spaces between the logs of a woodpile to create a musical score.
“It is an incredible feeling to be acknowledged alongside all the long and shortlisted artists for this award,” Willard said in her live-broadcast acceptance. “I want to thank my husband and two sons and all my family—my practice and my life are richer because of you. I want to thank my community and nation Secwépemc people and all Indigenous people for carrying our languages and knowledges despite so many challenges that continue today—our culture is our power. I want to also thank the land, all lands that hold us. I also want to advocate and encourage all people to spend time with art—we need more of it in our lives, especially now in the face of austerity and injustice around the world.”
The Sobey prize recognizes an artist at a “critical juncture in their career”. The remaining shortlisted artists—Tarralik Duffy, Chukwudubem Ukaigwe, Sandra Brewster, Swapnaa Tamhane, and Hangama Amiri—each receive $25,000, bringing the total prize money to $465,000.
Works by the six finalists are on view at Ottawa's National Gallery to February 8, 2026. 
Tania Willard, Installation view at the Sobey Art Award exhibition, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. © Tania Willard Photo: NGC
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