Tania Willard, BUSH Gallery and the New Secwépemc Art

Tania Willard is an "Indigenous Canadian multidisciplinary artist, graphic designer, and curator, known for mixing traditional Indigenous arts practices with contemporary ideas." She is from the Secwepemc nation of British Columbia's interior.

Her mediums include "oil and acrylic painting, printmaking, pen and ink drawing, watercolour, mixed media, and collage." She describes her practice in her own words: "Land-based art, community engaged practice, printmaking, painting are the mediums I most often work in."

BUSH Gallery, an experimental residency held on her Secwepemc land, is "a series of on-going gatherings of like-minded folks united under questions concerning art making, land, Indigenous art history." Rather than bringing Secwepemc art into the white cube, BUSH Gallery brings the questions of contemporary art onto Secwepemc land.

As a curator, Willard co-curated Beat Nation: Art, Hip Hop and Aboriginal Culture, which toured major Canadian cities, and co-organized #callresponse, a multifaceted project centring Indigenous women artists. She received a Hnatyshyn Foundation Award for Curatorial Excellence in Contemporary Art, and in 2026 was appointed Director of the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery at the University of British Columbia.

Her career links directly back to the traditions documented a century earlier by Teit and Boas: the same territory, the same questions about what art is for, now asked by a Secwepemc artist on her own terms.