How do we cultivate the next generation of changemakers? What lessons can we learn from this country’s greatest visual artists? How do we creatively connect the past to thinking about the future? What role does art play in shaping the thought-leaders of tomorrow?
These questions were at the root of the Canadian Art Inspiration Student Challenge. In an unprecedented year the Art Canada Institute launched a creative challenge to reaffirm our mission: to inspire students from coast to coast with the work of this country’s artists and support its teachers in their heroic task of fostering our leaders to come.
We invited K–12 students to create works in connection to, and inspired by, Canadian art and art history. The resulting submissions revealed profoundly pan-Canadian and multicultural talent that bears witness to the incredible potential of art and its impact on young people.
We are honoured to share the work of this year’s winners with you. Their vision for the future of Canadian art is an inspiration to us all.
The 2023 Canadian Art Inspiration 
The 2022 Canadian Art Inspiration 
Autumn Tigers
Mastery in Metal
Through the Lens of C.D. Hoy
The Measure of Nature: 
Artist and Abolitionist
Shuvinai Ashoona: Mapping Worlds
Early Snow: Michael Snow 1947-1962
Harold Town: Art of Evolution
William Kurelek’s Art of Rapture and Reminiscence
Prudence Heward’s Modern Women
Paul-Émile Borduas’s Abstract Revolution
Norval Morrisseau’s Spiritual Vision
Alex Colville: An Everyday Order
Shared History: The Drawings of Pitseolak Ashoona
Personal, Local, and National: Greg Curnoe’s Vision
Art of Perception: Jack Chambers’s Inner Vision
Jock Macdonald: The Search for New Forms of Beauty
Zacharie Vincent’s Indigenous Legacy