Nico Williams
Nadia's Ticket, 2025, 11/0 Japanese Glass Cylinder Beads, thermally-fused/braided polyethylene thread, 3” x 6”. Photo Credit: Paul Litherland. Courtesy of Nico Williams Studio
Artist statement
Using the bright, tactile materiality and relational nature of beadwork, my practice looks at the ways we live through connections with objects, place, and language. Often in collaboration and community with others, I make sculptures that are sometimes highly patterned abstract geometric forms, sometimes sparkling representations of familiar objects, and always hand-woven from hundreds of glass beads. In their making, these sculptures become points of relation between the multiple hands that wove them as well as the cultural lenses through which different audiences access them.
I choose to work with forms and objects that, like beadwork, have an overt—if often overlooked—relationship to gratitude, exchange and commerce, land, and the shaping, and morphing ability of language. Sculptural geometries are a meeting point for technologies, stories, and lineages of knowledge. Translating everyday, accessible objects into beadwork re-presents regular things from our daily lives to reattune us to their attraction and code-switching, overlapping, shifting resonances across cultural contexts and modes of identity. This deep layering of held meaning about the connectivity of the past and present, cross-cultural interweaving, and both the harshness and beauty of our current reality shapes and motivates my practice.
Sealed plastic DNA testing kit, 2025. 10/0 Czech Glass Beads, blue stabilizing fluid, saliva collection tube, thermally-fused/braided polyethylene thread. 15 x 9.5 cm x .03 cm. Photo Credit: Paul Litherland. Courtesy of Nico Williams Studio
Rez Taxi, 2025. 11/0 Japanese Glass Cylinder Beads, thermally-fused/braided polyethylene thread | Perles en verre cylindriques japonaises 11/0, fil en polyéthylène thermocollé/entrelacé. 2.5” x 5”. Photo Credit: Paul Litherland. Courtesy of Nico Williams Studio
Artist’s biography
Nico Williams, ᐅᑌᒥᐣ (b. 1989) is a member of Aamjiwnaang First Nation (Anishinaabe), currently living and working in Tiohtià:ke/Montréal. In 2021, he graduated with a Master of Fine Arts in Sculpture from Concordia University. He has a multidisciplinary and, often collaborative, practice that is centred around sculptural beadwork. Williams is active within the urban Indigenous Montréal Arts community and a member of the Contemporary Geometric Beadwork research team. He has taught workshops at The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the McCord Stewart Museum, Crown-Indigenous Relations and Northern Affairs Canada, and the University of Toronto.
In 2024, he was awarded the prestigious Sobey Art Award, as well as the Claudine and Stephen Bronfman Fellowship in Contemporary Art in 2021. His work has been shown internationally and across Canada, including at the Art Gallery of Hamilton (2023), the MacKenzie Art Gallery (2022), Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal (2021), Musée des beaux-arts Montréal (2019), PHI Foundation for Contemporary Art (2023), and the recent group exhibition, Indian Theater: Native Performance, Art, and Self-Determination since 1969, at the Hessel Museum of Art.
Williams’ practice has been featured by National Geographic (2018) and CBC (2021) and is housed in prominent public collections, including Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal, Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, The Art Gallery of Ontario, Archives Nationales du Québec, the Ojibwe Cultural Foundation, and the Royal Bank of Canada Art Collection. His first public sculpture, Monument to the Brave, was commissioned in 2020 by the Sick Kids Foundation.
His work has been supported by the Canada Council, Conseil des arts de Montréal, Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec Impetus Grant, The Ontario Arts Council and the Fluevog Artist Grant.
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