Loan Stars: Beading Back our Manidoo
Installation view, Nico Williams: Bingo, 2025, PHI. Nico Williams, After Gallagher, 2025 © PHI, photo: document original
Nico Williams (Aamjiwnaang, Anishinaabek Nation) + Mishomis Uncollection
Featuring Adam Garnet Jones, Bobby Dues, Catherine Blackburn, Cedar Eve, David Charette, Elias Jade Not Afraid, Jean Marshall, Justine Gustafson, Keith Stonechild, Marcy Friesen, Mary Magiskan, Michael Beaumont, Maggie Thompson, Natalie Pelletier/Nenookaasi, Shannon Gustafson, Skye Paul, Spencer Lunham Jr., Stevi Riley, This Claw, and Wayne Robinson
Main Space
October 28–December 13, 2025
Opening reception: Saturday, October 25, 5pm
Union Gallery is excited to announce our Fall 2025 visiting artist, Nico Williams. Through Loan Stars, the Main Space is transformed into an homage to pawn shops, featuring sculptural beadwork and more. This exhibition and its programming are supported by the George Taylor Richardson Memorial Fund and the Inclusive Community Fund at Queen’s University.
PARALLEL PROGRAMMING
Beading Workshop with Nico Williams and Taylor Tye
Wednesday, October 22, 6pm, Kingston Native Centre & Language Nest
Supported by the Inclusive Community Fund of Queen’s University
Artist Talk
Thursday, October 23, 4:30pm, Dunning Hall, room 12, Queen’s University
Open to all
ARTIST STATEMENT
The 2008 economic crisis pushed millions into foreclosure, unemployment, and precarity. Pawn shops and loan houses became lifelines, while reality television shows like Hardcore Pawn—set in Detroit’s American Jewelry and Loan—and Pawn Stars transformed hardship into spectacle. For Indigenous communities, however, pawn shops have long carried another meaning: alternative systems of survival where exchange and trust make life possible. That cycle of giving, losing, and redeeming objects informs the title of this exhibition, Loan Stars.
Loan Stars brings together sculptural beadworks from Nico Williams’ touring exhibition Bingo, curated by Daniel Fiset at PHI Montréal, alongside works by artists from across Turtle Island, reinventing beadwork and affirming cultural resilience. In Anishinaabemowin, the word manidoominens (seed bead) derives from manidoo (spirit). Each work brings back the spirit of beadwork and is a living relation to each individual's community.
Mandate
Loan Stars presents ancestral beadwork, baskets, quillwork, and bandolier bags—many once lost or displaced—that are treated not as objects but as living relations carrying memory, kinship, and responsibility. Anchored by Nico Williams’ Mishomis Uncollection—a project about giving back and taking back—the exhibition reclaims practices of exchange, resists erasure, and transforms Union Gallery into a space of community and reciprocity.
Nico Williams, O’dehmin (ᐅᑌᒥᐣ, pronounced DAY-min in Anishinaabemowin) (b. 1989) is a multidisciplinary artist from Aamjiwnaang (pronounced am-JIN-nun, meaning “at the spawning stream”). His ancestors were central to the Huron Tract Treaty of 1827, the Amherstburg negotiation that ceded 2.2 million acres of Anishinaabek territory.
Based in Mooniyang / Tiohtià:ke / Montreal, Williams operates his incorporated studio, developing cross-disciplinary projects. Rooted in sculptural beadwork, his practice extends Anishinaabe knowledge systems into contemporary art. On his Kettle Point side, he descends from Gertrude Bresette, a member of the Great Lakes ash-basket-making guild, situating his work within the long continuum of Anishinaabek artistry and the enduring teachings of the Great Lakes Nation.
Williams holds an MFA in Sculpture from Concordia University (2021) and is a lifelong member of the Contemporary Geometric Beadwork research team. He has taught at MIT, the McCord Stewart Museum, the University of Toronto, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and has created major installations at the Brooklyn Museum.
In 2025, his solo exhibition Bingo opened at the PHI Foundation for Contemporary Art, curated by Daniel Fiset. Following his 2024 Sobey Art Award, these projects affirm Williams as a leading Anishinaabe voice in contemporary art.