The Jack and Doris Shadbolt Foundation for the Visual Arts: 2025 VIVA Award and Balkind Prize

The Jack and Doris Shadbolt Foundation for the Visual Arts presents the 2025 VIVA Award to Justine A. Chambers and the 2025 Alvin Balkind Curator’s Prize to Lorna Brown in a special award ceremony on March 11, 2026 at Vancouver Art Gallery. Each winner will receive $15,000 in recognition of their exceptional contributions to the arts community in British Columbia. The VIVA Award, established in 1988 by Jack and Doris Shadbolt, is an annual prize awarded to mid-career visual artists in British Columbia who demonstrate exceptional creative ability and commitment to the visual arts. Justine A. Chambers is a dance artist and educator whose practice is a collaboration with her Black matrilineal heritage, and extends from this continuum and its entanglements with Western contemporary dance and visual arts practices. The Alvin Balkind Curator’s Prize is a biannual award set up in memory of Alvin Balkind to recognize excellence in the field of curating in the visual arts. Lorna Brown is a Vancouver-based visual artist, curator, writer and editor who received the VIVA Award in 1996, the Canada Council Paris Studio Award in 2000, and an honorary doctorate of letters from Emily Carr University of Art and Design in 2015. Admission to the ceremony is free, but an RSVP is required here.