Toronto Friends of the Visual Arts Announces the 2025 Founders Achievement Award

Each year the TFVA acknowledges a person or group who, over time, has made an exceptional contribution to the visual arts community in the greater Toronto area.

The Toronto Friends of the Visual Arts (TFVA) is pleased to announce this year’s Founders Achievement Award goes to Dr. Gerald McMaster, whose central role in contemporary Indigenous art makes him a most worthy recipient.

Dr. Gerald McMaster. Photo: Mark Ledbury, University of Sydney.

Dr. McMaster has curated for over forty years and been involved in Indigenous art in various ways for some fifty years, engaging in local, national and international work in contemporary art, critical theory, museology and Indigenous aesthetics. Throughout his career, he has championed the mainstream value of Indigenous art and played a key role in its evolution from ethnographic to art museums. He has served in several curatorial positions, in Canada at the Canadian Museum of Civilization, the Art Gallery of Ontario and, as adjunct curator at Remai Modern, as well as in the United States at the Smithsonian National Museum of the Indian American. He has also had a distinguished academic career as professor at OCAD University, holding a Tier I Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Visual Culture and Curatorial Practice, and directing the Wapatah Centre for Indigenous Visual Knowledge at OCADU.

Among his many distinctions, Dr. McMaster is an Officer of the Order of Canada and the recipient of the Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Art and the OCADU Distinguished Research, Scholarship and Creative Activity Award. He holds Honorary Doctorates of Letters from University of Saskatchewan and Emily Carr University of Art & Design, Vancouver. Within an international art context, he served as Curator of the Canadian pavilion at the 1995 Venice Biennale, Artistic Director to the Biennale of Sydney in 2012 and curator for Indigenous architects at the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale.

Thanks to the Founders Achievement Committee for their hard work researching and selecting this year’s recipient, and congratulations to Dr. McMaster.

Founded in 1998, The Toronto Friends of the Visual Arts is an independent, membership based, non-profit organization that promotes knowledge of the visual arts to its members through an extensive education program, and provides support and recognition of artistic achievement to artists, arts professionals and arts organizations in Toronto and the GTA.

Toronto Friends of the Visual Arts
Contact: Charlotte Durand, externalrelations@tfva.ca
Website: tfva.ca | Instagram: @tfva.ca