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About Nico Williams

Nico Williams, ᐅᑌᒥᐣ (b. 1989), is a member of Aamjiwnaang First Nation (Anishinaabe) and currently lives and works in Tiohtià:ke/Montréal. In 2021, he graduated with a Master of Fine Arts in Sculpture from Concordia University. He has a multidisciplinary and often collaborative practice that is centred around sculptural beadwork. Williams is active within the urban Indigenous Montréal arts community and is a member of the Contemporary Geometric Beadwork research team. He has led workshops at The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the McCord Stewart Museum, MOMA x AICH, and the University of Toronto. In 2021, he was awarded the Claudine and Stephen Bronfman Fellowship in Contemporary Art, and in 2024, he was the laureate of the prestigious Sobey Art Award, for which he was longlisted in 2022. His work has been shown internationally and across Canada, including at the National Gallery of Canada (2024), the Art Gallery of Hamilton (2023), the MacKenzie Art Gallery (2022), the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal (2021), and the Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal (2019). He was part of the critically-lauded group exhibition Indian Theater: Native Performance, Art, and Self-Determination since 1969 at the Hessel Museum of Art. Williams’s works are housed in prominent public collections, including the Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal, the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, the Art Gallery of Ontario, Archives Nationales du Québec, the Ojibwe Cultural Foundation, and the Royal Bank of Canada Art Collection. His work has been supported by the Canada Council for the Arts, the Conseil des arts de Montréal, the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Fluevog Artist Grant.