The Thunder Bay Art Gallery is delighted to announce the NWO, NOW Juried Exhibition.
As a survey of living artists across Northern Ontario, NWO, NOW showcases a compelling selection of works created over the past three years. A wide variety of genres and media were selected by co-jurors Anong Beam and Maria Hupfield including painting, sculpture, beadwork, digital media, birchbark, textile arts, and more. An anticipated event, this is the largest public gallery exhibition of Northern Ontario artists in Canada.
72 works by 60 artists. A total of 218 works were submitted by 98 artists.
Beverly Turpin, Mystic, 2020
It was challenging and we had some hard decisions to make, but the resulting exhibition is a beautiful view of the north, its people, land, nature, and animals, through the artist’s eyes.– Anong Beam, co-juror
Meet the Jurors
Anong Migwans Beam
Anong Migwans Beam is a painter, mother, paint-maker, and curator, living and working in her home community of M’Chigeeng First Nation on Manitoulin Island. After studying art at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, OCAD University, and the Institute of American Indian Arts, she returned home to be a studio assistant for her father, Carl Beam. Her painting practice is in large-format oil on canvas. She is the founder of Gimaa Radio, Ojibwe-language radio CHYF 88.9FM. She maintains an independent curating practice, and served as director of the Ojibwe Cultural Foundation before leaving to focus on her own practice and the art of paint-making. She is the founder of Beam Paints, where she combines an early education in Indigenous pigments from her parents Carl and Ann Beam, with a lifelong interest in art and colour. She has always loved the colours pink and green more than anyone should. She collects art, makes art, and is generally obsessed with all aspects therein. She recently showed her work at Campbell House Museum, in Toronto.
Maria Hupfield
Maria Hupfield (she/her) is a Toronto based artist and transdisciplinary maker working with Industrial felt at the intersection of performance art, design, and sculpture. She is currently the inaugural ArtworxTO Legacy Artist in Residency with the City of Toronto, Ravines, and a Mellon Fellow, Center for the Imagination in the Borderlands, Arizona State University, USA, 2022; which follows her inaugural Borderlands Fellowship for the project Breaking Protocol at The Vera List Center for Art and Politics at the New School and the Center for the Imagination in the Borderlands at Arizona State University (2020-2022). A recipient of the Hnatyshyn Mid-career Award for Outstanding Achievement in Canada (2018) she has exhibited and performed her work through her first major touring solo exhibition The One Who Keeps On Giving (organized by The Power Plant 2017-2018), and solo Nine Years Towards the Sun, at the Heard Museum, Phoenix, 2019-2020. She has exhibited extensively including recent projects at: Art Gallery of Ontario, National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa; and in New York at CARA (Center for Art Research and Alliance), Abrons Art Center, the New York Museum of Art and Design, BRIC House Gallery, the Bronx Museum, Boston Museum of Fine Arts, and the Smithsonian Institution National Museum of the American Indian; amongst others. An Assistant Professor and Canadian Research Chair, Transdisciplinary Indigenous Arts at the University of Toronto, Hupfield is Martin clan and off-rez member of the Anishinaabe Nation belonging to Wasauksing First Nation, Ontario, Canada.
Maria Hupfield is co-owner of Native Art Department International with her husband artist Jason Lujan and founder of 7th Generation Image Makers, Native Child and Family Services of Toronto.