Made you look From tiny beads to sweeping statements, 2025’s art exhibitions had an impact By: Jen Zoratti Posted: 4:00 PM CST Monday, Dec. 29, 2025 Last Modified: 7:53 PM CST Monday, Dec. 29, 2025 Updates

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This article was published 29/12/2025 (288 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Winnipeg’s art galleries, large and small, played host to a ton of exciting, groundbreaking and thought-provoking exhibitions this year.

Here, in no particular order, are five exhibitions that turned our heads in 2025.

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■ Landfear, Aceartinc.

This striking solo exhibition by Winnipeg-based Métis beadwork artist Vi Houssin, curated by Julia Lafreniere with assistance from Michael Miteku, was proof that even the smallest medium — here, glass seed beads — can pack the biggest punch.

Some of Houssin’s featured works depicted visceral scenes of nature, such as Strange Mercy, of a bloodied polar bear and its kill, and Muzzle Grab, of two canines, jaws intertwined. One of the most evocative pieces was Lot’s Wife, inspired by the Bible story about the nameless woman turned into a pillar of salt. It’s a floral motif that begins in vivid colour and slowly turns white, as though bleached by the sun. Still there, but forever changed.

■ Theatre of War, 226 Main Street Gallery

Nigerian-born, Winnipeg-based visual artist Habeeb Andu used powerful, large-scale mixed-media works in this solo show — his first in Canada — to highlight an ongoing crisis in his home country: the mass kidnapping of school children.

Andu’s large canvases evoked classroom blackboards. Some of them had bullet holes, others red paint that looks like blood. But it was Andu’s inventive use of spent bullet casings — piles of them, littered all over the gallery floor — that really brought home reality for the viewer.

■ Crying Over Spilt Tea, Winnipeg Art Gallery-Qaumajuq

Curated by Grace Braniff, assistant curator of art at WAG-Qaumajuq, this exhibition was inspired by two idioms: “spill the tea,” a phrase from Black drag culture that refers to the subversive sharing of gossip, and “no use crying over spilled milk,” about the powerlessness to change what has happened.

The show, which features works from WAG-Qaumajuq’s permanent collection, itself is also subversive. Immediately upon entering the gallery space, you are confronted by a massive wall of bone-china teaware, most of it from the United Kingdom. On the other side of the wall is Hunkpapa Lakota filmmaker/photographer/performance artist Dana Claxton’s Buffalo Bone China, a 1997 video/found-object installation, the centrepiece of which is a pile of smashed bone-china teaware on the floor. This exhibition is on view into 2026.

■ Things Left Unsaid, Gallery 1C03, University of Winnipeg

The large-scale, brightly coloured oil and acrylic paintings in Ottawa-born, Winnipeg-based Bria Fernandes’s solo show, curated by Jennifer Gibson, explore feelings and thoughts of self-doubt, anxiety, grief and displacement. Here, the internal is made external, those thoughts and feelings depicted as physical visitors intruding on the daily rhythms of life.

When Fernandes was starting out, she was inspired by the bizarre imagery of artists such as Salvador Dalí before becoming interested in Renaissance figurative painting of angels and the celestial. Eventually, she combined the two, which showed up most vividly in her 2025 piece, Step Aside, Splash, in which a woman reclining in a bath (not unlike a Renaissance Venus) is interrupted by surrealist people and animals, including a lizard-tongued blue dog.

■ Homage/I Contain Multitudes, School of Art Gallery, University of Manitoba

Toronto interdisciplinary artist Jon Sasaki made the visible invisible in this dual show.

For Homage, he swabbed the palettes and brushes used by Tom Thomson and members of the Group of Seven, left the microbial cultures to bloom in petri dishes, then photographed the results and blew them up. For I Contain Multitudes he used an endoscopic camera to explore the insides of trees in places significant to Group of Seven artist and former School of Art director Lionel LeMoine FitzGerald, including his former Winnipeg residence and the U of M campus.

The resulting works are different kinds of landscapes that possibly contain DNA from the Group of Seven, or feature the tiny ecosystems in the trees FitzGerald may have painted.

“It’s equally likely that the microbes are just from this community of people that have cared for these objects and this history,” Sasaki told the Free Press. “So it’s kind of like a group portrait as well.”

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