Deanna Bowen

Produced by the Contemporary Art Gallery and presented to Vancouver audiences in spring 2019, the solo exhibition of Toronto-based artist Deanna Bowen will continue its national tour in Montreal this fall, with a joint presentation at OBORO, Groupe Intervention Video and Ada X.

### Biography 
Deanna Bowen is a descendant of two Alabama and Kentucky born Black Prairie pioneer families from Amber Valley and Campsie, Alberta. Bowen’s family history has been the central pivot of her auto-ethnographic interdisciplinary works since the early 1990s. She makes use of a repertoire of artistic gestures in order to define the Black body and trace its presence and movement in place and time. In recent years, her work has involved close examination of her family’s migration and their connections to Vancouver’s Hogan’s Alley and Black Strathcona, the “All-Black” towns of Oklahoma, the Kansas Exoduster migrations and the Ku Klux Klan in Canada and the US. Bowen is a recipient of numerous awards including a 2020 Governor General Award for Visual and Media Arts, a 2016 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, and the 2014 William H. Johnson Prize. Her writing, interviews and art works have been published in Canadian Art, The Capilano Review, The Black Prairie Archives, and Transition Magazine. Bowen is editor of the 2019 publication Other Places: Reflections on Media Arts in Canada.


A black and white cast photo from a theatre play with a large group of smiling people standing and crouching in rows. The people appear to be in costume and positioned in front of the stage backdrop.

thumbnail_01-DeannaBowen-2020 .jpg

01-DeannaBowen-2020 .jpg

A Harlem Nocturne

Produced by the Contemporary Art Gallery and presented to Vancouver audiences in spring 2019, the solo exhibition of Toronto-based artist Deanna Bowen will continue its national tour in Banff this spring at Walter Phillips Gallery. This iteration of the touring exhibition at Banff Centre will mark the artist’s first solo exhibition in Alberta.

### Biography
Deanna Bowen is a descendant of two Alabama and Kentucky born Black Prairie pioneer families from Amber Valley and Campsie, Alberta. Bowen’s family history has been the central pivot of her auto-ethnographic interdisciplinary works since the early 1990s. She makes use of a repertoire of artistic gestures in order to define the Black body and trace its presence and movement in place and time. In recent years, her work has involved close examination of her family’s migration and their connections to Vancouver’s Hogan’s Alley and Black Strathcona, the “All-Black” towns of Oklahoma, the Kansas Exoduster migrations and the Ku Klux Klan in Canada and the US. Bowen is a recipient of numerous awards including a 2020 Governor General Award for Visual and Media Arts, a 2016 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, and the 2014 William H. Johnson Prize. Her writing, interviews and art works have been published in Canadian Art, The Capilano Review, The Black Prairie Archives, and Transition Magazine. Bowen is editor of the 2019 publication Other Places: Reflections on Media Arts in Canada.



An image depicting Benesh notation dance scores. The scores are white on a solid black background and resemble sheet music. “Farm Duet.” is written above the score on the top left.

thumbnail_Gibson Notations 2 Farm 1-10 vF.jpg

Gibson Notations 2 Farm 1-10 vF.jpg

Produced by the Contemporary Art Gallery and presented to Vancouver audiences in spring 2019, the solo exhibition of Montreal-based artist Deanna Bowen will continue its national tour in Chatham-Kent this fall at the Thames Art Gallery.

### Biography
Deanna Bowen is a descendant of two Alabama and Kentucky born Black Prairie pioneer families from Amber Valley and Campsie, Alberta. Bowen’s family history has been the central pivot of her auto-ethnographic interdisciplinary works since the early 1990s. She makes use of a repertoire of artistic gestures in order to define the Black body and trace its presence and movement in place and time. In recent years, her work has involved close examination of her family’s migration and their connections to Vancouver’s Hogan’s Alley and Black Strathcona, the “All-Black” towns of Oklahoma, the Kansas Exoduster migrations and the Ku Klux Klan in Canada and the US. Bowen is a recipient of numerous awards including a 2020 Governor General Award for Visual and Media Arts, a 2016 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, and the 2014 William H. Johnson Prize. Her writing, interviews and art works have been published in Canadian Art, The Capilano Review, The Black Prairie Archives, and Transition Magazine. Bowen is editor of the 2019 publication Other Places: Reflections on Media Arts in Canada.

