About the CIBC C² Art Program

About the program

CIBC is proud to present the C² Art Program (C² Art), a Canadian national art competition. Each year, we'll award 2 early-career artists with the opportunity and funding to create a body of work. The 2 artists’ work will be displayed in a solo exhibition inside our global headquarters, CIBC Square South Tower at 81 Bay Street, Toronto, Ontario.

C² Art assists emerging Canadian artists seeking financial support and exhibition opportunities to help launch their practice. By empowering artists, we enrich the cultural landscape, support the diversity of Canada and encourage new ideas and ways of thinking.

A selection committee including members of CIBC and the art community will select 2 artists based on the quality of their submissions.

We'll award each of the 2 artists $25,000, paid out over Phase 1 and Phase 2 — a period of 6 months. Each artist will create a body of work and curate it in a solo exhibition in one of the gallery spaces at CIBC Square. The CIBC art team will collaborate with each artist throughout this process, funding all exhibition materials including framing, plinths, shipping and installation.

The selected artists will also be invited on an all-expenses paid trip to Toronto to attend an exhibition opening reception at CIBC Square.

The exhibitions will be on display at CIBC Square for 4 months, in a space open to clients, visitors and employees. All works will be returned to artists at the end of the exhibition period.

For more information about the artwork, contact mailbox.c2art@cibc.com Opens your email app.

Video: 2025 CIBC C² Art Program — Delali Cofie and Natia Lemay (02:34)

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2025 recipients

Delali Cofie

Delali Cofie is a photographer and visual artist of Ghanaian-Nigerian heritage based in Toronto, Canada. Merging photography and material forms such as textiles in his storytelling, his personal work presents subtle beauty whilst exploring themes of self-formation and the process of becoming.

…The Candle Whispered Them Here

This exhibition asks two questions; where do oral histories go? And what if stories had a place to stay? It imagines the practice of storytelling as a ritual through which the trail of words shared within a home find their way into household objects that store them. Presented are five stories from Ghanaian culture that found their way into such objects. Historically, presentations of artwork in this form was often labelled as folk art, due to its decorative nature. Understanding that this practice was a form of mark making, it reimagines folk art as hosts of folklore.

Natia Lemay

Natia Lemay is an interdisciplinary artist raised in Winnipeg and based in Toronto. Her autoethnographic practice draws on personal stories to explore how the mind, body, and space interact, reflecting on lived experience as a lens to understand broader cultural and social contexts.

What the Edge Knows

Black is the first to arrive and the last to leave, moving through these works as a witness and connective thread. In this exhibition, Black is not absence but living presence, a reservoir of histories, geographies, and encounters. It is revealed through the contours it gives to light, form, and matter, and shaped by its encounters with bodies, objects and environments. Black absorbs and reflects, obscures and reveals, holding fragments without fixing them as it flows between image and object, weight and light, time and touch.

2025 Finalists

Cindy Hill
Destinie Adelakun
Edward Fu Chen Juan
Ehiko Odeh
Ernesto Cabral de Luna
Kimberly Orjuela
Par Nair
Tina Lam

2025 Selection Committee

Jason Baerg, Cree Metis visual artist, media producer and educator
Alex Bowron, Writer and Curator
Karen Carter, Director Museums and Heritage Services for City of Toronto and Curator/Founder of BAND (Black Artists Network in Dialogue)
Sarah Milroy, Executive Director and Chief Curator at McMichael Canadian Art Collection

2024 recipients

Laura Hudspith

Laura Hudspith is a Toronto-based interdisciplinary artist who works in sculpture, installation, photography and text. Hudspith holds a BFA from Concordia University and an MFA from Carnegie Mellon University. Her work is supported by several arts councils and foundations, and she has participated in numerous residences in Canada and the United States.

Internal Circumstances

Internal Circumstances is an exhibition of works in stained glass and copper, that brings together the enduring knowledges and agential forces held within the more-than-human world and at our core. In practicing forest-walking meditation as a form of healing, Hudspith encounters an intuitive knowledge and wisdom present in the earth and vegetation; patterns left by insects in the wood of fallen trees are reminiscent of an unknowable language, and the presence of the shape-shifting wild woman archetype in her maiden, mother and crone aspects. These encounters offer opportunities of healing and insights that deepen self-knowledge and connection. Hudspith harnesses these forces for healing and growth, creating meditative installations for inward-looking and deep feeling.

