Charlene Vickers

Encompassing a wide range of media — including painting, sculpture, performance and installation — the practice of Charlene Vickers operates as a visionary expression of what the artist terms embodied territory. Giving vital form to the lands, histories and relations of her birthplace in Wauzhushk Onigum as they are felt, imagined and carried across distance, Vickers’ works lucidly manifest ancestral connections, cultural reclamations and her territorial presence as Anishinaabe Kwe, while responding formally to the Coast Salish land she has resided upon for the past thirty years.

Recent exhibitions and accolades include 2025 Sobey Award Long List, Indian Theatre, curated by Candice Hopkins at CCS BARD Hessel Museum in Hudson, NY (2023), Reverberations: Contemporary Art and Modern Classics at the Seattle Art Museum (2023), Good Foot Forward, curated by Kitty Scott, Toronto (2023), Big Blue Smudge, The University of Saskatchewan (2022), Ancestral Gesture, a solo exhibition at the Contemporary Art Gallery in Vancouver (September 2021), Rain Shadow at the Nanaimo Art Gallery (2021), Where Do We Go From Here? at the Vancouver Art Gallery (2020), the Biennale national de sculpture Contemporaine 2020 in Quebec, An Assembly of Shapes, Oakville Galleries, I continue to shape, Art Museum, U of T, Toronto, and Speaking From Hands and Earth, SFU Galleries, Burnaby and Ambivalent Pleasures at the Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver,(2016). International group exhibitions include the map is not the territory at the Portland Art Museum, Oregon (2019), Connective Tissue: New Approaches in Contemporary Fibre Art at MoCNA in Santa Fe, NM (2017), From The Belly of The Beast at Grace Gallery in Brooklyn, N.Y. (2017), If We Never Met, Pataka Art Museum, Porirua, New Zealand (2016). Charlene Vickers graduated from Emily Carr University of Art and Design (94) and Simon Fraser University in Critical Studies of the Arts (98), MFA (2013).