Image: Beaverbrook Art Gallery, Fredericton
The Beaverbrook Art Gallery, in partnership with the Canada Council for the Arts and the National Gallery of Canada, is hosting the 2026 Governor General’s Awards in Visual and Media Arts exhibition from November 7, 2026, to February 21, 2027. The exhibition celebrates eight laureates: Chung-Im Kim, Roger Lee, Faye HeavyShield, Carole Itter, Zacharias Kunuk, Lyne LaPointe, Marie-Jeanne Musiol and Skawennati.
Established in 1999 by the Canada Council for the Arts and the Governor General of Canada, the awards are among the highest national honours recognizing exceptional achievement in the visual and media arts. Recipients are chosen through an independent national peer-assessment process administered by the Canada Council. The exhibition is part of a national exhibition program that brings the laureates’ work to institutions across Canada.
Historian Roger Lee and media artist Skawennati have enriched Canadian cultural life by challenging inherited ideas of Canadian history while using cultural production to shape new futures. As an educator and art collector, Lee has advanced intercultural dialogue that deepens understandings of Asian-Canadian identity, while Skawennati uses virtual world-building and digital storytelling with Kanien'kehá:ka archives of oral histories and material culture to create new spaces for Indigenous self-determination.
Artists Faye HeavyShield and Chung-Im Kim are both recognized for encoding histories of identity and memory into their materials. HeavyShield’s minimalist sculptures and site-specific installations are informed by Blackfoot (Kainai/Blood) ways of knowing and personal narratives, while Kim’s dimensional wall sculptures transform industrial felt into works that explore texture and space, referencing her background in surface design while evoking experiences of family, emotion and labour through hand-stitching.
Together, these eight recipients demonstrate the breadth of cultural practice in Canada: building community, carrying memory, challenging exclusion, responding to the natural world, preserving and transforming stories, and imagining new futures.
