In its sixth year, the Middlebrook Prize for Young Canadian Curators was set up to challenge and encourage young curators by offering entrants a chance to create an innovative exhibition. A unique prize in the Canadian art world, the Middlebrook Prize celebrates social connectedness and a shared sense of community. The winner is a curator under 30 and receives a space for their exhibition at the Art Gallery of Guelph.

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The Middlebrook Prize for Young Canadian Curators

OCAD University Alumni Award

Jean Sutherland Boggs Fellowship

Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council’s Canada Graduate Scholarships – Masters

Sir Edmund Walker Award for Graduate Studies

Visual and Critical Studies Graduation Award

Diversity & Equity Excellence Award

Ada Slaight Scholarship

Royal Ontario Museum

OCAD University

University of Toronto

Art Gallery of Ontario

C Magazine

City of Toronto

Art Gallery of Guelph

Art Museum at the University of Toronto

Tate Modern

Canadian Art Magazine

A Centenary of Influence

Hemispheric Thinking

“Àbadakone” Creates Community

Blackface, Brownface and Redface in the Arts: A Bibliography

The Politics of Sensing

Newcomers Discuss Creative-Industry Barriers in Canada

Maya Wilson-Sanchez is an independent curator, writer, and editor based in Toronto. She is interested in processes of history-making and building connections between local and international communities to foster networks of exchange and solidarity. Her essays, reviews, and exhibition texts can be found in various publications including The Senses and Society Journal, Canadian Art, Contemporary HUM, and the book Other Places: Reflections on Media Arts in Canada (PUBLIC Books, 2019).

Wilson-Sanchez holds degrees in art history from the University of Toronto (MA) and OCAD University (BA) and has worked in collections, research, programming, and curatorial research roles at Gallery TPW, the Royal Ontario Museum, Onsite Gallery, OCAD University, MKG127, and the Art Gallery of Ontario. She curated Intra-Action: Live Performance Art (2016, 2017) at Xpace Cultural Centre, Living Room (2017) at the Royal Ontario Museum, DIY Love: Queer Knowledge & History Then, Now, and Forever (2017) at Pride Toronto, and Grounding (2020) at the Art Gallery of Guelph. In 2019, she was an Editorial Resident at Canadian Art and a Curatorial Resident at the Art Museum at the University of Toronto, where she contributed to exhibitions highlighting the work of Deanna Bowen and the Isuma film collective. She has shared her research through talks, public tours, and guest lectures held in multiple venues across Canada, the United States, and Mexico. The 2020 recipient of the Middlebrook Prize for Young Canadian Curators, Wilson-Sanchez will be a 2021 participant at the Tate Intensive in London, UK. She is currently teaching at OCAD University curating a year-long public arts program and exhibition for the City of Toronto’s Year of Public Art.

Contemporary Art

Art Criticism

Curatorial Studies 

Art History

Performance Art

Curatorial Research

Indigenous Art

Visual and Critical Studies

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Latin American Art

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Spanish

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Grounding Exhibition

Gods of Gods: A Canadian Play Exhibition 

Murals on bridges, poems on library walls, exhibits at the mall: 2021 will be the Year of Public Art in Toronto

Maya Wilson-Sanchez Awarded Fall Canadian Art Editorial Residency

Maya Wilson-Sanchez Wins Middlebrook Prize for Young Canadian Curators

Ways of Knowing Land: Métis and Anishinaabe Land Knowledge in the Work of Christi Belcourt and Bonnie Devine

Encuentro: The World Inside Out

The Album as Archive: Margaret Corry’s souvenir photographs through the lens of Canadian citizenship (1946-63)

Performing History in the Andes: Performance Art and Decolonial Methods

Non-Human Kinship in Contemporary Canadian Art

Curator, Art Gallery of Guelph, 2020

Grounding includes artwork made from the ground – work that uses as its material basis the same valuable natural resources that drive world economies. Taking a hemispheric approach, Grounding presents nuanced practices of art-making that respond to extractive industries in the Americas, and more specifically within Canada, Peru, and Argentina. Challenging the assumptions implicit in this economic model, the artists suggest a re-appropriation of natural resources to envision futures beyond those based on capital accumulation, environmental destruction, and colonial value systems.

Grounding

Curatorial Resident, Art Museum at the University of Toronto, Toronto, ON
2019

God of Gods: A Canadian Play

Co-Curator, Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto, ON
2017

Housed within the Family Camera exhibition at the Royal Ontario Museum, the Living Room is an exhibition that depicts how history, culture, and politics are present in our homes and in our photographs. By showcasing the collaborative work of designers, documentary-makers, and artists, it shows how through stories and images we create new histories that help shape our society. The installation explores the power of storytelling through sharing family photographs. This intimate setting portrays how photographs may be kept, shared, and displayed. It uses projection-mapping technology to create a multi-sensory narrative that explores how personal remembrance can contribute to collective memory.

The Living Room

Curator, Pride Toronto, Toronto, ON
2017

This participatory artwork was a project for Pride Toronto that created a collective installation of queer discourse and history. Mobile walls were presented in the middle of Church Street where community members were invited to contribute to a collage-like mural. Defaced by markers and messages, it connotes the typical nightclub bathroom walls that were often the most direct portal to affection and an understanding audience during LGBTQ2 youth. Blank paper, markers, and paint were provided in addition to posters that were commissioned from five LGBTQ2 artists and writers that referenced important historical icons or moments of queer history in Toronto. Other LGBTQ2 artists based in Toronto also donated existing print-based work. While onsite, the curator and artists were present to teach participants how to make wheat paste and use the posters and artwork on hand (or create drawings themselves) to include in the creation of two murals. Participants were also free to take away the posters and invited to wheatpaste them in other places within the city. High-quality digital versions of the posters are also available online for free so that they may be shared on social media or printed out and wheat-pasted elsewhere. Pride Toronto has become an increasingly commercial space, therefore this free and interactive art project was a way to provide a non-transactional experience at Pride that was centered on community-building and remembering the radical history of Pride. One of the collective murals currently hangs at OCAD University.

DIY LOVE: Queer Knowledge & History Then, Now, and Forever

Curator, Xpace Cultural Centre, Toronto, ON
2017

An exhibition of live performance art by artists based in Toronto, Montreal, and New York City. Supported by funding from the Toronto Arts Council, this performance event welcomed the public to come together to form a critical and inclusive space for the development and demonstration of performance art. The 2017 exhibition included themes of surveillance, performing femininity, current economic realities in Toronto, and the contemporary art community in Montreal, among others.

Intra-Action II: Live Performance Art

Curator, Writer, and Researcher

Maya Wilson-Sanchez

Middlebrook Prize Badge 2020 Widescreen

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