September 2025 Edition

(click on the underlined blue below for more information)

IN THE NEWS

Marty Gross Mingei Film Productions – Project Support 2025
Congratulations to Marty Gross, Canadian filmmaker and film archivist on receiving a Japan Foundation Award for his lifelong dedication to sharing Japan’s traditional performing arts and folk crafts on film, by bringing Japanese culture to audiences worldwide.

On July 27, 2025 there was a Mingei Film Archive screening featuring Hamada Soji at the National Noh Theatre in Tokyo, Japan.

Maria Hupfield – Artist Prize 2023
Congratulations to Maria Hupfield who has been longlisted for the 2025 Salt Spring National Art Prize (SSNAP).The finalists  have their work shown at Mahon Hall on Salt Spring Island from September 27 to October 19, 2025.

Alexa Hatanaka – Artist Prize 2023
Good review Of Alexa Hatanaka’s work at Armory by Artsy, as well as  with another good review by Hyperallergic.

Ghazaleh Avarzamani – Artist Prize 2022
In the August 2025 issue of Fad Magazine Mieke Brunkhorst reviewed artist collective Freudian Typo’s (Ghazaleh Avarzamani and Ali Ahadi) exhibition at Delfina Foundation. It was described as “an altogether uncomfortable experience and one of the most witty and thought-provoking exhibitions in London”.

Shellie Zhang – Artist Prize 2021
Congratulations as well to Shellie Zhang on being named one of three finalists for the William and Meredith Saunderson Prizes for Emerging Visual Artists. This award supports young emerging visual artists whose practices show potential and who are deemed to have the determination and talent to contribute to the legacy of art in Canada.

Anique Jordan – Artist Prize 2020
Congratulations to Anique Jordan on winning one of The Joseph S. Stauffer Prizes. These prizes are awarded to emerging and mid-career (less than 15 years of practice) artists from Canada who exhibit strong artistic potential in music, visual arts and literature.

At a recent artist talk about “Underbelly,” presented at Montreal Museum of Fine Arts as part of the MOMENTA Biennale d’art contemporain, Jordandiscussed her exhibition—an invitation to explore invisible worlds and the powers they possess and described the main themes underlying her artistic practice. The exhibition will run until February 1, 2026.

Tau Lewis – Artist Prize 2019
A new commission by Tau Lewis is referred to in an article by Elisa Carollo in Observer.com on Performa New York and its 2025 biennale.

Sandra Brewster – Artist Prize 2018
Congratulations to Sandra Brewster on winning the Canada Council for the Arts Photography Prize. This prize is awarded to professional photographers for personal creative work or professional development, and is the only Canada Council prize dedicated to photography.

Edward Burtynsky – Founders Achievement Award 2008
There have been lots of very favourable reviews of Edward Burtynsky’sshows at the Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York and the International Center of Photography, New York. Donald Kuspit wrote a favourable review in an article in the September 2025 issue of Whitehot Magazine of Contemporary Art, Flying High: Edward Burtynsky’s Photographs. 

Jonas Cuenin of Blind.com also reviewed Burtynsky’s exhibitions on August 15, 2025. And Jan Staller reviewed the exhibition at the ICP in The Brooklyn Rail’s September issue.

In an article titled “Earth’s Poet of Scale” – Edward Burtynsky’smonumental chronicle of the human impact on the planet” in the New Yorker July 12, 2025 issue, Bill McKinnon profiles Burtynsky and refers to him as the greatest visual chronicler of the “great acceleration,” to use the title of the retrospective at the ICP.

An article in The Financial Times published July 26, 2025 under the headline “Edward Burtynsky’s photographs of our ravaged planet are gorgeous — and troubling” Ariella Budick also spotlight’s  Burtynsky’s show at the ICP.

On August 19, 2025 Business/Arts, Canada’s national organization dedicated to building lasting partnerships between business and the arts, announced the appointment of Burtynsky as one of five iconic Canadian artists named Distinguished Cultural Ambassadors. These artists represent both extraordinary creative achievement and the entrepreneurial force driving Canada’s cultural sector forward.

Roula Partheniou – Artist Prize 2007
In the September 2025 issue of ArtForum Dan Adler favourably reviewed Roula Partheniou’s show Maps and Models that took place in June 2025 at MKG 127 Gallery.

Katherine Knight Site Media Inc  – Project Support 2013
BOAT:photographs by Katherine Knight is coming out this November. The book interweaves Knight’s fine art photographs of model boats with guest essays  and a number of interviews with model makers and others.

