Sobey Art Award and Canadian Contemporary Art
Marie Leduc
This post is the first in a series that uses data drawn from the Sobey Art Award nominee and winner lists to explore questions about contemporary art in Canada and beyond. In this post, I introduce the award (which is often referred to as Canada's Turner Prize) and explain my research method.
The Sobey Art Award, Canada’s most valuable art prize, celebrated its twentieth anniversary in 2022. The award was founded in 2002 as a collaborative project between the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia in Halifax and the Sobey Art Foundation. The Sobey Art Foundation is a non-profit organization established by the Sobey family, the owners of one of Canada’s largest grocery chains, Sobeys Inc. and its parent company Empire Company Limited. Like the Turner Prize and other contemporary art awards, the award was established to provide young artists with a financial boost and, at the same time, improve the visibility and profile of Canada’s contemporary art nationally and internationally (see my post, “And the Winner Is”). As Donald R. Sobey wrote in 2012, the Sobey Art Award was designed to “shine a spotlight on the talented and dynamic young artists of this country.”1
For the first few years, the Sobey Art Award was given biennially, but realizing the important benefits for emerging artists, the organizers decided to make the award an annual event beginning in 2006. Thus, over a twenty year period, nineteen prizes have been awarded to young Canadian artists.
Each year, a longlist of twenty-five artists is drawn up for the award. Five artists are selected from each of five designated regions across Canada: West Coast and Yukon, Prairies and The North, Ontario, Quebec, and Atlantic. The list is then honed down to a shortlist of just five artists, one from each region. The final selection of one winner is announced in the Fall.
Initially, the winners were awarded $50,000, the shortlisted candidates $10,000, and the the longlisted artists $2,000. Over the years, the award has been increased. As of 2021, the longlisted candidates are awarded $10,000 each, the shortlisted candidates $25,000, and the winner $100,000. This amounts to a total of $400,000 awarded each year; a very generous contribution to Canadian contemporary art by the Sobey Art Foundation.
In addition to a healthy financial boost, the five shortlisted artists are featured in an exhibition. In the early years of the award, this exhibition was held in the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia in Halifax or at another public gallery in one of Canada’s cities. In 2015, the National Gallery of Art in Ottawa assumed the administration of the award and now the exhibition is held at the National Gallery or at a designated provincial museum. This move has added greater prestige to the award and brought more national and international media attention to the artists.
Like most contemporary art awards, the winners of the Sobey Art Award are chosen by a jury of art professionals. But first, to be considered for the award, artists must be nominated. Nominations are submitted by “established artists, arts professionals, scholars, critics, curators, professionals from art galleries and artist-run-centres, as well as private Canadian dealers in visual or media arts.”2 In other words, nominations can only be made by people who are already actively involved in the contemporary art community, including artists. The jury or selection committee, on the other hand, does not include artists. Instead, five curators – “one distinguished representative from each of Canada’s five regions”3 – are asked to sit on the committee along with one international art professional. This group makes the final decisions on the longlist, shortlist, and winner.
The requirements for a Sobey Art Award nomination are very vague and the type of artwork eligible to be considered is never described. Even the word “contemporary” is used sparingly in the official descriptions of the award, and when it is used, it usually implies the artist’s position in the present time. Moreover, the few criteria cited focus on the artist rather than the artwork. When the award was introduced in 2002, it was for “emerging” artists – artists at the early stages of their art practice – and nominations were restricted to artists under forty years of age. This requirement was changed in 2021 to recognize that artists can “emerge” at any age. Now there are only three requirements; first, the nominees must be Canadian citizens or landed immigrants; second, they must demonstrate “a commitment to artistic practice;” and, third, they must have gained “recognition by peers, critics and/or curators.”4 The first criterion is easy to determine while the other two are more challenging. What is “a commitment to artistic practice” and what qualifies as “recognition by peers, critics and/or curators”?
With its twenty years of data, the Sobey nomination lists provide a very useful resource for exploring these questions. Since its inception, and up to and including the year 2022, 475 artists or collectives have been nominated for the award. This represents 311 artists or collectives when duplicate nominations are eliminated. When individuals in the collectives are counted the actual number of artists considered for the award is 331; that is, 331 artists who, by their very nomination, have been vetted and approved as “contemporary” Canadian artists.
To better understand who these Sobey nominees are, and how they qualified as contemporary artists, I reviewed published material on each of the 331 longlisted artists. The research relied primarily on internet sources such as the Sobey Art Award webpages at the National Art Gallery of Canada, Sobey Art Award publications, public and commercial gallery bios, and the artists’ own webpages. From these sources I documented the following: the artists’ gender and racial/cultural identity when this information was provided in their bio or references to their work; education and training; place of residence; exhibition record; and, the type of artwork the artists produce.
The year 2020 presented an unusual research problem. That year, as public events and gatherings were shuttered because of the Covid-19 pandemic, the selection committee opted not to designate a shortlist or a single winner. Instead, they awarded an equal portion of the prize to each of the 25 nominees on the longlist. To resolve this anomaly in my data collection and analysis, I have excluded the candidates from the year 2020 when I consider the results of shortlists and winners but include these candidates when counting the total artists nominated and other details about individual artists.
All of this information has helped to shape a profile of Canadian contemporary artists. In subsequent posts, I will provide my analysis of this research and explore the larger question of who is a Canadian contemporary artists and how do these artists qualify for this prestigious role.
While this research focuses on Canada, its artists, and a Canadian prize, the results can also inform us about international contemporary art. Contemporary artists in Canada, as in other peripheral locations around the world, strive to be seen not only in their own nation but in the very centers of international contemporary art. Awards, such as the Sobey Art Award and the Turner Prize, bring the winning artists within view of those centres and help to affirm their place in contemporary art.
In Ray Cronin, Sara Fillmore, and Donna Wellard, Sobey Art Award/Prix artistique Sobey: 10th Anniversary/10e anniversaire (Halifax: Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, 2013), 2.
For example, see the jury for the 2023 Sobey Art Award : https://www.gallery.ca/whats-on/sobey-art-award/jury
Excellent. Looking forward to part 2!