With great pleasure, Vtape congratulates artist Rebecca Belmore, the 2024 recipient of The Audain Prize for the Visual Arts. This prize, worth $100,000, is one of Canada’s most prestigious honours, awarded to a senior artist in recognition of their outstanding contributions to the arts.

Rebecca Belmore is an internationally recognized multidisciplinary artist. Rooted in the political and social realities of Indigenous communities, Belmore’s works make evocative connections between bodies, land, and language. A member of the Lac Seul First Nation on traditional Anishinaabe territories in Northwestern Ontario, her performative practice focuses on issues of place and identity while confronting contemporary challenges faced by indigenous peoples throughout North America.

Belmore’s work has been exhibited at the Polygon Gallery, Audain Art Museum, Grunt Gallery, Vancouver Art Gallery, Art Gallery of Ontario, and National Gallery of Canada, as well as internationally in the United States, Mexico, Cuba, Germany, Greece and Australia. She was the official representative for Canada at the 2005 Venice Biennale, where she created Fountain for the Canadian Pavilion. In 2014, the Canadian Museum for Human Rights commissioned Belmore to produce an original work titled trace, which consists of a blanket of hand-pressed clay beads.

Rebecca Belmore has received multiple awards, including the Jack and Doris Shadbolt Foundation’s VIVA Award (2004), the Hnatyshyn Visual Arts Award (2009), the Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts (2013), the Gershon Iskowitz Prize (2016), and Honorary Doctorates from Ontario College of Art & Design University (2005) and Emily Carr University of Art + Design (2017).

Image credit: Speaking To Their Mother: Ayumee-Aawach Oomama-Mowan, Marjorie Beaucage & Rebecca Belmore (1992)