AABronson – Founders Achievement 2002
On September 3, 2025, AABronson engaged in conversation with Adam Welch, Curator of Modern Art, Art Gallery of Ontario. Bronson reflected on his six-decade-long practice, both as part of General Idea (1969–1994), and following, often working in a spirit of collaboration and queer kinship.

Nuit Blanche 
Toronto’s free all-night celebration of contemporary art transforms public spaces into extraordinary landscapes from 7 p.m. on October 4, 2025 until 7 a.m. on October 5, 2025. The 2025 theme, Translating the City, invites artists, curators and audiences to consider how cities can be reimagined, communicated and felt through art. The event will feature three unique exhibitions, projects presented by cultural institutions and a multitude of independent works by local artists.

IN AND AROUND TORONTO:

Shannon Garden Smith – Artist Prize 2025
Proof of Life, an exhibition on until December 20, 2025 at The Jackman Humanities Institute in conjunction with The Art Museum at University of Toronto includes work by Shannon Garden Smith. This exhibition explores material debris from the end of the world, considering the aftermath of our present-day ruin. Using archival matter and found or foraged objects, the artworks in the exhibition bear traces and remnants of the present, speaking to a not-so-distant future.

Garden Smith’s work was also in a group exhibition Strike a match and put it out at MKG 127 Gallery from July 12 to August 23, 2025  which featured artworks across a variety of sculptural and visual mediums that are completed through the presence or activation of a participant.

STEPS Public Art – Project Support 2025
On September 11, 2025 there was a celebration of the mural produced by STEPS Public Art at 840 St. Clair West. The eight-story mural Yellow Oasisdrew inspiration from the hidden natural wonder of Garrison Creek, a buried waterway that once flowed freely through the area. The artwork creatively led by artist Yasaman Mehrsa evokes this underground current as a symbol of continuity, connection, and memory, linking past and present, nature and city, and the diverse communities who now call Hillcrest home.

Luis Jacob – 20th Anniversary Special Project Support Award
Mercer Union has launched groundwork, an incubator for artistic and practice-based research. Groundwork invites multiple cultural practitioners to develop their self-directed projects concurrently in the gallery over a sustained period of time. The inaugural edition of groundwork was collaboratively produced with seven Toronto-based practitioners including artist Luis Jacob. Their projects considered the conditions currently impacting artistic and cultural production in Toronto, guided by differing prompts and senses of scale.

Alvin Luong – Artist Prize 2023
Until December 20, 2025, Alvin Luong is participating in a group show Dwelling Under Distant Suns in the Justina M. Barnicke Gallery at The Art Museum at the University of Toronto. This exhibition interrogates the way we currently consume media about environmental precarity, inviting viewers to engage in a dialogue and sit with representations of catastrophe that deemphasizes the spectacular and dramatic.

Workman Arts – Project Support 2022
Being Scene 2025, Workman Arts’ annual juried exhibition of recent artwork by Workman Arts members and individuals is titled Tending to What Remains and curated by Manar Abo Toukis. It is  a multidisciplinary group exhibition that reimagines the gallery as a living garden: a shared ecosystem of care. It explores how artists with lived experiences of displacement, intergenerational grief, or mental health struggles turn to organic and everyday materials to reflect on trauma, recovery, and community resilience. The exhibition is on from September 4 until October 5, 2025.

Lisa Myers – Artist Prize 2020
A group show in the University Art Centre at The Art Museum at the University of Toronto running until December 20, 2025 includes work of Lisa Myers. Earthwork reframes a key concept from the Minimalist and Land Art movements of the 1960s and 70s, reclaiming it from an Indigenous lens.

Camille Turner – Artist Prize 2018
The public keynote presentation given by Camille Turner as  part of: A Journey through Otherworld, is available online. A Journey through Otherworld was  a multi-sensory program of workshops, tours, and presentations that took place at the University of Toronto in March 2025 inspired by  Turner’s exhibition Otherworld.

Jon Sasaki – Artist Prize 2009
At Clint Roenisch Gallery until October 18, 2025 is an exhibition Making Do with the Photons that Linger of work by Jon Sasaki. In his work Sasaki probes the ways the landscape genre dovetails with broader questions around our national identity, for better or worse.

Roula Partheniou – Artist Prize 2007
At MKG127 Gallery until October 11, 2025 is A IS FOR APPLE, the first collaborative exhibition by gallery artists Dave Dyment and Roula Partheniou, which explores play, perception, pattern recognition, and cognitive geometry, from early childhood development back to early civilization.

