Wanda Nanibush, Georgiana Uhlyarik win $10K Toronto Book Award for 'radical and necessary' Moving the Museum
Annual award honours books that are inspired by the city
Wanda Nanibush and Georgiana Uhlyarik won the 2023 Toronto Book Award for their novel Moving the Museum: Indigenous + Canadian Art at the AGO.
The book highlights the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO)'s ongoing efforts to reopen the J.S. McLean Centre for Indigenous and Canadian Art, with a renewed focus on showcasing Indigenous art.
The Toronto Book Awards celebrate books that are inspired by the city. The award was created in 1974 by the Toronto City Council, and is now celebrating its 49th year.
The winners will receive a prize of $10,000.
Nanibush is an Anishinaabe-kwe writer, artist, curator and community organizer from Beausoleil First Nation of Georgian Bay. She is the inaugural curator of Indigenous Art and co-head of the Indigenous & Canadian Art Department at the AGO.
Currently, Nanibush has a retrospective exhibition Robert Houle Red is Beautiful displayed at the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C.
Uhlyarik is the Fredrik S. Eaton Curator of Canadian Art and co-lead of the J.S. McLean Centre for Indigenous & Canadian Art at the AGO. She is currently an adjunct faculty member at York University and University of Toronto.
There were many reasons the authors wanted to document the reopening of the J.S. McLean Centre for Indigenous and Canadian Art, Uhlyarik told CBC Books, one being that they wanted to share their unique model of working.
"What we were trying to do is make this shift: be Indigenous-led, be artist-centred and really think about the work that we do at the AGO. [To be] in honour, celebration and recognition of the great artists of Toronto, Canada and in fact the world," Uhlyarik said.
What we were trying to do is make this shift: be Indigenous-led, be artist-centred and really think about the work that we do at the AGO. - Georgiana Uhlyarik
"We wanted to mark that because it felt quite an important moment in the history of the institution."
Uhlyarik said that it is an incredible feeling to have Moving the Museum win this year's Toronto Book Award.
"This kind of recognition gives me a real sense of the kind of impact that it had, and that all this hard work and desire to communicate and exchange ideas has actually reached people. It comes back to you in such a beautiful and generous way and I'm very touched by all that."
"It actually was quite incredible to go through the images of all the programming that we had done in the last five years," Uhlyarik said. "It is so wonderful to bring people together in this space to really make the Art Gallery of Ontario a welcoming space for everyone."
Moving the Museum is written back and forth between Nanibush and Uhlyarik, which Uhlyarik says is in the spirit of how they work. The way people are toured through the centre is the way the publication is structured.
The creation of the book was a true collaboration, according to Uhlyarik.
"From the moment that we created the [Indigenous & Canadian Art] department, we are always working in relation with one another, even when we're working on our separate projects. And so working on the book was the same. The way we make installations, the way we make acquisitions, the way we make programming – it really is collaborative in every way."
The jury called Moving the Museum "revelatory". They stated in a press release that the novel "kicks the colonial gaze to the curb, insisting instead that museums and galleries radically shift what they've been doing and offers page after page enacting the potential of Indigenous art to empower, inspire and create community. Moving the Museum is an art book that is practical, radical, and necessary."
The 2023 jury was made up of writers Kateri Akiwenzie-Damm, Jamila-Khanom Allidina, Steven W. Beattie, Sue Carter and karen lee.
This year the Toronto Book Awards received 105 submissions, and the shortlisted finalists included works of non-fiction, fiction and poetry.
The other titles on the 2023 shortlist were Nomenclature by Dionne Brand, Wild Fires by Sophie Jai, Finding Edward by Sheila Murray, and Carolyn Whitzman's Clara at the Door with a Revolver.
The finalists each will receive $1000.
Sarah Polley won last year for her novel, Run Towards the Danger.
Other past winners include Kim Echlin for Speak, Silence, Desmond Cole for The Skin We're In and Dionne Brand for Theory.
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