OTTAWA.- The Hnatyshyn Foundation announces today that Howie Tsui (Vancouver) has received the Hnatyshyn Foundation Mid-Career Award for Excellence in Visual Arts and Crystal Mowry (Regina) has received the Hnatyshyn Foundation Mid-Career Award for Curatorial Excellence, prestigious peer-recognitions of excellence in the visual arts. Both have previously been shortlisted for the award.
Valued respectively at $30,000 and $20,000 and awarded annually since 2006, the awards recognize excellence, innovation, and promise of outstanding artistic or curatorial achievement in the years ahead.
Former laureates include Abbas Akhavan, Wanda Nanibush, Michelle Jacques, Heather Igloliorte, Kent Monkman, Rebecca Belmore, and more. Many have gone on to receive other major accolades including the Governor General’s Awards in Visual and Media Arts and Order of Canada, or have represented Canada at the Venice Biennale.
“Without a doubt, the Canadian arts landscape is richer as a result of Tsui and Mowry’s work, and we are happy to honour their contributions through these awards” said Joe Friday, Chair of the Hnatyshyn Foundation.
Selection Committees
For each award, a selection committee of arts professionals from across Canada draws up the list of candidates and narrows it down through a series of votes and deliberations. This year, there was consensus that both Tsui and Mowry are forging unique paths with their careers: Tsui, through his creative use of technology and historical materials in his art-making; and Mowry, through her exemplary human-centred approach to curation.
Selection Committee, The Hnatyshyn Foundation Mid-Career Award for Excellence in Visual Arts:
Corrie Jackson, RBC Senior Curator | Joy Xiang, Editor, C Magazine | Catherine Sinclair, Director, Exhibitions and Collections Care, National Gallery of Canada | Richard Hill, Smith Jarislowsky Senior Curator of Canadian Art, Vancouver Art Gallery | Elliott Ramsey, Curator, The Polygon Gallery
Selection committee, The Hnatyshyn Foundation Mid-Career Award for Curatorial Excellence:
Samus Gallagher, Artist, 2024 Hnatyshyn Foundation William and Meredith Saunderson Prize laureate | Dr. Luli Eshrāghi (Tagata Sāmoa), Artist, and Curator of Indigenous Practices, Muse des beaux-arts de Montral | Michle Pearson Clarke, Visual Artist, Assistant Professor of Photography, Toronto Metropolitan University | Sandra Dyck, Executive Director, The Reach Gallery Museum, Abbotsford, BC | Karen Tam, Artist shortlisted for the 2025 Hnatyshyn Foundation Mid-Career Award for Excellence in Visual Arts and Adjunct Curator, Griffin Art Projects, North Vancouver
Howie Tsui (徐浩恩, b. Hong Kong) is an interdisciplinary artist based on unceded Coast Salish territories. His practice spans ink brush painting, interactive sound sculpture, lenticular light box and installation. Tsui constructs tense, fictive environments that gleefully deflate revered art forms and narrative genres, often stemming from the Chinese literati tradition. He employs a stylized form of derisive and exaggerated imagery as a way to satirize and disarm the homogenizing agendas of broadening regimes. The most notable branch of his practice involves the use of algorithmic animation sequences to raise questions around order/chaos and the potential of social harmony through self-organized societies. Tsui synthesizes diverging socio-cultural anxieties around superstition, surveillance and the “abject other” through a wry outsider sensibility - casting light onto the contradictions of diasporic life. Tsui received the Canada Council for the Arts' Joseph Stauffer Prize (2005), was longlisted for the Sobey Art Award (2018) and was shortlisted for the Hnatyshyn Foundation Mid-Career Award (2024).
“To be recognized in this way affirms that the quiet, diligent work I dedicate to my practice can be found, understood — and considered belonging within the Canadian contemporary art community. The award anchors my convictions, silences the bouts of debilitating doubt that seep in through the crevasses, and emboldens the pursuit of works that might otherwise remain unrealized. ”
- H. Tsui
“Howie Tsui has been ahead of the curve for a long time, with both uses of technology and cross-cultural juxtapositions in art.” - Elliott Ramsey (Curator, The Polygon Gallery)
“Howie Tsui has been ahead of the curve for a long time, with both uses of technology and cross-cultural juxtapositions in art.”
Crystal Mowry is the Director of Programs at the MacKenzie Art Gallery, a position she has held since 2021. She previously served as Senior Curator at the Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery. Her work often explores the tension between perceived authenticity and troubled forms of representation. As a curator operating primarily within a public art museum, she treats her role as equal parts co-conspirator and translator, drawing on roots in studio practice to support artists in the development and subsequent touring of new projects. Her career path has been shaped by curiosity and a particular interest in how to make a public trust a site for experimentation. This has led her to work as an artist, a studio assistant, and in unconventional creative gigs before entering museum work in 2005. Mowry’s curatorial work includes thematic group exhibitions such as The Limits (2011), Imitation of Life (2015), I’ll be your Mirror (2018), What the Bat Knows (2022), and Thick as Thieves (2025). In 2013, she co-curated Romancing the Anthropocene, one of three zones commissioned by the City of Toronto for its annual Nuit Blanche event. Her solo projects with artists Deanna Bowen, Maggie Groat, and Ernest Daetwyler have received Exhibition of the Year Awards from the Ontario Association of Art Galleries (now Galeries Ontario Galleries). She is a recipient of a Waterloo Region Arts Award (2020) and has been shortlisted for the Hnatyshyn Foundation Mid-Career Award for Curatorial Excellence (2024, 2025). Her writing has appeared in various artist-focused publications on the work of artists such as Brendan Fernandes, Shary Boyle, August Klintberg, Annie MacDonell, among others. She regularly serves on industry juries and advisory panels, most notably for the Sobey Art Award (2015), the Scotiabank Photography Award (2021), and the Canadian pavilion for the 2026 Venice Biennale. Crystal was born in Tkaronto (Toronto), where she completed undergraduate studies in sculpture and installation at the Ontario College of Art and Design University before earning a Master of Fine Arts degree at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Kjipuktuk (Halifax). She is currently based in Treaty 4 (Regina), where she lives with her family.
“It has been a privilege to count artists as my most inspired educators over the years. They have taught me how to centre curiosity in my work and to consider our shared questions – from the ones posed in the intimacy of the studio to the speculative prompts we work through in written offerings – a record of what we realize anew together. As someone who always felt like I had more questions than answers, I am humbled to be in the company of the incredible colleagues – the long list, preceding laureates, and the jury – who have inspired me through their own curatorial accomplishments. My curatorial work most often unfolds deliberately in museums because I believe they are spaces where we can still learn in public, and where if we are lucky, a record of that learning contributes to a public trust. Mid-career award attention is a reminder that there is still time to be a fulcrum, to consider unexpected shifts in your practice with assurance from your peers. I am deeply honoured by this award and grateful to be recognized in this moment.”
- C. Mowry
“Crystal Mowry is brilliant and courageous. She builds deep worlds. I love her description of a curator as a co-conspirator and translator—she works alongside, never above. Her work is steeped in care, humility, and curiosity, always with artists at the centre. […] When Crystal speaks, people listen. She has a way with words, and she is wise. She sets a high standard of professionalism, accountability, commitment, and rigour. She may be at the mid-point of her career, but I think of her as an elder in our field, and it is an honour to observe and learn from her work.”
