NICO WILLIAMS

- NICO WILLIAMS -

Aamjiwnaang First Nation (Anishinaabe), 1989–

Nico Williams is currently living and working in Montréal. In 2021, he graduated with a Master of Fine Arts in Sculpture from Concordia University. Williams is renowned for his multidisciplinary practice, which centers on sculptural beadwork—hand‑woven glass‑bead sculptures often rendered in abstract geometric configurations or as hyper‑realistic representations of everyday objects, such as scratch tickets and grocery bags. Through this meticulous craft, Williams is bridging ancestral traditions with contemporary visual narratives.

Williams is deeply embedded in the Indigenous and arts communities of Montréal and Canada. He serves on the board of the Biennale d’art contemporain autochtone and participates in the Contemporary Geometric Beadwork research team. He has taught bead‑art workshops at notable institutions including MIT, NSCAD University, the McCord Stewart Museum, Carleton University, Crown‑Indigenous Relations and Northern Affairs Canada, and the University of Toronto.

Williams’s work is held in the permanent collections of several prominent institutions, including the Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal, the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Archives Nationales du Québec, and the Ojibwe Cultural Foundation. His beadwork is also part of corporate and governmental collections such as the Royal Bank of Canada Art Collection, the Hydro-Québec Art Collection, and the Indigenous Art Centre at Crown-Indigenous Relations and Northern Affairs Canada. In 2021, he was awarded the prestigious Claudine and Stephen Bronfman Fellowship in Contemporary Art. His work has been shown internationally and across Canada, including at the Art Gallery of Hamilton (2023), the MacKenzie Art Gallery (2022), Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal (2021), Musée des beaux-arts Montréal (2019), PHI Foundation for Contemporary Art (2023), and the recent group exhibition, Indian Theater: Native Performance, Art, and Self-Determination since 1969, at the Hessel Museum of Art.