FOR TRAVELLERS: 

Elsewhere in Canada

Sameer Farouq – Artist Prize 2022 
Germaine Koh – Artist Prize 2002
Simon Fraser University is opening  a transformative new art facility, the Marianne and Edward Gibson Art Museum, in September 2025. The inaugural exhibition Edge Effects is a group show featuring 15 critically acclaimed Canadian artists, including Sameer Farouq and Germaine Koh. The title is a reference to the ecological term “edge effect,” which describes the conditions created where two adjacent ecological communities meet, such as an estuary between a river and the ocean.  Farouq’s participation in the exhibition is referred to in the article in The Art Newspaper on the exhibition.

Sandra Brewster – Artist Prize 2018
In honour of Judith Brown, Kingston’s community advocate and educator who passed away in October 2024, Agnes Etherington Art Centre and Sandra Brewster have re-mounted the 2019 portrait Brewster made of Brown. It will adorn a prominent downtown wall at 68 Brock Street Kingston, Ontario as a monumental public artwork until July 2026.

South of the Border

Shary Boyle – Artist Prize 2006
The work of Shary Boyle will be presented in an upcoming exhibition at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York. Boyle’s work “Judy”, from her touring exhibition Outside the Palace of Me, was acquired into the permanent collection of the MAD and will be presented in the upcoming exhibition centred around “performing objects, also known as puppets at the crossroads of contemporary art, craft, design, experimental theatre, and performance art as metaphors for human world making.

Tau Lewis – Artist Prize 2019
In collaboration with Sylvie Fleury, Tau Lewis  is creating a newly commissioned series of sculpture, movement and sound performances as part of Performa 2025 Biennale to take place in New York City in November 2025.

International 

Ghazaleh Avarzamani – Artist Prize 2022
Until October 8, 2025, Ghazaleh Avarzamani is participating in a major group exhibition More than Human at The Design Museum, London which brings together art, science and radical thinking to ask how design can help our planet thrive by shifting its focus beyond human needs.

Vessna Perunovich – Artist Prize 2005
Home Paradigm is a solo retrospective exhibition of work by Vessna Perunovich on view until November 30, 2025, at the Božidar Jakac Gallery – Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Kostanjevica na Krki, Slovenia (EU). This exhibition is part of a touring project that premiered at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Belgrade in 2023.

Edward Burtynsky – Founders Achievement Award 2008
If you are in Avignon, France, Edward Burtynsky has an exhibition Mounds and Voids From Human to Global Scale at the Villa Créative, Avignon Université, until October 31.

RECENTLY CLOSED

Emmanuel Osahor – Artist Prize 2025
On September 13, 2025, Emmanuel Osahor led an in-depth walk through of his exhibition, To Dream of Other Places at The Power Plant. This special event offered an opportunity to explore Osahor’s powerful body of work and delve into the themes throughout his practice. The exhibition closes on September 21.

Isabel Okoro – Artist Prize 2024
The Summer Group Show at Olga Korper Gallery that ran from July 10 to August 8, 2025 included work by Isabel Okoro.

Esery Mondesir – Artist Prize 2025
From August 1-3, 2025, 2025 Ésery Mondésir participated at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW), Berlin in Bwa Kayiman – Lakouzémi, a three-day gathering commemorating the Haitian Revolution as a radical and enduring site of Pan-African and Indigenous resistance, while imagining the Lakou as a framework for diasporic sovereignty and shared belonging.

Alexa Hatanaka – Artist Prize 2023
At Patel Brown Gallery until September 6, 2025 was a group exhibition which included work by Alexa Hatanaka. What We Carry explored how identity is not fixed but continually shaped —stitched together from memory, inheritance, and the tactile presence of materials. Through abstraction, layering, surface, and spatial composition, each work became a site where identity was constructed not as a singular truth, but as a process formed through encounter, gesture, repetition, and time.

Erika DeFreitas – Artist Prize 2016
Broad/Cast: Reclaiming Representation at Dalhousie Art Gallery, Halifax from July 18 to August 31, 2025 included work by Erika DeFreitas. Broad/Cast emerged in response to the persistent misrepresentation of Black identity in the media. This exhibition offered vital and deserved space for artists who push back against dominant narratives and, in turn, set the standard for truthful depiction.

In July and August 2025, DeFreitas engaged in an artist residency  at Eagles Estate, Deer Lake, Burnaby, British Columbia.