2024 VIVA Awards

The Jack and Doris Shadbolt Foundation for the Visual Arts presents the 2024 VIVA Awards to Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill and T’uy’t’tanat Cease Wyss in a special award ceremony on March 26, 2025 at Emily Carr University. Each artist will receive $15,000 in recognition of their exceptional contributions to the arts community in British Columbia. This will mark the foundation’s first in-person VIVA Awards celebration since 2019, offering a chance to celebrate the artists’ work and impact on the local, regional, and national art scenes. Hill is an artist and writer whose practice explores the history of found materials to examine concepts of land, property, and alternative economies. Wyss is a Sḵwxwú7mesh, Sto:lo, Hawaiian, and Swiss interdisciplinary artist, educator, and Indigenous ethnobotanist with 30 years of practice encompassing storytelling and collaborative initiatives centered on Indigenous plant knowledge. The ceremony will also mark an opportunity to celebrate those who received awards in years without an in-person presentation: Hazel Meyer and Laiwan (2023), Charles Campbell and Jan Wade (2022), Diyan Achjadi and Samuel Roy-Bois (2021), and Lucie Chan, Cindy Mochizuki and Tania Willard (2020). Recipients of the two most recent Alvin Balkind Curator’s Prize, Daina Augaitis and Makiko Hara, will also be honoured.