Spring 2026 Exhibitions at Art Windsor-Essex

Indoors or out, it’s funny weather this spring at Art Windsor-Essex!

Sarah Sproule, All My Clothes Come in the Mail, 2023, raw clay, foam, found object, latex paint. Photo courtesy of Tangled Art + Disability (2025) and Lisa East Studio.

Sarah Sproule: A Restless Spectre

March 19 – June 28, 2026
AWE at Night: Thursday, March 19, 5 – 9pm
Curated by T. Bujold-Abu, 2025-2026 TD Curatorial Fellow

What does it mean to be haunted? To imagine ghosts and other entities, or to be part of the haunting yourself? To be in a placeless place, separate from the world, and yet firmly ensnared in its gravity? A Restless Spectre, is a heterotopia; a simultaneous construction and deconstruction of domestic space, a haunt, where queer, disabled, and fat bodies find themselves welcome, invited in.

Artist Sarah Sproule works primarily in the casting and mould-making process, utilizing plaster, clay, and found objects to create dimensional images of abstracted bodies—exploring wider ideas of otherness and the body through the lens of queerness, disability, fat politics and the intersections that exist between them.

Laura Demers, A certain state of exhaustion, hygrothermograph, inkjet print on fabric, and single-channel video. 2019-2022.

L’air est lourd

March 19 – June 28, 2026
AWE at Night: Thursday, March 19, 5 – 9pm
Curated by Cassandra Lesage Fongué; produced in collaboration with BRAVO

L’air est lourd approaches the storm not as a distant natural phenomenon, but as an immersive system—slow, certain, already at work. In the age of the Anthropocene that we now inhabit, L’air est lourd invites us to consider the storm as a potent metaphor for the climatic transformations that envelop us.

The exhibition features works by Lisa Hirmer, Laura Demers, Hala Alsalman, and Katherine Takpannie. Together, they explore the nature of artificial clouds, the atmosphere shaped by human hubris, the slow transformations, and the minute signs of atmospheric change.

Emerging Digital Artists Award 2025

March 19 – June 28, 2026
AWE at Night: Thursday, March 19, 5 – 9pm
Presented in partnership with EQ Bank

The Emerging Digital Artists Award is an annual celebration of creativity and experimentation in digital media. Now in its 11th year, the prize recognizes the exceptional talents of emerging artists in Canada working at the forefront of the genre, highlighting the dynamic ways in which digital tools and technologies expand artistic practice.

This year’s exhibition presents the work of five remarkable artists that embrace the limitless nature of digital media: Eva Grant, Alex Gibson, Cadin Londono, Laura Caraballo, and Kahani (कहानी) Ploessl. As recipients of the 2025 prize, each artist pushes the boundaries of their distinct medium, including still image, animation, game art, extended reality, and installation. Together, their works offer a snapshot of our current moment, including what to hold on to from the past and what to alter, shift, or destroy to move thoughtfully into the future.

Judy Chappus, Twilight Apparition, 2022, mixed media on vintage linen tablecloth.

Judy Chappus: Skin in the Game

March 26 – May 24, 2026
AWE at Night: Thursday, April 16, 5 – 9pm
Curated by Emily McKibbon

Judy Chappus is a Windsor-based artist and poet who is uncompromising in her artistic searching. Skin in the Game is a survey exhibition, ranging from Chappus’ student years to the present, capturing a restless artist in the midst and aftermaths of many reckonings: with motherhood, shifting critical fortunes, aging, and climate change; others, too many to name. Animating all works on view is Chappus’ courage, a vital throughline connecting Chappus’ student work at the University of Windsor and the University of California at Irvine, through her return to Windsor, to the present.

The Exhibitionists Take AWE

April 16 – October 25, 2026
AWE at Night: Thursday, April 16, 5 – 9pm
Curated by Judy Chappus, Sandie Collins, Rebecca Draisey and Linda Renaud Fisher

The Exhibitionists are a fluidly organized collective of Windsor-based figurative woman artists. While individual exhibitionists move in and out of the group, their shared focus remains the same: how to authentically capture the contemporary experience of being a woman by disrupting and expanding the nude tradition. For The Exhibitionists Take AWE, Chappus, Collins, Draisey and Renaud Fisher have selected work from AWE’s collection that centre the female body as a contested site of power and celebration, of play and vulnerability. They have placed their work and the work of other Exhibitionists alongside AWE’s collection to reveal what’s possible when we centre equity and bravery in our collecting choices.

Christian Chapman: Run to the Hills!

April 16 – October 25, 2026
AWE at Night: Thursday, April 16, 5 – 9pm
Curated by Danielle Printup

Christian Chapman, an Anishinaabe artist from Fort William First Nation in Ontario, has always cherished and attended to stories, admiring their depth, elusiveness, the ways they carry meaning, and how storytellers in his family—young and old—could uniquely animate their being. These stories warmly anchored him in Anishinaabe traditions from the north shore of Lake Superior, stretching back to times before his own. He would listen, carefully attentive, beaming with his own curiosity. For Chapman, these stories are treasures, sources of inspiration and influence that travel with him into the shifting imaginary of Anishinaabe storytelling. Run to the Hills! spotlights Chapman’s gift as a storyteller who, like relatives before him, finds his own way of being in conversation with ancestral oral traditions. Using painting, printmaking, and other mixed media techniques, he forms a new graphic language for narrative expression that still carries old-timey sensibilities.

Christian Chapman: Run to the Hills! is organized and circulated by the Carleton University Art Gallery. It has been made possible in part by the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council.

About Art Windsor-Essex

Art Windsor-Essex recognizes the Three Fires Confederacy of First Nations, comprised of the Ojibway, the Odawa, and the Potawatomi as the original title holders of the lands we operate on, and Bkejwanong as the home of the Council Fire. We recognize the governing system of the Wampum Treaties; including the Dish with One Spoon Covenant between the Anishnaabe and Haudenosaunee Peoples. We respect the rights of Anishnaabe, Haudenosaunee and allied First Nations in caring for and protecting this territory. We commit to the work of being in good relation to Bkejwanong (Walpole Island First Nation) and Caldwell First Nation.

Art Windsor-Essex
401 Riverside Drive West
Windsor, ON N9A 7J1
artwindsoressex.ca
visit@artwindsoressex.ca
519-977-0013

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Accessibility: Art Windsor-Essex is a fully accessible venue. For more information, visit here.

Image Descriptions:
1. A military green armoire is against a wall, painted with the same colour. The central panel of the armoire is fleshy and skin-like, emerging out of the armoire as though it were flesh.
2. A closely framed film still shows a hand holding a black and white object.
3. An atmospheric painting showing a pale-faced nun beside a drone in motion.