Rebecca Belmore

2024 Audain Prize for the Visual 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.

In 2005, she was Canada’s official representative at the Venice Biennale where she created Fountain for the Canadian Pavilion. She was also commissioned by the Canadian Museum for Human Rights, in 2014, to produce an original work entitled trace, which consists of a blanket of hand pressed clay beads. As a performance-installation based artist, Belmore’s places of residence have oscilated between Vancouver and Toronto over the course of her extensive practice.

Throughout her career 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).