The 2026 Governor General’s Awards in Visual and Media Arts

The Governor General’s Awards in Visual and Media Arts exhibition celebrates eight laureates recognized for artistic merit and outstanding contributions to the Canadian visual and media arts landscape. 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 Saidye Bronfman Award for Fine Craft was established in 1977 and transferred to the Canada Council in 2007 to join the Governor-General's Awards. 

The exhibition is presented and supported by the Canada Council for the Arts, in collaboration with the National Gallery of Canada and the Beaverbrook Art Gallery. It 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. Through virtual world-building and digital storytelling, Skawennati works 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.   

Carole Itter and Lyne LaPointe have engaged with political messaging and feminist approaches to art through practices attentive to bodies, people, environments, and systems of exclusion. Itter’s ambitious art installations connect the treatment of the earth and ecosystems with questions surrounding the position of women in society. LaPointe’s installations and two-dimensional pieces consider the body and its relationship to external factors and societal pressures through a queer feminist lens.  

The work of Marie-Jeanne Musiol and Zacarías Kunuk is deeply responsive to the places and communities that shape their practices. Musiol explores the energies held within plant life and the natural world through electromagnetic fields, making otherwise imperceptible forces perceptible. Kunuk has brought the energy of Inuit storytelling to audiences around the world, reshaping misinformed perspectives of Inuit peoples by grounding his films in the lived experiences, knowledge, and voices of his community. 

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.  

2026 Governor General’s Awards in Visual and Media Arts winners

This exhibition is presented with the generous support of Fred and Elizabeth Fountain, Frank and Debbi Sobey, and Total Transportation Solutions Inc.