Sculptor Brian Jungen wins top Canadian art prize – The Art Newspaper

The artist Brian Jungen—renowned for transforming Nike Air Jordans into Northwest Coast First Nations masks—has won the 2025 Audain Prize for the Visual Arts.

In the Fairmont Hotel Vancouver’s historic Pacific ballroom on Friday (26 September), the C$100,00 ($71,700) prize—one of Canada’s highest honours in the arts—was awarded to Jungen in a ceremony that managed to be at once both colonial and decolonial. A bagpiper ushered in the Lieutenant Governor of British Columbia, Wendy Cocchia, to the tune of Jerusalem. As guests dined on Pacific salmon under ornate chandeliers, a Native elder performed a traditional Coast Salish welcome.

Jungen, an artist of mixed Dane-Zaa First Nations and Swiss ancestry, creates inventive sculptural amalgamations of Nike sneakers, sports uniforms, plastic furniture and containers, and other mass-produced objects. Often evoking visceral connections to traditional Indigenous artistry, including masks, drums and animals, his multidisciplinary practice challenges, explores and creates dialogue between Indigenous and settler cultures, examining the complexities of appropriation and cultural identity in a globalised world. He previously won the inaugural edition of the Sobey Art Award (in 2002) and the 2010 Gershon Iskowitz Prize.

Selected by an independent committee, and established by Michael Audain in 2004, the Audain Prize is presented annually by the Whistler, British Columbia-based Audain Art Museum, with the aim of “elevating artists from British Columbia”.

The crowd packing the ballroom for Friday’s ebullient ceremony included many past winners such as Chief James Hart, Ian Wallace (one of Jungen’s former teachers) and Stan Douglas. When jury member and Polygon Gallery director Reid Shier presented the award, praising Jungen’s work as “imaginative, unpredictable and hauntingly evocative”, the two embraced like old friends. And when Jungen made his acceptance speech, he presented Michael Audain with a pair of beaded moosehide moccasins made by his cousin.

“It is an honour to recognise Brian Jungen with the 2025 Audain Prize,” says Audain, the chairman of the Audain Foundation. “The impact of his art is undeniable. Since the late 1990s, Jungen has forged a name for himself internationally through his commanding sculptural practice. It is critical that we not only acknowledge the calibre of such accomplished artists but also continue to raise their profile here in British Columbia, in Canada and around the world.”

Jungen in turn recognised his ties to the local art community. In an accompanying documentary short, he remembered coming to the “big city” in 1988 as an 18-year-old from northern British Columbia and being introduced to new ideas like conceptual art at the Emily Carr School of Art and Design. At one point he had a studio in Vancouver’s downtown east side and supported his artistic practice by working at Canada Post. While his early work involved drawing and painting, “I didn’t really start making objects until I did a residency at the Banff Centre at 28,” recalled the artist, who is now 55 years old.

Inspired by broken objects he encountered on the streets of Vancouver, he said, “I made these Nike masks, which I’m kind of tied up with for the rest of my life.” That series, Prototypes for New Understanding (1998-2005), launched his career. One of those masks, Variant #1 (2002), is in the permanent collection of the Audain Art Museum and will go on show there next month in From Sea to Sky: The Art of British Columbia. “It was a huge turning point for me,” Junger said. “I was suddenly being flown around the world and getting museum shows.”

The artist later bought a ranch in British Columbia’s rural Okanagan Valley, where he lived and had a studio for nine years. During that time, he created his first large-scale public work for the Art Gallery of Ontario, Couch Monster: Sadzěʔ yaaghęhch’ill (2002),a giant bronze sculpture cast fromsecond-hand leather furniture formed into the figure of a performing elephant. Inspired by an escaped circus elephant “forced into cultural slavery” that he felt a “huge affinity with”, Jungen drew parallels to the commercial art world where “if something doesn’t sell, it just gets thrown into storage”.

Four years ago, he reached another turning point when his ranch and his entire archive—stuffed into around 900 Air Jordan boxes—burned to the ground during a wildfire. Happily, much of his early work was collected by Bob Rennie, who donated it to the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa.

“It was a time to renew,” Jungen tells The Art Newspaper of the loss of his ranch and archive. He currently lives in a cabin in Moberly Lake in Northern British Columbia and has no studio, but he says he is now producing more public art as it does not require one.

“I’ve also started making arrows in wood and carbon fibre fletched with feathers,” he says. “Because I practice archery now where I live up north, I’ve been firing the arrows into different objects and made a piece for Prospect New Orleans and did a performance with the arrows in February in New York.” He says he was inspired he said by the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian, where he exhibited in 2009, and its collection of arrows.

Jungen adds: “I want to get back to making things with my own hands.”