The Canada Council for the Arts revealed the 2025 winners of the Governor General’s Awards in Visual and Media Arts on Wednesday (5 March). At a time when US President Donald Trump has repeatedly threatened to annex Canada and make it the “51st state”, all the while launching a trade war between the longtime allies, the awards are a reminder of the richness of Canadian culture and celebrate the exceptional careers of the eight artists and curators working in diverse media across the country. From the decolonial history painter Kent Monkman to emerging artists like Sandra Rodriquez, the awards celebrate both the elders of the national scene as well as the up and coming.
Monkman, one of the biggest stars in this Governor General’s Awards cohort, is a First Nations, two spirited artist of Cree ancestry, who divides his time between Toronto and New York. Made an officer of the order of Canada in 2023—one of the country’s highest honours—Monkman’s work is both playful and provocative, full of mimicry and deeply moving. Often appropriating classical 19-century landscape paintings and incorporating his alter ego Miss Chief Eagle Testickle, Monkman reverses the colonial gaze, using both humour and horror.
His 2020 painting Hanky Panky—depicting Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau restrained and on all fours as Miss Chief Eagle Testickle approaches him from behind holding up a red sex toy in the shape of praying hands—proved controversial. But his 2017 composition The Scream, which unflinchingly shows Royal Canadian Mounted Police officers ripping Indigenous children from the arms of their mothers to take them to the now-notorious residential schools, has become a national cri du coeur. As Monkman says in a video accompanying the award announcement: “Canada has projected this image of itself out into the world—and the world doesn’t see…the darker side to the colonial history here.”
The idea of reversing the colonial gaze is also present in the work of the Vancouver-based artist Jin-Me Yoon, who says in her accompanying video that she is interested in “looking with” her subjects than in “looking at”. Yoon’s “rigorous work continues to grow and respond to shifting discourses around such questions as nationalism, diasporic identity, colonisation and relations with Indigenous peoples”, Diana Freundl, the senior curator and director of publishing and content strategy at the Vancouver Art Gallery (VAG), said in a statement.
The emerging multi-disciplinary artist Sandra Rodriguez, who works at the cutting edge of virtual reality and mixed reality technologies, questions what is real, what is fake and what makes us human. Her recent projects incorporate video game engines, digital projection, artificial intelligence and live performance to probe issues from facial recognition systems to the spectrum of human sexuality.
The work of Thaddeus Holownia, an honouree New Brunswick, reveals the very soul of Canadian landscape through four decades of meditative “slow photography”. Rather than straight documentation, her images reflect on the landscape and its transformation over time.
“I like precision,” says Peter Pierobon, a British Columbia-based furniture designer who was honoured with the Saidye Bronfman Award, in a video accompanying the announcement.“I like when things come together, and you can’t see how they’re made.” His organic, sculptural yet meticulously crafted pieces pay homage to the rugged West Coast landscape of his Salt Spring Island home.
Daina Augaitis, the former chief curator and associate director emeritus at the VAG, was also honoured with an Outstanding Contribution Award. She began her curatorial career in 1983 at the Western Front, one of Canada’s oldest independent artist-run centres, before moving to the Banff Centre, where she became director of visual residencies.
In an accompanying video, Augaitis speaks of the importance of clearing “institutional obstacles” and “the tremendous value of collaborating”. Of her work at the VAG, where she helped initiate the Asian Art Institute (since renamed the Centre for Global Asias), she highlights the importance of documenting local histories, but also of “contextualising them internationally—to amplify and extend the dialogues beyond this place”.
The Toronto-based film-maker and writer Bruce LaBruce, known for his pioneering, edgy and punk-infused “queercore” aesthetic, received praise from his nominator, Toronto dealer Bonny Poon, for his five decades of work that “continually transgresses and destabilises any core idea of what a film is, what culture is, what family is, what sexuality is, what activism is, what art is”.
The Kingston, Ontario-based media artist Clive Robertson was recognised for a five-decade career that has included producing the interdisciplinary art magazine Centerfold in 1976, which later became Fuse: A magazine on art, media and politics (1980–2014). These seminal publications, the nominators stated, “situated artistic production within its social context, becoming an essential source of information and critical discourse for people bridging new media forms and engaged practices”.
