NorQuest Executive Offices

Kiona Callihoo Ligtvoet

Kiona Callihoo Ligtvoet (she/her) is a multidisciplinary artist practicing in amiskwaciwâskahikan on Treaty 6 Territory. She grew up West of the city near the hamlet of Calahoo where she lived with her relatives on scrip land. Her family lines are Cree and Métis descending from Michel First Nation, as well as Dutch and mixed European.

Kiona works in painting, printmaking, drawing and installation, recollecting personal stories of grief and tenderness. Her practice uses a non-linear telling of her memories through narrative work as a form of diaristic archiving. It draws from feelings of loss and enfranchisement, but also from deep belly laughter, mundane gestures, and a gentle fondness for where the histories between herself and her family overlap and disperse.

Kiona has had solo exhibitions at The New Gallery, Calgary, AB; Harcourt House, Edmonton, AB; and Latitude 53, Edmonton, AB. Her work has been featured in group exhibitions at Ociciwan Contemporary Art Centre, Edmonton, AB; Khyber Art Centre, Halifax, NS; Neutral Ground, Regina, SK; and Bowling Green State University, Bowling Green, OH. She co-curated these bodies heal slowly and in our own time (2023-24) and the soil between plants (2022) with Making Space, and What’s Held through TREX and the Art Gallery of Grande Prairie (2022).

Kiona was a recipient of the Lieutenant Governor Emerging Artist Award (2022) and The Queen’s Platinum Jubilee Medal (2023). Her debut graphic novel with Conundrum Press, We Were Younger Once (2022), was a nominee for the The Doug Wright Award for emerging talent, and she is working on her second graphic novel to be released by Emanata Press in 2027.

Sadia Fakih

Sadia Fakih’s colourful and intricately detailed collage-drawings explore cultural hybridity, displacement, intersectionality, and the Surreal. Semi-autobiographical, her pieces delve into the idea of an alter-ego and of personal mythology building, expressing her place (or displacement) as a south-asian feminine in the West. She explores the transitional spaces that erupt when imposing identities collide.

Fakih’s parents immigrated to Canada from Karachi, Pakistan in the mid 1970s. She was born in Nova Scotia and grew up in Ontario. She went on to complete her BFA at the Alberta University of the Arts in 2017 and her MFA in Fine Arts at the School of Visual Arts in New York City in 2019. Upon the completion of her MFA she was selected for the Paula Rhodes Memorial Award for Exceptional Artistic Achievement. Her work has been included in exhibitions at Tiger Strikes Asteroid (New York), the School of Visual Arts Flat Iron Gallery and Nuit Blanche (Toronto). She recently was an Artist-in-Residence (2D) at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity. Her work is included in the collection of the Alberta Foundation for the Arts and Global Affairs Canada.

Fakih is represented by VivianeArt, Calgary.

Lauren Crazybull

Lauren Crazybull is a Niitsítapi (Member of Kainai First Nation), Dené artist currently living in Vancouver, BC. In her work, Lauren considers Indigenous presence and multiplicity through paintings, creating worlds where honest portrayals trespass onto romantic representations of Indigeneity. Working primarily in portraiture, a long-standing genre that is often embedded with an imbalance of power between the artist/viewer and sitter, Crazybull seeks to examine the relationship between herself as an artist and the individuals she paints. Through this ongoing work, Lauren uses her practice as a way to assert her own humanity, and advocate, in diverse and subtle ways, for the innate intellectual, spiritual, creative and political fortitude of Indigenous peoples.

Lauren won the 2020 Eldon + Anne Foote Edmonton Visual Arts Prize and the 2020 Lieutenant Governors Emerging Artist Award. She was shortlisted for the Kingston Portrait Prize in 2019 and the Salt Spring National Art Prize in 2021. In 2019, she was selected as the inaugural Artist in Residence for Alberta, and her work TSIMA KOHTOTSITAPIIHPA Where are you from? is in the permanent collection of the Edmonton Public Library on permanent display at the Stanley A. Milner library.

Elsa Robinson

Elsa Robinson is a multidisciplinary artist and art instructor based in amiskwacîwâskahikan (Edmonton). Through careful attention to colour, shape, texture, intuition and the power of cultural symbols, Robinson expresses themes of love, friendship, inner strength, equality and ancestral connection that guide her own life.

Her art is informed by personal experience, the histories of her people and by Black Feminism, Afrofuturism and Afro-Surrealism, all of which are movements for the liberation of all people from all forms of oppression. In her work, she combines concepts from her cultural heritages as a Jamaican of primarily African heritage and as a Canadian of Jamaican heritage. Bringing all these cultural influences to bear in her work is a way of honouring both her ‘homes’, all her Ancestors and all her Relations.

After working as a self-taught artist, Elsa earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in Art and Design from the University of Alberta and a Master of Fine Arts degree from Vermont College of Fine Art. Elsa received the National Black Coalition of Canada 2012 Fill Fraser Award for Outstanding Work in Visual Arts. She was shortlisted for the 2022 Eldon and Anne Foote Edmonton Visual Arts Prize and received the 2022 Queen Elizabeth II Platinum Jubilee Medal.

If you would like more information about a particular artist or works available,

please get in touch with michelle@mdsart.ca.

Kiona Callihoo Ligtvoet

Sadia Fakih

Lauren Crazybull

Elsa Robinson

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