MacKenzie Art Gallery become inaugural host to Governor General’s Awards exhibit

The following transcript has been edited for length and clarity. The interview starts at 17:40. 

Brent Loucks: The MacKenzie Art Gallery has had quite the year?

John G. Hampton: It’s been a huge year. We’re Saskatchewan’s oldest public art gallery. We started as part of the university, actually, but have had a long history that brought us to this point, and I think it’s been a great year, building on the last few years being really fantastic.

And the gallery recently hosted a pretty significant event, the 2025 Governor General Awards in Visual and Media Arts, which opened in December and continues to the beginning of May?

Hampton: That’s right. The Governor General’s Awards in Visual and Media Arts is something that’s been around for a long time. It’s typically hosted at the National Gallery of Canada (in Ottawa), and they’re still collaborating on it, but they work on it with the Canada Council for the Arts, and they decided that starting this year, they wanted to really celebrate it as a national award.

So they’ll host the exhibition in a different part of Canada every year, and they reached out to us, and we’re very proud that the MacKenzie Art Gallery is the inaugural host for that new format.

Titled Through That Which is Scene, a diaroma on wooden planks. (Nicole Garn/980 CJME)

So what can people see when they come to Mackenzie and they want to take a look at the Governor General’s Awards in Visual and Media Arts?

Hampton: We’ve got about five exhibitions on now at the gallery. So the Governor General’s Awards show is the main exhibition. So you’re going to see eight of Canada’s best artists who are being honoured by Mary Simon, the Governor General of Canada, for their lifetime of contribution to the arts.

So you’ll see Kent Monkman, who’s from Fisher River Cree Nation, just out of Manitoba. You’ll see Thaddeus Holownia, Bruce LaBruce, Sandra Rodriguez, Jin-me Yoon and Peter Pierobon. So they’re an eclectic group who have paintings, new media art, to video and to furniture making, actually.

Hampton: Oh, well, it’s a great honour, but it’s also a responsibility to take on that mantle. It’s something that I hope to see happening at more and more galleries as we move forward.

The MacKenzie has really been a leader and at the forefront of championing Indigenous art since the 70s. So it was a natural fit where I could land comfortably, and it made sense with the gallery’s direction.

Souvenirs of Self photo exhibit by Jin-Me Yoon, set in Banff. (Nicole Garn/980 CJME)

Do you believe that art can bring people together and create important conversations? Do you see this happening when people visit the MacKenzie?

Hampton: Yeah, they definitely do. Art is, I think, becoming increasingly important, especially in our current times. It can be a little too easy to feel divided or to have people feel pitted against each other, and art is one of those spaces where you can find some type of common ground between different cultural understandings or different belief structures.

You’re able to communicate on that more emotional or spiritual level, rather than getting mired in politics or your inability to verbally communicate across those differences. So we’ve definitely seen that and hear that from our audiences.

One of the important things that we’ve been doing at the gallery is that we really lean into our Saskatchewan identity, and we’ve been working hard to celebrate Saskatchewan’s central role in Canadians’ identity, so through uplifting and promoting the unique culture, history and identity that is here in the prairies, and in the Great Plains.

Hampton: In 2025, we had about 83,000 people through the door, and we reached about 660,000 through our collective programs.

And we have specific programs for youth through partnerships with the Regina Immigrant Women’s Center, through local First Nations, through all different types of groups, and we make sure that we’re creating cultural offerings that help improve the vibrancy of our city and our province. So over 340 community programs and over 3,300 children are coming through our youth programs.

Hampton: I say to just pursue it. Follow your creativity, your ambitions and don’t let go of that ability to imagine and to think differently. Art inspires creativity; it gives us those critical problem-solving skills that are ever more important today as our world gets more complex.

But beyond that, it’s about embracing wonder and feeling confident about your own voice. And I think that that’s essential. You don’t have to create art or do things that you see on television or that you even see on the MacKenzie’s walls, but just trust in your own vision and create something.

Hampton: There’s so much I’m excited about for this new year! Just two months ago, we made announcements that we are housing this new database for the art of Norval Morrisseau. This database is a huge deal. It houses information about over 3,000 works of art produced by the artist Norval Morrisseau. 

We’ve got another major announcement coming just next week, which I would love to break with you right now, but you’ll have to stay tuned.

For more information about the exhibit and to see some of the artwork on display, visit the MacKenzie Art Gallery’s website.

Thaddeus Holownia’s Icarus, Falling of Birds display, pays homage to loss of thousands of birds due to the 100-foot Canaport LNG flare in 2013. (Nicole Garn/980 CJME)