Vancouver artist Stan Douglas wins $100K Audain Prize

A Vancouver artist known for his photo, film and video installations that examine social reality and history was awarded the Audain Prize on Monday night.

Stan Douglas, 58, was given the $100,000 cash prize before a packed ballroom at the Vancouver Club. 

"The award raises the profile of visual art in the city, which has not always had the highest profile, even though we have really extraordinary artists who live and work here," Douglas told the crowd, calling the award "a great honour."

"The best is yet to come."

Douglas was born in Vancouver and studied at Emily Carr University. One of his most celebrated pieces sits in the city's historic Woodward's building, a 15-metre photo mural depicting the Gastown Riot on Aug. 7, 1971.

"His ongoing inquiry into technology's role in image-making, and how those mediations infiltrate and shape collective memory, has resulted in works that are at once specific in their historical and cultural references and broadly accessible," reads an online biography.

Michael Audain, founder of the Audain Art Museum, which administers the prize, called Douglas one of the world's leading contemporary artists.

"I think we should be proud throughout the province of these cultural heroes," said Audain in an interview Tuesday morning on CBC's The Early Edition.

The Audain Foundation also announced Monday the funding of five travel awards worth $7,500 each for students in university-level visual arts programs in B.C.

The foundation said it has issued more than $120 million in grants since it was established in 1997 to support the visual arts, mainly in B.C.

It said the foundation now includes grants for wildlife conservation, with a special emphasis on grizzly bears.

The Audain Prize is one of three annual, six-figure Canadian cash arts awards, the other two being the Giller Prize, celebrating excellence in Canadian fiction, and the Sobey Art Award for a contemporary Canadian artist under the age of 40.