- Application Deadline
Wednesday, April 30, 2025 at 12:00pm - September 2025 – August 2026
Call for submissions
Year-Long Mentorship Program, Sept 2025 – Sept 2026
with mentors Katherine Boyer, Jaimie Isaac, Helga Jakobson and Megan Krause
Application deadline: Wednesday, April 30, 2025 at noon
For women or gender-diverse visual artists based in or near Winnipeg
Free to apply; $300 fee for successful applicants
"This program challenged me in ways that fostered growth and self-confidence, allowing me to make mistakes and experiment. I’m fortunate to have built lasting relationships with my mentors and fellow mentees, and I’m excited to continue supporting and uplifting each other."
– Tess Ray Houston, 2023/24 FMP mentee
The Foundation Mentorship Program (FMP) is a professional training program designed to help women and non-binary, trans and Two-Spirit woman-identifying people in the visual arts develop skills and define their decision-making philosophies by providing information, resources and support. In this year-long professional training program, established artists (mentors) meet individually with their mentees for 4 hours per month to share their experience, expertise and advice. The entire FMP group meets for 3 hours each month for critiques, discussion, gallery visits and other activities, usually on a Sunday afternoon.
Applicants will be selected based on the quality and potential of the artwork submitted, the emerging artist’s willingness to dedicate time to the program, and the mentor’s ability to work with the emerging artist through a shared medium or conceptual interest. Mentors choose their mentees. If you have applied before and were unsuccessful, consider revisiting your application and the quality of your images and applying again. Note that demand for this program far outstrips available spaces. Sometimes the mentors agree that an artist’s work is excellent, but they do not feel that they have the specific skills or experience to help. Another year, another mentor might select you.
Potential mentees of all adult ages and backgrounds are encouraged to apply. Students are not eligible. There is no fee to apply, but successful applicants will be charged $300 for the program. If you would like to apply verbally or through an ASL interpreter, please contact Adriana at [email protected] and we can make accommodations. If finances would be a barrier to a successful application, partial bursaries and payment plans can be discussed.
To apply for the Foundation Mentorship Program, send a single PDF document labelled with your name and FMP (e.g., Sarah Wong FMP) containing:
- a letter outlining why you want to participate in this program and what you hope to achieve through mentorship, including a description of your art practice
- your contact information (phone, email and mailing address)
- an artist résumé (maximum 3 pages)
- up to 20 embedded images of your artwork, with an image list or captions giving the title of the work, medium, date completed and dimensions; or links to up to 3 minutes of video
Email your application to [email protected] with “FMP 2025” in the subject line.
The 2025 / 2026 Mentors
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Jaimie Isaac is a curator and interdisciplinary artist, an Anishinaabe member of Sagkeeng First Nation, and is of British heritage. She was the Chief Curator at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria from 2021 to 2023 and an advisor for 2023-2024. As the Curator of Contemporary and Indigenous Arts at the Winnipeg Art Gallery, 2015-2021, she was awarded the Canadian Museums Association’s Outstanding Achievement Award in the exhibitions category with the Boarder X exhibition. She is a co-director/co-founder of ROSEMARY Gallery/SKOOL, a roving project space. Through artistic, curatorial and collaborative projects, Jaimie engages in reconciliation, resistance, decolonization in art and in sport, Indigenous feminism, environmental justice, and language and cultural resurgence.
Jaimie Isaac with her public art installation, The Eighth and Final Fire, The Forks, Winnipeg, 2021
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Katherine Boyer (Métis/white Settler) is a multidisciplinary artist whose work is focussed on methods bound to textile arts and the handmade, primarily woodworking and beadwork. Boyer’s art and research encompass personal and family narratives, entwined with Métis history, material culture, queer theory and architectural spaces (human made and natural). Her work often explores boundaries between two opposing things as an effort to better understand sides of a perceived dichotomous identity. This manifests in long, slow and considerate laborious processes that attempt to unravel and better understand history, environmental influences and personal memories.
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Helga Jakobson is a transdisciplinary artist. In 2017, she received an MFA from AKV St. Joost (The Netherlands) and the Transdisciplinary New Media program at the Paris College of Art (France). She has exhibited and participated in residencies across Canada and Europe. She often works within the realm of new media, with a particular affinity for sound as medium. Lately her research has centred around the sixth mass extinction that we are living in, as well as how to live on a damaged Earth and how to make tangible the almost invisible and inaudible losses that are occurring all around us.
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Megan Krause is an abstract landscape painter. Thematically, her paintings contemplate conventional notions of progress, in a world where all things eventually come to an end. Through intuitive layering and editing, she depicts ways in which we shape and interact with our environment, from excavating and constructing to deconstructing and, with that, leaving traces of our presence behind. Combining quick gestural paint application with architectural elements, she gives her landscapes a broader dream-like familiarity. Her aim is to highlight the natural world as possessing character, one that is both whimsical and resilient.
