2026 Middlebrook Prize Awarded to Casper Sutton-Fosman

2026 Middlebrook Prize for Young Canadian Curators awarded to Casper Sutton-Fosman

The Art Gallery of Guelph (AGG) is pleased to announce that Casper Sutton-Fosman has been awarded the 2026 Middlebrook Prize for Young Canadian Curators. Their proposed exhibition, looking in/looking through, has been selected as the winning submission and will be presented at the Art Gallery of Guelph from September 17, 2026 to January 3, 2027. This year’s Middlebrook Prize jury included Emma Hassencahl-Perley (Curator of Indigenous Art, Beaverbrook Art Gallery), Lillian O’Brien Davis (Associate Curator, MacKenzie Art Gallery) and Sandy Saad-Smith (Curator, Doris McCarthy Gallery).

Created in 2012, the annual prize is awarded to a Canadian curator or curatorial team under 30 with the goal to support a resilient, sustainable, and inclusive arts sector in Canada. “The Middlebrook Prize champions curators at a time in their career when it often matters most,” says AGG’s Curator of Contemporary Art and 2022 Middlebrook Prize recipient Erin Szikora. “It provides a rare platform for emergent narratives, and the partnership with the Art Gallery of Guelph offers valuable professional mentorship. I am proud to have gone through this program and to now support Casper in developing this important project.”

Breanne Jeethan, Unviable, 2024, MDF, LED lights, film print. Courtesy of the artist.

Drawing on Anne Boyer’s suggestion in her book The Undying that “Radiology turns a person made of feelings and flesh into a patient made of light and shadows,” Sutton-Fosman considers how artists engage with and respond to the interpretive frameworks of radiology. Featuring work by Breanne Jeethan, Charline Dally, Miles Rufelds, and Hannah Bullock, looking in/looking through brings together practices that draw on personal and found medical imagery, including angiograms, MRIs, and X-rays. Through these materials, the exhibition interrogates the authority of medical interpretation while exploring questions of selfhood, embodiment, and bodily autonomy. This project emerges out of Sutton-Fosman’s ongoing research into the relationship between medical imaging and image-making in art.

Curator Biography

Casper Sutton-Fosman is a curator, artist, and academic based in Tiohtià:ke/Mooniyang/Montreal. Their work centres conceptions of identity through a trans and disabled lens, questioning the fraught meanings of representation and exposure. Tracing pathways of labour, medicalization, and desire, Casper’s research foregrounds materiality and community. Casper has curated, exhibited, and held residencies in Toronto and New York, and was named InterAccess’s 2024 IA Current Emerging Curator. They hold an MFA from OCAD University and are currently a doctoral student in Concordia’s Interdisciplinary Humanities program.

Casper Sutton-Fosman

About the Middlebrook Prize

Founded in 2012, the Middlebrook Prize is a national prize awarded annually to foster social innovation and curatorial excellence in Canada while encouraging creative inquiry and public engagement. Selected by a jury of arts professionals, each winner is a curator or curatorial team under 30 who receives an honorarium as well as curatorial mentorship in the development of an exhibition. The Middlebrook Prize for Young Canadian Curators is made possible through the support of the Centre Wellington Community Foundation’s Middlebrook Social Innovation Fund and through private donations. For more information about the Middlebrook Prize and the cohort of past winners, please visit middlebrookprize.ca.

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