Toronto Friends of the Visual Arts Announces the 2026 Artist Prize Awards

The Toronto Friends of the Visual Arts recently announced the recipients of the 2026 TFVA Artist Prize Awards. Each year the committee carefully researches selected artists based on their multi-faceted and compelling art practice. Congratulations to this year’s three Artist Prize Award recipients!

TFVA was founded in 1998, and has given awards to 250+ artists, visual arts organizations and those engaged in the visual arts in Toronto and the GTA.

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 for artistic achievement to artists and art organizations in the GTA and surrounding area.

The TFVA is proud to announce the following 2026 Artist Prize Winner and two Artist Prize Finalists:

Subject to the tide (After David Hammons), 2018-2025, Twill flag, salvaged fence from the Africville heritage site in Halifax, NS. Photo: LF Documentation

Artist Prize Winner 2026 is Oluseye

Oluseye is a Nigerian Canadian artist based in Toronto, where he traces Blackness through its multifaceted migrations and manifestations. Using “diasporic debris”—a term used to describe the artifacts collected on his trans-Atlantic travels—these transformational objects recast into sculpture, performance and photography, invoking his personal narratives within a broader examination of Black Diasporic identity and African spiritual traditions. Oluseye embraces Blackness as divine, fluid, and unfixed; unbound by time, space, and geographies. His practice blends the ancestral with the contemporary and the physical with the spiritual.

Website: Oluseye

Making In my body out of my mind, powdered graphite applied directly to the gallery wall, 2023. Photo: Annie MacDonell

Artist Prize Finalist 2026 is Claire Greenshaw

Claire Greenshaw is a Canadian artist based in Toronto whose practice is grounded in drawing as a way of thinking, seeing, and making sense of the world. Greenshaw is known for her command of line, tone, and observation—drawing with both precision and emotional acuity. Her works often unfold through slow, attentive mark-making, where patience and intimacy with materials allow images and sculptures to emerge gradually. Her meditative process considers drawing as an enduring analogue tool of documentation and contemplation which contrasts the increasing influence of the digital in our daily lives. Greenshaw is currently a doctoral candidate in the Department of Visual Arts at York University, where her creative research takes up ideas about the circulation of images, feminist approaches to the archive, and the experience of time under capitalism and the Anthropocene. Across both drawing and sculpture, Greenshaw’s work reflects a deep respect for materials and process, revealing an artist attentive to nuance, restraint, and the expressive power of careful looking.

Website: Claire Greenshaw

Photo: Kwame Delfish

Artist Prize Finalist 2026 is Christina Leslie

Christina Leslie is an artist living and working in the Toronto area. Her lens-based practice delves into decolonization, identity, migration, marginalization, and her West Indian heritage. Using experimental photography and text, she explores the intersections of history, memory, and race to create thought-provoking visual narratives. Her series titled Pinhole Parishes was inspired by familial stories of Jamaica’s post-independence era. The images, created through improvised photographic tools and long exposures, evoke memory and presence. In her series Sugar Coat, she seeks to address the disconnection between sugar and its history, while exploring the materiality of sugar in its bleached granular form and speaking metaphorically about the whitewashing of this history. Using her adept experimental approach, she produced these photographs made from sugar, further enhancing the depth and power of the images. In addition to her art making practice, Christina is also an independent curator who recently curated an exhibition, The Great Unseen (2025), at the McMaster Museum of Art in Hamilton, her first curatorial experience working with a major collection and institution.

Website: Christina Leslie

Our sincere thanks to the 2025-26 Artist Prize committee for their hard work, and congratulations to all the Artist Prize Award recipients.

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