Roda Medhat

Roda Medhat is a Kurdish-born, Toronto-based artist specializing in public art and sculpture. He holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from OCAD University and studied film production at FAMU in Prague. In 2023, Medhat won the 401 Richmond Career Launcher Prize.

Serdem

“Serdem” can mean “time,” “the time of,” or represent an urgency in time. The word signifies not only the passage of time, but also reconnection and the urgency of preserving personal and collective heritage. In journeying back to his home country of Kurdistan for the first time in 15 years, Roda collected an array of sources in the form of 3D renderings, motifs, designs and patterns drawn from the objects he encountered. This exhibition features a series of works that weave together a personal history with broader cultural narratives, utilizing traditional and contemporary methods of production, fabrication and archiving. In the intersection of the material, a dialogue opens between past and present, offering a place to explore the intersections between materiality and cultural heritage.

2024 Finalists

Aaron Jones
Alex Sutcliffe
Andrew Harding
Charisma Panchapakesan
Emma Welch
Nicolas Zirk
Phuong Nguyen
Yaw Tony

2024 Selection Committee

Hugues Charbonneau, Director, Galerie Hugues Charbonneau, Montreal
Jason Lujan, Artist, Assistant Professor at OCADU Faculty of Art
Noor Alé, Curator, Art Historian and Writer
Dr. Jay Smith, Senior Portfolio Manager, CIBC Wood Gundy

2023 recipients

Maya Skarzenski

Maya Skarzenski is an interdisciplinary artist, curator, and designer based in Toronto, Canada. She earned her BFA in Drawing and Painting from OCAD University, where she was awarded the Mrs. W. O. Forsyth Award. Her work has been featured in galleries and conferences across Canada, both through juried and solo exhibitions. She currently spends her time working as a UX Designer; doing arts programming with her collective, Long Winter Toronto; and developing her art practice further. Drawing from her diverse skills and domains, she creates projects that are compassionate and human-centered.

Crépuscule

Crépuscule describes the soft light the moment before the sun rises at dusk, and just after the sun sets at twilight. It’s a moment of anticipation, of before the beginning and after the end. This collection of soft sculptures, or “Wonks” takes us into the artist’s world of play and imagination, while reflecting her own journey of being at the crépuscule; not yet an ending and not yet a beginning, but a key moment in a cycle.

Mike Pszczonak

Mike Pszczonak received his MFA from Western University and his Bachelor of Arts from the University of Guelph. He currently teaches within the Fine Art Program at Fanshawe College in London, Ontario. He has received numerous grants and awards such as the Ontario Arts Council’s Emerging Artist Grant and a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Grant. His artwork is the collection of Museum London and private collections across North America. He is represented by Michael Gibson Gallery in London, Ontario.

No Thanks, I’m Just Looking

An innocent question posed by the artist’s young son has fueled a deep exploration into capturing the colour of the window in paint, light and colour. In this current body of work, Pszczonak expands the perspective out of the personal and into the worlds and lives of other people he has stumbled upon on social media. Here the artist and viewer become the Flâneur, the spectator who is at once embedded in the world yet removed from it.

2023 Finalists

Emma Welch
Luca Soldovieri
Raoul Olou
Julia Campisi
Serville Poblete
Michelle Paterok
Alyssa Scott

2023 Selection Committee

Kitty Scott, Independent Curator and Writer
Michael Massie, Artist, silversmith and metalworker, Member of the Order of Canada
Devan Patel, Co-Owner and Director at Patel Brown Gallery
Dr. Jay Smith, PH.D, CIM, FCSI, Senior Portfolio Manager, CIBC Wood Gundy

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Video: 2025 CIBC C2 Art Program — Delali Cofie and Natia Lemay (02:34)

2025 recipients

Delali Cofie

…The Candle Whispered Them Here

Natia Lemay

What the Edge Knows

2025 Finalists

2025 Selection Committee

2024 recipients

Laura Hudspith

Internal Circumstances

Roda Medhat

Serdem

2024 Finalists

2024 Selection Committee

2023 recipients

Maya Skarzenski

Crépuscule

Mike Pszczonak

No Thanks, I’m Just Looking

2023 Finalists

2023 Selection Committee

About the CIBC C² Art Program

Video: 2025 CIBC C² Art Program — Delali Cofie and Natia Lemay (02:34)