A black and white image of two newspaper pages side by side. The image has been inverted so that the papers appear black with white text, and the images appear ghostly. 

thumbnail_The_Vancouver_Sun_Wed__Oct_14-17__1959_low res.jpg

The_Vancouver_Sun_Wed__Oct_14-17__1959_low res.jpg

Produced by the Contemporary Art Gallery and presented to Vancouver audiences in spring 2019, the solo exhibition of Toronto-based artist Deanna Bowen will begin its multi-venue national tour at McMaster Museum of Art in Hamilton, Ontario.

### Biography
Deanna Bowen is a descendant of two Alabama and Kentucky born Black Prairie pioneer families from Amber Valley and Campsie, Alberta. Bowen’s family history has been the central pivot of her auto-ethnographic interdisciplinary works since the early 1990s. She makes use of a repertoire of artistic gestures in order to define the Black body and trace its presence and movement in place and time. In recent years, her work has involved close examination of her family’s migration and their connections to Vancouver’s Hogan’s Alley and Black Strathcona, the “All-Black” towns of Oklahoma, the Kansas Exoduster migrations and the Ku Klux Klan in Canada and the US. Bowen is a recipient of numerous awards including a 2020 Governor General Award for Visual and Media Arts, a 2016 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, and the 2014 William H. Johnson Prize. Her writing, interviews and art works have been published in Canadian Art, The Capilano Review, The Black Prairie Archives, and Transition Magazine. Bowen is editor of the 2019 publication Other Places: Reflections on Media Arts in Canada.

An image, with a black background and white text and lines showing a section of an architectural plan for a neighbourhood. Handwritten text in the centre reads “CULLODEN COURT SHEL.”

thumbnail_Culloden Court vF.jpg

Culloden Court vF.jpg

Presented by the [Vancouver Heritage Foundation](https://www.tickettailor.com/events/vancouverheritagefoundation/424893), join Deanna Bowen for a discussion of the artist’s large-scale public artwork, *Night Prowl* (2019), which features the extinguished neon light of the Blue Sky dance club, a hub of Black nightlife in 1950s Vancouver. *Night Prowl* is an extension of Bowen’s recent work mapping the history of a Black entertainment community in Vancouver, much of which has been erased from the city’s physical fabric and collective memory, but continues to exist as traces in archives. Bowen will be joined by CAG Acting Associate Curator Julia Lamare.

### Biography 

Deanna Bowen is a Toronto-based interdisciplinary artist whose work has been exhibited across North America, including at the Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver; Royal Ontario Museum of Art, Toronto; the Art Museum at the University of Toronto, and the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. She has received several awards in support of her artistic practice including Canada Council New Chapter and Ontario Arts Council Media Arts production grants, a 2016 Guggenheim Fellowship and the 2014 William H. Johnson Prize.


A black and white image of a film frame depicting an unlit neon sign and street light at night. The neon sign reads “DANC BLUE SKY.” Black circles cover the surface of the image. 

thumbnail_Bowen_Night Prowl vF.jpg

Bowen_Night Prowl vF.jpg

Talk

Join us for a special screening and discussion of Bowen’s edited cut of *~~On Trial~~ The Long Doorway*, co-commissioned by CAG and [Mercer Union](https://www.mercerunion.org/), Toronto, and produced with support from the [Western Front](https://westernfront.ca/).

