Mustafa, Cindy Lee and more: The Canadians who made their mark in the arts world in 2024 | Canada Voices

Canadian Filmmakers of the Year: Denis Villeneuve and Pascal Plante (tie)

The Canadian film industry might be in a state of perpetual crisis – there are almost too many calamities to choose from this year, but let’s go with C-11 and the uncertain state of Telefilm funding, for starters – and yet our best and brightest directors continue to break boundaries at home and abroad. Especially if those filmmakers happen to be from Quebec. With his magnificent, somewhat-improbable sequel, Dune: Part Two, Denis Villeneuve has now ascended the mountains of the film industry to breathe the rarified air of true Hollywood titans. At this point, it is really just Villeneuve, fellow Canadian James Cameron and Christopher Nolan who can lay claim to being the true kings of the blockbuster world – their names alone are enough to draw rabid fandoms and critical appetite-whetting, no matter the actual stories they are telling. And unlike, say, fellow Canadian filmmaker Shawn Levy – the man behind the year’s most financially successful but artistically soulless endeavour, Deadpool & Wolverine – Villeneuve has never forgotten where he has come from, and who might be coming after him. There is simply no stronger or more committed advocate for Canadian cinema – and the systems that make such art possible – than Villeneuve. Speaking of the next generation: Villeneuve’s younger but no less fiercely talented Québécois colleague Pascal Plante accomplished a feat this year greater than even imagining the desert plains of Arrakis: He managed to get American moviegoers to care about French-language Canadian cinema. Slowly but surely, Plante’s razor-sharp serial-killer thriller Red Rooms, which got only a flicker of attention during its brief English-Canadian release in 2023, has become the most talked-about movie in the most influential corners of U.S. film circles. Seek Red Rooms out before Plante inevitably gets lured by Americans to make his own Dune-sized tentpole. Barry Hertz

Celine Dion is our 2024 artist of the year

Canadian Actress of the Year: Deragh Campbell

There is brave, and then there is Deragh Campbell brave. The most fearless performer of her generation, Campbell possesses a determined and unparalleled desire to claw under the skin of her characters, evaporating the line between fabrication and fact to a wisp of thin air. And 2024 proved to be her breakout year – if we can just get Canadian moviegoers to actually pay attention to what’s going on inside our own borders, that is. So here’s the top tip of the year that will make you feel better once Campbell breaks out even further: Keep your eyes out for two of this past fall’s big Canadian film-fest premieres: Kazik Radwanski’s romantic dramedy Matt and Mara, and Sofia Bohdanowicz’s Measures for a Funeral. Each film requires a wildly different tenor from its star – Radwanski needs Campbell to be wry and stirring as she cozies up to an old boyfriend, while Bohdanowicz forces her star into far more haunted and uncomfortable corners as an academic uncovering forgotten history. Yet the actress takes to both challenges – each directed by familiar collaborators whose filmographies have evolved in lockstep with Campbell’s – as if they were the most natural of journeys. Watching her figure out her place on-screen, not just in her 2024 films (which also included the underseen and unsettling drama Family Portrait from New York director Lucy Kerr), but over the course of her career, is akin to watching a cinematic high-wire act. Her work is a series of wonderfully constructed, audacious dares. Don’t dare turn away, or you’ll risk missing something astonishing. Barry Hertz

Money-wrangler of the year: Alex Sarian

The postlockdown world has thrust arts organizations into difficult, compounding financial circumstances. Costs are going up, people are spending less at the box office, government grants are stagnating and both philanthropists and corporate sponsors have started putting their money elsewhere.

Alex Sarian, the president and chief executive officer of Calgary’s Arts Commons performing- and visual-arts complex, is not only an optimist who spends his spare time trying to combat all these problems – he’s proven that with the right effort, you can find transformative amounts of money. In June, Sarian revealed that he’d secured a $75-million donation from oil field waste-treatment industry giant Dave Werklund and his family to help transform Arts Commons. It’ll soon be renamed the Werklund Centre.

