Toronto, April 3, 2024 – Visual artist Sandra Brewster is this year’s recipient of the $50,000 Paul de Hueck and Norman Walford Career Achievement Award. This year’s award recognizes outstanding achievement in the field of art photography.
About Sandra Brewster
Sandra Brewster is a Canadian artist based in Toronto whose work employs a range of media to engage concepts of movement that express an internal relationship with identity. Her practice is grounded in people of the Caribbean diaspora, who maintain a relationship with “back home”. Born to Guyanese parents, she is interested in a multilayered sense of being made up of a collision between geographies and temporalities. She expresses these complexities via the unfixed nature of her work’s materiality and presentation.
Sandra’s work has been featured internationally. Recent group and solo exhibitions have been held at Kenderdine Art Gallery / College Art Galleries in Saskatoon, Leonard & Bina Art Gallery in Montreal, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery in Toronto, Les Rencontres d’Arles in France, the Art Gallery of Ontario, Agnes Etherington Art Centre in Kingston, Or Gallery in Vancouver, Rajko Mamuzic Gallery in Novi Sad, Serbia and Lagos Photo Festival in Nigeria.
Sandra Brewster is a recent residency fellow of Artpace San Antonio, Loghaven Artist Residency in Knoxville and Sacatar Brazil. She has been awarded
the Gattuso Prize for outstanding featured exhibition of CONTACT Photography Festival 2017, the Toronto Friends of Visual Arts Artist Prize in 2018, and was a 2023 finalist for the Scotiabank Photography Award.
Sandra received a Bachelor of Fine Arts from York University and a Masters of Visual Studies from the University of Toronto. She is represented by Olga Korper Gallery.
Jury Comments
The jury was unanimous in their choice of Sandra as laureate for the Paul de Hueck and Norman Walford Career Achievement Award. They said: “Sandra Brewster’s strong interdisciplinary photographic practice fuses poetic experimentation with thoughtful and expansive interrogations of transnational Blackness. Her use of scale and gesture is transformative. Sandra’s bold investigation of photographic materials pushing to extremes the process of gel transfers, migrating them from the skin of the photograph onto the walls of the architectural space, mylar sheets and wooden panels is exceptional.”
Sandra Brewster was selected by a jury comprised of photographer, educator, and mentor Evergon (Montreal); photographer, educator, and the 2022 Paul De Hueck and Norman Walford Career Achievement Award laureate Dawit Petros (Montreal); and curator and Artistic Director of the Contact Photography Festival Heather Canlas Rigg (Toronto).
Exhibition: Take a Little Trip, Olga Korper Gallery, February 19 – March 19, 2022. “Take a Little Trip” is a series of photo-based gel transfers of iconic people who have passed on and who have inspired the artist and many with their commitment to expressing themselves as who they are – complex human beings – through their talent, activism and study.
About the Award
The Paul de Hueck and Norman Walford Career Achievement Award was established at the Ontario Arts Foundation by the late Norman Walford, former Executive Director of the Ontario Arts Council, and the late Paul de Hueck, former CBC television production manager. The award recognizes in alternating years a classical or jazz keyboard artist, an art photographer, and a classical singer. The winner is chosen through a nominating and adjudication process managed by the Ontario Arts Council.
Previous award winners in the field of art photography include Dawit L. Petros (2021), Shelley Niro (2019), and Rosalie Favell (2017). See the full list of previous recipients.
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For information, please contact:
Bruce Bennett, Executive Director
Ontario Arts Foundation
Tel: (416) 969-7413 bbennett@oafdn.ca
Established in 1991, the Ontario Arts Foundation (OAF) is passionately committed to building long-term support for the arts in Ontario. In 2022-2023, the OAF paid $4 million in endowment income and $450,000 in awards and scholarships.
For 60 years, the Ontario Arts Council has played a vital role in promoting and assisting the development of the arts and artists for the enjoyment and benefit of Ontarians. In 2022-2023, the Ontario Arts Council invested $55.9 million in 220 communities across Ontario through 2,269 grants to individual artists and 1,023 grants to organizations.
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