U of M grad shortlisted for Sobey Art Award

ARTIST, curator and writer Chukwudubem Ukaigwe has been shortlisted to represent the Prairies region for the prestigious Sobey Art Award 2025.

His work is on display until Feb. 8, 2026, at the National Gallery of Canada for the 2025 Sobey Art Award Exhibition with five other artists representing the Circumpolar, Pacific, Ontario, Quebec and Atlantic regions.

The annual award is the largest and arguably most important Canadian prize for contemporary visual artists.

Sobey recognition can be life-changing: shortlisted artists receive $25,000, while remaining longlisted artists (from 25 in total) receive $10,000. The winner, announced Nov. 8, receives $100,000.

The award can also help propel an artist’s career towards art world stardom.

Ukaigwe — born in Lagos, Nigeria, in 1995 and holding a bachelor of fine arts from the University of Manitoba — was based here for several years before embarking on graduate studies at Stanford University in Palo Alto, Calif., this fall, and has displayed across the Prairies and beyond, including in the United Kingdom, South Africa and the Netherlands.

Ukaigwe’s visual art includes paintings, installations, performance and video work. He’s perhaps best recognized for his paintings, as refined in their detail as they are vivid in colour, blending elements of realism, pop art and surrealism.

On view in the gallery, the installation Ain’t at the Gate (Titled After Lubrin)? exposes the artist’s internal conflicts while criticizing outside factors influencing Black communities. It features a painting resting on a pair of speakers playing a track of songs and spoken word on the theme of the extra planetary, including Charles Mingus’s Please Don’t Come Back From the Moon.

Ukaigwe joins at least one other artist with Manitoba connections among Sobey finalists: Tarralik Duffy, shortlisted for the Circumpolar region.

The Inuk artist — whose jerrycan sculptures and playful drawings depicting life in Nunavut were displayed at WAG-Qaumajuq two years ago — was born in Churchill and raised in the small hamlet community of Coral Harbour on Southampton Island at the northwest corner of Hudson Bay.

conrad.sweatman@freepress.mb.ca