The CEO did it by getting to know Werklund, and recognizing that his commitment to community and education fit nicely with expanding Calgarians’ access both to culture and to learning about it. The gift brought Arts Commons to 76 per cent of its $660-million goal for the project – itself one of the country’s most financially ambitious arts-infrastructure endeavours ever. The transformation will see its existing facility upgraded, a new building added and the neighbouring outdoor Olympic Plaza redesigned. Josh O’Kane

Confronter of the year: Mustafa

“Toronto is full of horrors,” Mustafa Ahmed told The Globe earlier this year, “but it’s steeped in nostalgia.” His identity has been intertwined with the city since he first came to prominence as a preteen poet in 2009, yet he has minced few words about the place since recently leaving for Los Angeles. Recognizing the whole of his relationship with Toronto means reckoning with conflict. It is the city, he said, in which his family faced hostility from the health care system and the police; it is also the place where he “first discovered music, truth and heartbreak.”

The Sudanese-Canadian artist released his debut full-length album, Dunya, in September, after expanding from poetry to song while embracing these kinds of conflicts, internal and external. He served on the Prime Minister’s Youth Council shortly after Justin Trudeau took office, but confronted him last year about Israel’s war with Hamas, asking him to “defy this active genocide and imprisonment that is levelling Gaza.”

Dunya’s title can be roughly translated from Arabic into “the world and all its flaws.” Flaws are unhelpful if ignored or treated as erroneous or malicious; they can be conversation starters if they’re instead interpreted with humanity and nuance. Dunya embraces the latter interpretation of flaws, and of conflict. There are hard truths in life worth acknowledging. “There’s nowhere I can go,” he sings in Leaving Toronto, “that has enough room to let me bring my hood.” Josh O’Kane

Systems-of-distribution disruptor of the year: Cindy Lee

We’re nearly a decade removed from the era when artists such as Beyoncé and Frank Ocean could cause fan uproars by limiting the services through which they put out albums. These days, the most-talked-about artists usually release albums across as many platforms as possible. Unless you’re Cindy Lee.

Lee, the musical project and drag persona of Patrick Flegel – formerly of the critically acclaimed Calgary band Women – released the album Diamond Jubilee in March with as little planned promotion as possible. It was first made available only on YouTube and a nineties-looking GeoCities-esque website. Across 32 tracks cast in a gauzy, AM radio haze, Lee takes listeners through worlds of jangle, groove and dirge. And in the days that followed, Diamond Jubilee gradually set the indie-music and critical worlds ablaze.

The hype that followed was remarkable: widespread acclaim, including the highest score that music website Pitchfork has issued in years and the top spot on numerous album-of-the-year lists, plus a sold-out 27-day tour. This response, however, was antithetical to the album’s quiet release strategy; the hype was perhaps too enormous. Lee wound up cancelling the tour partway through. While fans hope that all is well for Lee, and for continued music under the moniker, the story of Diamond Jubilee is a powerful one. In the era of algorithmic mediation, you can still make art for art’s sake. Josh O’Kane

Trendsetter of the year: Wanda Nanibush

In November, 2023, word got around that Wanda Nanibush had left the Art Gallery of Ontario – in a political controversy that proved to be a bellwether for the Canadian arts scene in 2024.

Nanibush was the gallery’s respected Indigenous curator, co-head of its Canadian and Indigenous department with Georgiana Uhlyarik, with whom she wrote an award-winning book, Moving the Museum. She was also outspoken in her political beliefs, had previously drawn comparisons between Indigenous experience and Palestinians in the Middle East and had been posting on social media in the aftermath of the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel and the war in Gaza. Sources told The Globe that her statements, on several topics including Palestinian causes, had rankled with some staff and gallery supporters, and that the Israel-Hamas war had brought the situation to a head.

In a memo to staff, AGO director Stephan Jost said her departure was a mutual decision to give her freedom to express her views. Nanibush herself made no comment and deleted her social-media posts but Indigenous leaders and cultural workers complained loudly on her behalf.

