Proud to receive an Honorable Mention for the Norval Morrisseau Award for Visual Arts, Surrey Muse Awards, 2022!
The awards ceremony will happen on Saturday, November 26, 1-4pm (PT) in Surrey BC.
Surrey Muse Arts Society is proud to have received over 300 submissions from 66 different cities in Canada, and it welcomes all poets, writers, artists and musicians who made submissions to the 2022 Surrey Muse Art & Literature Awards. For the Norval Morrisseau Award for Visual Arts, we are grateful to Judge Liz Toohey-Wiese and Jury Members Heidi Mckenzie and Mariam Zohra D for their valuable contributions to this year’s visual arts contest.
Surrey Muse is an interdisciplinary art and literature presentation group that was founded by four artists of Color in Surrey BC in November 2011. Mandated to inclusivity and equality, it held 3-hour salon-style monthly gatherings featuring authors, poets and artist/performers, with discussions and open mic sessions till March 2019 when it went virtual due to COVID-19 restrictions. In 2016, for its fifth anniversary, two additional programs were introduced: Surrey Muse At Large and Surrey Muse Writers. The group registered itself as Surrey Muse Arts Society (SMAS) in 2019, and it operates from the unceded Coast Salish territories of the Semiahmoo, Katzie, Kwikwetlem, Kwantlen, Qayqayt, Tsawwassen, Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations.
Dedicated to Norval Morrisseau
Norval Morrisseau (1932 – 2007), Copper Thunderbird, who founded the Woodland School of Art, is also called the grandfather of contemporary Indigenous art in Canada. In the 1960s, Morrisseau shattered societal, sexual, and commonly held stereotypes and prejudices, and in the face of intense discrimination, he created a style that was all his own, an artistic vocabulary that inspired a new art movement. A prominent member of the Indian Group of Seven, in 1978, he was made a Member of the Order of Canada. He was a member of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts where he was given a posthumous Lifetime Achievement Award in 2008. He is the only Indigenous artist to have had a solo exhibition at the National Gallery of Canada. We dedicate the Visual Arts Award to Norval Morrisseau to express our gratitude for the color, the shapes, and the tremendous depth he gave to Canadian visual art
