Mayor's Arts Award for Public Art
2017 recipients
Bryan Newson
Honouree
Bryan Newson graduated from UBC in 1970 with a BA in literature and political science. In 1986, he joined City of Vancouver colleagues, artists and others in setting up the City's Public Art Program for Civic and Private Development, which was his privilege to lead until 2016.
Newson states that the best and most innovative parts of the public art program are all based on input from the many, many artists, curators, City Councillors and others whose collective efforts enable artists to make, in public, important cultural statements about the times and place in which we live.
Helen Reed and Hannah Jickling
Emerging artists
Helen Reed and Hannah Jickling have been collaborating since 2007. Their projects take shape as public installations, social situations and events that circulate as photographs, videos, printed matter, and artists’ multiples. They are currently fascinated with the “contact high” intrinsic to collaborative work, especially in their recent projects with children. Giant vegetable growers, orienteers and therian teens also feature in their work.
Since 2015, Reed and Jickling have been co-developing Big Rock Candy Mountain with the students, teachers and administrators at Queen Alexandra Elementary School in East Vancouver. Supported by Other Sights for Artists’ Projects, Big Rock Candy Mountain privileges a wide range of productive capacities and processes that expand traditional notions of public art. Reed and Jickling currently teach at the Emily Carr University of Art + Design in Vancouver, located within the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Tseil-Watuth and Squamish First Nations.
Instant Coffee is a service-oriented artist and curatorial collective based in Winnipeg and Vancouver. Since establishing in 2000, IC’s solo exhibitions have included UDT at the Art Gallery of Ontario; Take the Easy Way, MKG127, Toronto and The hero, the villain, the salesman, the parent, a side kick and a servant, Simon Fraser Art Gallery, Vancouver.
Al McWilliams is a graduate of the Vancouver School of Art where he studied sculpture. He has exhibited extensively throughout Canada, the US, and Europe. His work is in most major public collections in Canada and many private and corporate collections in North America and Europe.
Cedric Bomford works in Vancouver and Winnipeg, where he is an assistant professor at the University of Manitoba’s School of Art. His brother Nathan Bomford lives and works on Vancouver Island and received his master of fine arts degree from the University of Victoria in 2006.
Ken Lum grew up in East Vancouver and his public works in Vancouver include "Monument for East Vancouver", "Four Boats Stranded: Red and Yellow, Black and White", "A Tale of Two Children: A Work for Strathcona" and "from shangri-la to shangri-la". He has also completed public artworks in Toronto, Edmonton, St. Louis, New Orleans, Louisiana, St. Moritz, Vienna and Utrecht.
Rebecca Bayer is a Vancouver-based artist who examines the active relationships between people, material, and atmospheric surroundings. Bayer pursues these themes through art projects and proposals for urban public space in combination with her research and teaching interests. Her recent “Give & Take” project with the Burnaby Art Gallery was an experiment in the free exchange of one item for another.
Jerry Pethick (1935 – 2003) was born in London, Ontario and in 1957 moved to London, UK to study at the Chelsea College of Art and later at the Royal College of Art. In 1968 he moved to Ann Arbor and then San Francisco. In 1975 he moved permanently to Hornby Island, British Columbia, where he lived and worked until the end of his life.
Samuel Roy-Bois currently resides in Vancouver and hails from Quebec City. He acquired his Bachelor of Fine Arts from Université Laval in Quebec (1996) and a Masters of Fine Arts from Concordia University in Montréal (2001).
Barbara Cole is an artist, curator, educator, and curatorial consultant in public art. She is the founder and executive director of Other Sights for Artists' Projects, a non-profit society that collaborates and shares resources to present artworks that consider the aesthetic, economic, and regulatory conditions of public places and public life.
Norma is a collective of seven artists, currently based in Canada and Japan. The group has been producing performance and installation works—for gallery and public contexts—since 2003. Members of the collective are Vanessa Kwan, Diana Lopez-Soto, Christy Myiri, Josh Neelands, Pietro Sammarco, Erica Stocking, and Kara Uzelman.
George Norris has dedicated his life to serving the public good, advocating urban reform, and enhancing some of British Columbia’s most prominent public spaces with his artworks. 
Reece Terris is a Vancouver-based artist whose work alters the expected experiential qualities of a place or object through an amplification or shift in the primary function of an original design.
Alan Storey is a Vancouver artist working both locally and internationally. He studied visual arts at Okanagan College and received a BFA major in sculpture from the University of Victoria and has a 30-year history of creating site-specific public art.
Erica Stocking lives and works in Vancouver, where she received her BFA from Emily Carr University of Art and Design in 2004.