Yukon Wildlife Viewing is launching its annual A Celebration of Swans poster competition. This is your chance to enter your original art to be featured on the 2025 poster.
A Celebration of Swans is a festival held annually during the month of April at Swan Haven Interpretive Centre at M’Clintock Bay on Marsh Lake. Every year, Environment Yukon’s Wildlife Viewing team, with support from Yukon Energy, produces a collectible poster featuring an art piece celebrating spring and the arrival of swans. Posters are distributed across the Yukon.
We encourage interested artists, including those early in their career, to submit their original art for consideration. The successful artist receives an honorarium of $500.
Note: Please, no Mute Swans! If your artwork will include depictions of swans, however abstract/artistic, use Trumpeter or Tundra swans as your inspiration, which both have mostly black bills. The yellow-billed swan popularized in media resembles the Mute Swan, a non-native species considered invasive in parts of North America.
Submit your artwork
1. Send us a high quality image of your art (image file or PDF) and a brief description that includes its medium and size. Do not submit the actual art.
2. A small jury will judge the pieces. Only the winner will be contacted (in mid to late February).
3. Wildlife Viewing will announce the winner and release the poster to the public at the end of March.
4. The artist will receive a $500 honorarium.
You must be a Yukon resident to enter.
Deadline
The deadline to enter is February 13, 2025 at 5 pm Yukon Time.
Submit your entry electronically, in person or by mail
Email: [email protected]
In person: 10 Burns Road in Whitehorse, Yukon. We are open Monday to Friday from 8:30 am to 4:45 pm.
Mail: Yukon Wildlife Viewing Department of Environment PO Box 2703 (V-5R) Whitehorse, Yukon Y1A 2C6
About the 2024 winning artist
Stanislav Hermak won the 2024 contest. Chera Hunchuk did the poster design.
Stanislav Hermak is a graphic designer from Odesa, Ukraine. He studied at a specialized art school in Kyiv from 1988 to 1993 and at the Higher Art Academy (formerly Stroganovskoe) in Moscow, Russia. He moved to Whitehorse in 2021 and designs stickers, T-shirts and hoodies for North of Ordinary Media. He also paints with pastels and acrylics.
About Stanislav's winning entry: “The plot is saturated with the feeling of the awakening of new life, spring, the flight of swans at dawn over of the Yukon mountains.”
For questions about the festival poster, email [email protected] or phone: 867-667-8291 or toll free in the Yukon: 1-800-661-0408, ext. 8291.