In 2023, this controversy felt like a reckoning for museums as they try to integrate radical change-makers into venerable institutions. But by 2024, it became clear that Nanibush’s case was also typical of the divisions tearing the whole community apart as it argued over the Israel-Hamas war and people’s right to express themselves in cultural forums. Artists on both sides of the debate allege they have been censored or lost work because of their political views.

A year after Nanibush left, the Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery at Concordia University parted company with its newly appointed director Pip Day, apparently in a similar dispute. (A gallery representative confirmed Day’s departure but otherwise declined to comment on a personnel matter.) Hers was just the latest name in a long list of resignations, event cancellations, boycotts and protests that disrupted the Canadian arts community through 2024. Kate Taylor

Roots-rock Renaissance man of the year: Tom Wilson

Ten years ago, Hamilton-based singer-songwriter Tom Wilson told The Globe and Mail that being a mid-level, middle-aged artist was like being in a bar fight: “You pick up whatever you have to in the moment to stay alive.” He’s still alive, and he’s still picking up things (pens, paint brushes, honorary degrees etc.). There was a time in his life when all he was picking up were guitars, dry-wall jobs and bad habits.

In 2023, he was appointed a Companion of the Order of Canada, for his “multifaceted contributions to the arts in Canada” and his “advocacy of Indigenous communities in Canada.” Two months ago, he was awarded an honorary degree from McMaster University’s faculty of humanities, which cited him as being “part of Canadian artistic lore.”

This spring, his musical, Beautiful Scars, written with Shaun Smyth and based on Wilson’s 2017 memoir of the same name, premiered at Hamilton’s Theatre Aquarius. The story is about Wilson’s late-in-life discovery of his hidden Mohawk heritage. The musical was reviewed in The Globe as a big-hearted crowd-pleaser that educated on cultural identity and unsettled psyches.

Not only did Wilson’s eye-popping artwork serve as a big part of the play’s staging, an exhibit of his pieces ran concurrently at Beckett Fine Art in Hamilton. Last month, his decolonial painting We Will Not Be Destroyed was mounted at the McMichael Canadian Art Collection.

Wilson is one-third of the roots-rock trio Blackie and the Rodeo Kings, but this month he revived his 1990s rock group Junkhouse for a pair of reunion shows at Toronto’s Horseshoe Tavern. He sang the hit tune Shine: “It’s just a matter of time before we get to shine/ It’s not a question of when, or who does the crime.” It’s a damn good song. Brad Wheeler

Choreographers of the year: Rick and Jeff Kuperman

The Kuperman brothers experienced twin successes in 2024 – choreographing two shows in New York still in open-ended runs.

In June, The Outsiders, a Broadway musical adaptation of the 1967 coming-of-age novel by S.E. Hinton that the pair choreographed, walked away with the Tony Award for Best Musical.

Then in August, Life and Trust, an immersive spectacle inspired by the Faust legend that the Canadian brothers co-directed and choreographed, opened over six floors of a skyscraper in Manhattan’s Financial District – and quickly developed a rabid fan base.

Rick, 35, and Jeff, 34 – the two aren’t twins; they are 13 months apart in age – were born in North York, Ont., and grew up in Thornhill, Ont. As boys, the Kupermans first began exploring the world of bodily movement in gymnastics, then took up dance, before ultimately adding martial arts to their arsenal.

The mix of art and athleticism of their aesthetic was apparent in the Tony Award telecast performance of The Outsiders, which features some of the most original choreography for rival gangs facing off since West Side Story. (The two were nominated for best choreography.)

Their ambition and work ethic was evident in Life and Trust – a sprawling piece featuring 30 characters for whom they had to devise about 1,000 minutes of original material.

The two are now looking to lead creative teams from the ground up, but still plan to work together. Says Jeff: “It’s a chaotic and unpredictable industry so it’s nice to have a partner you can depend upon as family.” J. Kelly Nestruck

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