*~~On Trial~~ The Long Doorway* focuses on a lost 1956 CBC teledrama titled *The Long Doorway*, in which Bowen’s great uncle Herman Risby played a supporting role, and tells the story of a Black legal aid lawyer tasked with representing a white University of Toronto student charged with the assault of a rising Black basketball player. The screening will be followed by a talk with Bowen, discussing familial connections and repressed histories and traumas of Black communities within Canada and the US.

A photograph of a script. Around the typed script, handwritten notes cover the margins of the paper. 

thumbnail_Long Doorway_Annotations pg2.jpg

Long Doorway_Annotations pg2.jpg

Deanna Bowen: On Trial The Long Doorway

Screening and Discussion 

Deanna Bowen contemplates the simultaneous hypervisibility and invisibility of Black bodies in the photographic archive, Vancouver’s particular performance of racism through class and how her own work might offer a counterpoint to established forms of representation in Vancouver and their role in the continued erasure of Black presence from the city’s historical narratives.

The talk will be followed by the [2019 Capture Photography Festival Launch](https://capturephotofest.com/events/2019-festival-launch/).

A black and white cast photo from a theatre play with a large group of smiling people standing and crouching in rows. The people appear to be in costume and positioned in front of the stage backdrop. 

thumbnail_Finian's Rainbow vF.jpg

Finian's Rainbow vF.jpg

Deanna Bowen: Capture Speaker Series

Talk 

Join artist-in-residence Deanna Bowen in conversation with Vancouver-based poet, activist and community organizer Cecily Nicholson as they discuss intersecting concerns in their respective practices.

A detail of installation work by Deanna Bowen. On a table with two chairs, a rotary phone, a radio, newspaper, and a note are placed. 

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Deanna Bowen in conversation with Cecily Nicholson

Deanna Bowen’s artistic practice concerns itself with histories of Black experience in Canada and the US. Her focus is the “dark matter” in our midst: that which remains overlooked, not because it is impossible to ﬁnd but because it is uncomfortable to acknowledge, due to the systematized racism it might expose. Through her work, Bowen asks demanding questions about who records history, reactivating historic documents from overlooked archives through a process of extraction, translation and enlargement, and then reinserting this material into public consciousness in a new form.

Over the past two years, Bowen undertook research in Vancouver to trace a series of intertwined ﬁgures who formed an integral part of this city’s Black entertainment community from the 1940s through the 1970s. She mapped a constellation of nightclubs, theatres and hotels where they gathered, many of which have been erased from the city’s physical fabric and collective memory, but exist as traces in archives. Her aim is to posit a powerful counterpoint to common narratives that oversimplify the city’s historical Black presence here.

*Night Prowl* captures part of a film frame from a CBC news story that aired in October 1959, reporting on the dramatic purging and forced closures of many nightclubs in Vancouver’s ethnically diverse east end. Racially-motivated anxieties around such nightclubs—and the neighbourhoods in which they were situated—fueled the calls for urban renewal that would displace and disperse Black communities in the coming decades. Depicting the marquee of the Blue Sky dance club, its neon light extinguished following the bar’s closure earlier that same month, the image is interrupted by a series of circular voids: visible fragments of batch numbers punched through the cellulose ﬁlm at its time of manufacture. The holes are a banal artifact found at the end of any ﬁlm reel, but for Bowen, the ruptured cellulose reminds us of ﬁlm’s fragile materiality and undermines our ability to trust photography’s seductive promise of “truth”. Considered this way, even blemished and seemingly insigniﬁcant documents can be rich repositories for unintended readings, and for questioning who has been charged with writing our histories and why.

Curated by Kimberly Phillips


### Biography

Deanna Bowen is a Toronto-based interdisciplinary artist whose work has been exhibited across North America, including at the Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver; Royal Ontario Museum of Art, Toronto; the Art Museum at the University of Toronto; and the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. She has received several awards in support of her artistic practice including Canada Council New Chapter and Ontario Arts Council Media Arts production grants, a 2016 Guggenheim Fellowship and the 2014 William H. Johnson Prize.


