Toronto Friends of the Visual Arts Announces the 2025 Artist Prize Awards
The Toronto Friends of the Visual Arts recently announced the recipients of the 2025 TFVA Artist Prize Awards. Each year the committee carefully researches selected artists based on their multi-faceted and compelling art practice. Congratulations to this year’s three Artist Prize Award recipients!
The TFVA is proud to announce the following 2025 Artist Prize Winner and two Artist Prize Finalists:
2025 Artist Prize Winner, Emmanuel Osahor, is a Nigerian Canadian artist based in Toronto, where he focuses on painting, printmaking, and sculpture. Born in Nigeria and raised in Alberta, Emmanuel’s practice explores beauty as essential for survival and as a foundation for flourishing. His artwork portrays fictional garden spaces as carefully constructed sanctuaries that embody both beauty and care. He aims to create these gardens as imagined safe havens that welcome marginalized communities, particularly people of colour like himself. By emphasizing beauty in his work, Emmanuel provides a nurturing environment for addressing the hopes and complexities of contemporary life. Emmanuel holds a BFA in Art and Design from the University of Alberta and completed his MFA at the University of Guelph in 2021. He is currently an Assistant Professor in Studio Art at the University of Toronto. In April 2025 The Power Plant will host a solo exhibition of Emmanuel’s work.
2025 Artist Prize Finalist, Ésery Mondésir, is a Haitian-Canadian video artist and filmmaker whose work is rooted in community-based storytelling. Drawing on music, archives, poetry, and sound, he explores themes of personal and collective memory,
offering perspectives from society’s margins. Ésery collaborates closely with
members of the Haitian diaspora, engaging with communities in places like Cuba, Mexico, and Italy to create his films. His innovative films combine evocative imagery, music, and poetic elements, immersing viewers in powerful narratives of migration and belonging. His work, which includes documentary, fiction and experimental narratives, takes a critical stance on modern-day social, political and cultural phenomena to suggest a reading of our society from its margins. Ésery was a high school teacher and a labour organizer before receiving an MFA in Cinema Production from York University in 2017. He currently works as an instructor at OCAD University. His work has been exhibited in Canada as well as internationally, his most recent exhibition was at the Leonard and Bina Ellen Art Gallery in Montreal.
Esery Mondesir (@gadepabouleje) • Instagram photos and videos
Esery Mondesir, Artist – Toronto – Akimbo
2025 Artist Prize Finalist, Shannon Garden-Smith, is a Toronto-based artist specializing in sculpture,installation and an expanded photo practice. Her work explores how the materials that cover our modern built environment shape our lives. Using
unconventional materials like sand and gelatin, Shannon employs a slow, repetitive process to reveal how the architecture we see every day becomes familiar through constant exposure. Her work encourages us to notice the often overlooked labor that supports our daily lives and examines materials through themes of connection, change, and limited resources. Shannon’s unique approach is deeply influenced by intersectional feminist perspectives. Shannon completed her MFA at the University of Guelph in 2017 and is now a doctoral student in Visual Art at York University. She has exhibited nationally and internationally, and is currently part of a group exhibition at Onsite Gallery at OCAD University.
Shannon Garden-Smith (@shannon.gardensmith) • Instagram photos and videos
Thanks to the 2025 Artist Prize committee for their hard work, and congratulations to all the Artist Prize Award recipients.
TFVA was founded in 1998, and has given awards to 243 artists, visual arts organizations and those engaged in the visual arts in Toronto and the GTA.
The Toronto Friends of the Visual Arts is an independent, membership based, non-profit organization that promotes knowledge of the visual arts to its members through an extensive education program and provides support and recognition for artistic achievement to artists and art organizations in the GTA and surrounding area.
