The Vega Foundation and the National Gallery of Canada have jointly acquired WINDWARD, a 2025 film by the Los Angeles-based artist Sharon Lockhart, the two institutions announced on November 2, 2026. The purchase is the National Gallery of Canada's first joint acquisition with a foundation, and it closes a circle that began when the film was developed as a co-commission and co-production of Shorefast and Fogo Island Arts, the Vega Foundation and the Gallery, with support from The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery and the Walter Phillips Gallery at the Banff Centre.

Lockhart filmed WINDWARD over three summers on Fogo Island, off the northern coast of Newfoundland. Built as twelve separate compositions, the film watches the island's young people at play among tall grass, volcanic rock and crashing surf, with the sea, sky, light and weather treated as essential parts of every scene. Shot on the island's northern, windward end, it takes its cue from the persistent gusts that shape daily life there, the children drifting in and out of view across the artist's carefully staged tableaux.

The work looks back to Colin Low's 1967 documentary The Children of Fogo Island, one of 27 films Low directed for the National Film Board of Canada between 1966 and 1968 as part of the Fogo Process, a participatory filmmaking project designed to open dialogue among island communities. Lockhart, born in Norwood, Massachusetts, in 1964, has built her practice on exactly this kind of sustained attention, returning to the same people and places over years to make films, photographs and installations that test how looking itself works.

This fall the film will be shown as part of Fogo, Lockhart's solo exhibition at The Power Plant in Toronto, organised with the Vega Foundation. For the National Gallery, the acquisition sits within its National Engagement initiative, which builds partnerships that carry art into communities across the country.