Governor General’s Awards 2010: Visual Victories
2010 Governor General’s Awards in the Visual and Media Arts winners (from left) Claude Tousignant, Ione Thorkelsson, Rita Letendre, Gabor Szilasi, Tom Sherman, Terry Ryan, Robert Davidson and André Forcier / photo Martin Lipman
In recent years, the Canadian art world has been struck by prize fever. There’s the Sobey Art Award for contemporary art, the Hnatyshyn Foundation awards for artistic and curatorial excellence and the Audain Prize for lifetime achievement in British Columbia, to name just a few. But in terms of reputation and official recognition, the annual Governor General’s Awards in Visual and Media Arts, doled out by the Canada Council for the Arts, remain the ultimate acknowledgement of a Canadian artist’s career. On March 9 the winners of the 2010 awards were announced in Montreal: sculptor Robert Davidson, filmmaker André Forcier, photographer Gabor Szilasi, new media artist Tom Sherman and painters Rita Letendre and Claude Tousignant are joined by glass sculptor Ione Thorkelsson, who takes home the Saidye Bronfman Award for excellence in fine crafts, and art dealer Terry Ryan, who is noted for his longtime support of Inuit art (in particular the artists of Cape Dorset, Nunavut). Here, we offer a quick look at the work of all nine of this year’s honourees.
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