Photo: Alex de Brabant (2024)
The Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory (AHVA) congratulates Abbas Akhavan (MFA ’06) as the recipient of the Hnatyshyn Foundation Mid-Career Award for Excellence in Visual Arts.
Akhavan is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice reflects on the relationships between place and history and attends to the geopolitical forces that define spaces. He gave an artist talk “Variations on a Garden” in March 2025 as part of AHVA’s Joan Carlisle-Irving Lecture Series, co-sponsored with Green College and the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery. Akhavan will represent Canada at the 61st Venice Biennale in 2026, and his work will be shown at the Belkin in the upcoming exhibition Abbas Akhavan: One Hundred Years from September 5 to December 7, 2025.
The Hnatyshyn Foundation Mid-Career Award for Excellence in Visual Arts of $30,000 (formerly $25,000) is awarded annually to a Canadian mid-career artist who has demonstrated excellence and innovation in their body of work and who shows promise of outstanding artistic achievement in the years ahead.
The Hnatyshyn Foundation is a private charity established by the late Right Honourable Ramon John Hnatyshyn, Canada’s twenty-fourth Governor General, to assist emerging and established artists in all disciplines with their schooling, training, and career development. Its programs are funded by donations from government, foundations, corporations, and individuals.
