2017 Middlebrook Prize is Awarded to Yasmin Nurming-Por

The Art Gallery of Guelph is pleased to announce that Yasmin Nurming-Por has been awarded the 5th Annual Middlebrook Prize for Young Canadian Curators. Her project, My curiosities are not your curios, has been selected as the winning submission and will be presented at the Art Gallery of Guelph from September 14 – December 17, 2017.

Created in 2013, the prestigious annual prize is given to a Canadian curator under 30. By supporting and mobilizing Canadian creative talent, the Middlebrook Prize aims to inspire positive social change through creativity in an era of ongoing and unprecedented economic, environmental, social, and cultural challenges.

My curiosities are not your curios will explore what it means to collect objects, examined through the work of artists for whom collecting is a creative practice. Nurming-Por has selected contemporary artists from across North America whose “collections” address the politics of display, exploring how these systems can also be used to present alternative narratives.

In their assessment of her proposal, the 2017 Middlebrook Prize jury noted: “The idea of collecting, collections, and their institutional and colonial histories was critically and productively destabilized through Nurming-Por’s articulation of alternative approaches to knowledge circulation/production and through the works of the artists she included in her proposal.”

The jury included Nancy Campbell, independent curator and writer on contemporary and Inuit art, Toronto; Natasha Chaykowski, 2014 Middlebrook Prize Recipient (with Alison Cooley) and Director, Untitled Art Society, Calgary; and Rhéanne Chartrand, Aboriginal Curatorial Resident, McMaster Museum of Art, Hamilton.

The Middlebrook Prize for Young Canadian Curators is funded by the Centre Wellington Community Foundation’s Middlebrook Social Innovation Fund, The Guelph Community Foundation: Musagetes Fund, and by private donations.

The Art Gallery of Guelph and its sponsors — University of Guelph, City of Guelph, and the Upper Grand District School Board — acknowledge the support of the Ontario Arts Council, Canada Council for the Arts, The Ontario Trillium Foundation, and the Department of Canadian Heritage.

Curator’s Biography

Yasmin Nurming-Por is a curator, writer and educator based in Banff, Alberta. She holds a B.A. Honours in Art History from the University of British Colombia (2011) and a M.A. in Art History from the University of Toronto (2013). Her recent curatorial projects include: ARCTICNOISE (2015-2016), At Sea (2015), and Blind White (2015). Her writing has appeared in Drain Magazine, c magazine, Inuit Art Quarterly, esse, and thisistomorrow. From 2014-2016, Yasmin was a sessional instructor in Art History at Humber College in Toronto. She is currently engaged in the Curatorial Research Practicum at the Walter Phillips Gallery at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity and will be curating an upcoming exhibition there as well as Video Pool in Winnipeg.