Sandra Brewster

Sandra Brewster (b. 1973, Toronto, Canada) is a Canadian artist based in Toronto whose multidisciplinary practice explores identity, memory, movement, and the experiences of the Caribbean diaspora. A child of Guyanese parents, Brewster considers how histories and identities are carried and transformed across generations, geographies, and time. She holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from York University and a Master of Visual Studies from the University of Toronto.

Working across photography, drawing, painting, video, and mixed media, Brewster centres Black and Caribbean diasporic life, exploring its complexity alongside ideas of joy, optimism, belonging, and place. Central to her practice is a distinctive gel transfer technique, through which photographic imagery is materially transformed, recontextualised, and transferred onto new surfaces. This process leaves behind abrasions, gaps, and other material traces, disrupting and reimagining the photographic image to create a space where memory, identity, and culture can shift and accumulate through movement and migration.

Brewster’s work has been presented in major institutional exhibitions, including Alliance, Infinity, Love – in the Face of the Other at Deichtorhallen Hamburg (2026); Sandra Brewster: FISH at the McMichael Canadian Art Collection (2025–26); Imagining Black Diasporas: 21st-Century Art and Poetics at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2024–25); By Way of Communion: DENSE and A Place to Put Your Things at The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery (2022); and Sandra Brewster: Blur at the Art Gallery of Ontario (2019). Her work has also been presented at Les Rencontres de la Photographie d’Arles (2022), the Havana Biennial (2019), and LagosPhoto Festival (2018).

In 2026, Brewster’s work was presented by Southern Guild at Frieze Los Angeles and Frieze New York, with her monumental photo-based installation Make Trouble (2024) selected for The Armory Show’s curated Platform section in September. Originally commissioned for the 2024 Toronto Biennial of Art, Make Trouble extends Brewster’s longstanding inquiry into memory, place, and diasporic identity through personal childhood photographs and her gel transfer process.

Brewster was a finalist for the 2025 Sobey Art Award, with her work exhibited at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa. She is the recipient of the Canada Council for the Arts’ Photography Prize (2024), the Paul de Hueck and Norman Walford Career Achievement Award (2024), the Toronto Friends of the Visual Arts Artist Prize (2018), and the Gattuso Prize for Outstanding Exhibition at CONTACT Photography Festival (2017).

Her work is held in major public collections including the Art Gallery of Ontario, Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, McMichael Canadian Art Collection, and Agnes Etherington Art Centre.