Nico Williams: Bingo

Ivey Galleries, Second Level

Bingo is the first major solo museum exhibition by Sobey Award-winning artist Nico Williams, bringing together a vibrant collection of large-scale beadwork and sculpture, and featuring a newly commissioned artwork specifically made for Museum London.

A member of Aamjiwnaang First Nation and an alumnus of London’s H.B. Beal Secondary School, Williams draws inspiration from everyday objects and pop culture imagery. From VHS tapes and grocery flyers to clothing, packaging, and lottery tickets, he transforms the familiar into something unexpected. His work challenges the traditional divide between art and craft, inviting visitors to reconsider the value and meaning we attach to both.

The exhibition takes inspiration from the game of bingo and the many ideas it evokes: chance, value, exchange, and community. Williams’s interest in bingo led him to explore the game’s history, which traces back to Renaissance-era Italy and unfolds alongside the history of glass bead production. These histories intersect with the practice of beadwork across Turtle Island, where Indigenous peoples incorporated Venetian glass beads–brought by settlers as bartering tools–into longstanding artistic and cultural practices. Through generations of knowledge-sharing from elders, beadwork traditions have endured and continue to evolve today.

Throughout Bingo, Williams connects these layered histories with contemporary life through humour, skill, and imagination. By exploring how objects, materials, and cultural traditions carry meaning, he opens up conversations about economics, circulation, cultural hierarchies, and disparity.

About the artist
Nico Williams, ᐅᑌᒥᐣ (b. 1989), is a member of Aamjiwnaang First Nation (Anishinaabe) and currently lives and works 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 is a member of the Contemporary Geometric Beadwork research team. He has led workshops at The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the McCord Stewart Museum, MOMA x AICH, and the University of Toronto. In 2021, he was awarded the Claudine and Stephen Bronfman Fellowship in Contemporary Art, and in 2024, he was the laureate of the prestigious Sobey Art Award, for which he was longlisted in 2022.

His work has been shown internationally and across Canada, including at the National Gallery of Canada (2024), the Art Gallery of Hamilton (2023), the MacKenzie Art Gallery (2022), the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal (2021), and the Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal (2019). He was part of the critically-lauded group exhibition Indian Theater: Native Performance, Art, and Self-Determination since 1969 at the Hessel Museum of Art. Williams’s works are housed in prominent public collections, including the Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal, the 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 work has been supported by the Canada Council for the Arts, the Conseil des arts de Montréal, the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Fluevog Artist Grant.

Nico Williams: Bingo is organized by PHI, Montréal, and presented in collaboration with Museum London.