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Indigenous Art Writing Award Winner 2024
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Indigenous Art Writing Award
We’re very excited to announce Magally Zelaya as the winner of the Indigenous Art Writing Award 2024! Zelaya’s text "Notes on Paper: Spiritual Healing for Artists and Other Humans” dives into artist Michelle Peraza’s work with amatl, the ancient Mesoamerican paper made from the bark of the wild fig tree. Zelaya skillfully covers much personal, historical, and cultural ground with a sense of poetics. Jurors were reminded of the often uncredited yet spiritual role materials play in art-making, where this sacred paper has survived banning and the largest massacre by Spanish colonizers in Mexico and Central America. “The artist heals the paper. The paper heals the viewer [...] The paper heals.” Zelaya’s piece will appear in a future issue of C Magazine.
We also extend warm congratulations to Vance Wright and Jordyn Hrenyk, who have been named runners-up for their strong texts.
Wright’s “The Legacy of the Potlatch Ban and Indigenous Art Production” felt to jurors like a fresh view of the disruption of the Potlatch ban (1885–1951) instigated by the settler colonial government of Canada. Wright places the Potlatch ban not as a place of sole negation, but a moment where the transfer of art practices and cultural knowledge had to change, casting Indigenous Art History as existing on a continuum where colonial tactics did not end or contaminate these practices.
Hrenyk’s “Looking Indigenous Beadwork in the Eye” weaves the historical context of beadwork on Turtle Island and its colonial market with grounded personal reflections and institutional critique in the experience of organizing the show “Pe-kīwēwin: Confronting Commercialized Spaces with Stitched Relationality” (Massy Arts Society). Hrenyk defines an Indigenous entrepreneuring practice as turning something very colonial—a “market”—into something very Indigenous, namely a community.
The IAWA continues to be organized by C Magazine and the Indigenous Curatorial Collective / Collectif des commissaires autochtones (ICCA), and was created to support, compensate, and platform Indigenous-identified writers who are advancing creative critical thought about Indigenous contemporary art. Stay tuned this summer for submissions to open for the next award.
Thank you to everyone who participated, and to last year’s jurors Mikinaak Migwans, Justine Stilborn (ICCA), and Joy Xiang (C Magazine).
Magally Zelaya is a Salvadoran-Canadian writer and journalist born in Mexico City and raised in Winnipeg. Her creative writing has been published in The Acentos Review, Sin Cesar, and The Normal School. Her reporting has appeared in The Guardian, Al Jazeera America, Cosmopolitan UK), _The Christian Science Monitor, and CBC. She holds an MFA from Rutgers University–Newark. Before giving her life over to the written word, she worked on film sets and tomato farms, in call centres and ESL classrooms. Recently, the ukulele has laid claim to her heart.
Vance Wright (they/them) is a reconnecting two-spirit member of the Tl’azt’en Nation, and was raised on the unceded territories of the Sinixt Nation in what is colonially known as Nelson, BC. Currently residing in the occupied and unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh Nations in Vancouver, they are an emerging artist, curator, and writer. They hold a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Emily Carr University, with a major in Critical and Cultural Practices and a minor in Curatorial Studies.
Dr. Jordyn Hrenyk is a Michif (Métis Nation Saskatchewan) researcher. She is a Provost’s Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto. Jordyn’s research is focused on Indigenous entrepreneurship and values-aligned business, with a focus on Indigenous arts-based self-employment. As part of her dissertation research, Jordyn collaborated with 23 Indigenous beadwork artists to develop an exhibit focused on beadwork as an act of community care and resistance. While she was born on her home territory in Treaty 6, Jordyn has grown up in different urban centres around what is now known as British Columbia. She now lives on the territories of the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Anishnabeg, the Chippewa, the Haudenosaunee, and the Wendat Peoples in Tkaronto. She strives to walk lightly on these lands, and works to cultivate meaningful relationships with this place with the Peoples who have stewarded it since Time Immemorial.