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The Sobey Art Foundation and the National Gallery of Canada (NGC) launched a call for nominations today for the 2018 Sobey Art Award, Canada’s prestigious contemporary art prize. The annual award is presented to a Canadian artist age 40 or under who has exhibited in a public or commercial art gallery within 18 months of being nominated. The deadline for artists’ nominations is March 2, 2018.
Created in 2002 by the Sobey Art Foundation, the Sobey Art Award represents unprecedented opportunities for Canadian contemporary artists, bringing them national and global recognition. From a total of $240,000 CAD prize money, $100,000 is awarded to the overall winner, $25,000 is given to each of the four short-listed artists, and $2,000 is awarded to each of the remaining twenty long-listed artists. The work of the five finalists, representing five regions in Canada, selected from the longlist of 25 nominees is featured in a special exhibition that alternates between the National Gallery of Canada and other arts institutions across the country.
The Awards’ 2018 longlist of nominees will be announced April 17 and the shortlist will be released May 29. The exhibition of works by the five shortlisted artists will be presented at the National Gallery of Canada from October 3, 2018 to February 10, 2019. The winner of the 2018 Sobey Art Award will be announced at a gala at the National Gallery of Canada, in Ottawa, on November 14, 2018.
The 2018 international jury panel, chaired by National Gallery of Canada’s Senior Curator of Contemporary Art, Josée Drouin-Brisebois, is composed of curators from five designated regions in Canada (the Atlantic Provinces, Quebec, Ontario, the Prairies and the North, and the West Coast and Yukon) and one international juror.
For more information and nomination guidelines, please visit gallery.ca/sobey, or contact: Sobey Art, Awards, c/o National Gallery of Canada, 380 Sussex Drive P.O. Box 427, Station A, Ottawa, ON, K1N 9N4.
About the Sobey Art Award process
The National Gallery of Canada will accept nominations for the 2018 Sobey Art Award from recognized agents and institutions. The jury panel will oversee the awards selection process. From the complete list of nominated artists, the jurors will create a longlist of 25 artists – five artists from each of five designated regions in Canada. The panel will then choose one representative from each region to be included on the national shortlist and in the 2018 Sobey Art Award exhibition. The panel will also select the winner of the $100,000 top prize.
About the Sobey Art Award
Since its launch, the Sobey Art Award has profiled 350 Canadian artists through its longlist process. For recipients, the Sobey Art Award has become a mark of distinction that has steered the artists toward national and international recognition. Past award recipients include Jeremy Shaw, Brian Jungen, Jean-Pierre Gauthier, Annie Pootoogook, Michel de Broin, Tim Lee, David Altmejd, Daniel Barrow, Daniel Young & Christian Giroux, Raphaëlle de Groot, Duane Linklater, Nadia Myre, and Abbas Akhavan. The 2017 Sobey Art Award winner, Ursula Johnson, was announced on October 25, 2017 at the Art Museum at the University of Toronto.
About the Sobey Art Foundation
The Sobey Art Foundation was established in 1981 with a mandate to carry on the work of entrepreneur and business leader, the late Frank H. Sobey, to collect and preserve representative examples of 19th- and 20th-century Canadian art. In one of the finest private collections of its kind, the Sobey Art Foundation has assembled outstanding examples from Canadian Masters such as Cornelius Krieghoff, Tom Thomson and J. E. H. MacDonald. The collection is on view in the former home of Frank Sobey and his wife Irene in Pictou County, Nova Scotia.
About the National Gallery of Canada
The National Gallery of Canada is home to the most important collections of historical and contemporary Canadian art. The Gallery also maintains Canada’s premier collection of European Art from the 14th to the 21st centuries, as well as important works of American, Asian and Indigenous Art and renowned international collections of prints, drawings and photographs. In 2015, the National Gallery of Canada established the Canadian Photography Institute, a global multidisciplinary research center dedicated to the history, evolution and future of photography. For more information, visit gallery.ca and follow us on Twitter @NatGalleryCan.
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For all media enquiries, please contact:
Josée-Britanie Mallet, Senior Media and Public Relations Officer
National Gallery of Canada
+ 1.613.990.6835
[email protected]
Bernard Doucet
Sobey Art Foundation
T + 1.902.752 8371 ext. 2301
C + 1.902.921.1755 [email protected]