A black and white image of a film frame depicting an unlit neon sign and street light at night. The neon sign reads “DANC BLUE SKY.” Black circles cover the surface of the image.

thumbnail_00-HEADER-NighProwl.jpg

00-HEADER-NighProwl.jpg

An image of the side of a building framed by two trees in the foreground. Installed on the building is a billboard-sized printed image of a neon sign and street light. The neon sign reads BLUE SKY.

thumbnail_01-DeannaBowen-NightProwl-2019.jpg

01-DeannaBowen-NightProwl-2019.jpg

Night Prowl

Deanna Bowen’s solo exhibition, *A Harlem Nocturne*, comprises two separate strands of research following the artist’s family lineage in Canada. Her practice concerns itself with histories of Black experience in Canada and the US that remain below the threshold of visibility, not because they are impossible to see but because they are difficult for the majority culture to acknowledge. Mining overlooked archives and forgotten documents, Bowen employs a range of artistic gestures to bring traces of a complex, deeply personal and often violent past into public visibility.

In the Alvin Balkind Gallery, a four-channel video installation presents footage from *On Trial The Long Doorway* (2017), which focuses on a lost 1956 CBC teledrama in which Bowen’s great uncle Herman Risby played a supporting role.

The B.C. Binning Gallery features works presenting a terrain of research that Bowen undertook in Vancouver in 2017–18, recovered from civic documents, newspaper clippings and numerous personal and organizational archives. Each of these materials trace interconnected figures forming an integral part of Vancouver’s Black entertainment community from the 1940s to 1970s. As Black bodies living and working in a settler colony surrounded by societal and institutionalized racism, they were both invisible and hypervisible, variously admired, exoticized, surveilled, discriminated against and violently attacked. What these recovered documents ultimately reveal is the picture of a complex and varied Black community in Vancouver.

Curated by Kimberly Phillips with assistance from Julia Lamare

Presented in partnership with Capture Photography Festival. *On Trial The Long Doorway* was commissioned and produced through a partnership between the Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver and Mercer Union, Toronto. Production support was provided through a Media Arts residency at the Western Front, Vancouver. Additional support provided by Clark’s Audio Visual. The artist wishes to thank the Ontario Arts Council for their support.


### Biography 

Deanna Bowen is a Toronto-based interdisciplinary artist whose practice examines race, migration, historical writing and authorship. Bowen makes use of a repertoire of artistic gestures in order to define the Black body and trace its presence and movement in place and time. In recent years, Bowen’s work has involved rigorous examination of her family lineage and their connections to the Black Prairie pioneers of Alberta and Saskatchewan, the Creek Negroes and All-Black towns of Oklahoma, the extended Kentucky/Kansas Exoduster migrations and the Ku Klux Klan. She has received several awards in support of her artistic practice including 2017 Canada Council New Chapter and Ontario Arts Council Media Arts production grants, a 2016 Guggenheim Fellowship and the 2014 William H. Johnson Prize. She has exhibited at the Royal Ontario Museum of Art, Toronto (2017); the Art Museum at the University of Toronto (2016); the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia (2015); McMaster Museum of Art, Hamilton (2015 – 14) and the Art Gallery of York University, Toronto (2013)

ProgramGuideSpring2019.pdf

ExhibitionGuideDeannaBowen.pdf

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00-HEADER-Bowen.jpg

Multimedia works installed in a gallery: a video on a monitor, a framed print, an overhead projector projecting a text document, a black & white painting, and choreographic notes in three lightboxes.

thumbnail_01-DeannaBowen-2019.jpg

01-DeannaBowen-2019.jpg

Multimedia works installed in a gallery: a video projected onto the white gallery wall, a TV monitor on a plinth, a framed print of a newspaper spread, a photograph, and a print of city subdivisions. 

thumbnail_02-DeannaBowen-2019.jpg

02-DeannaBowen-2019.jpg

Multimedia works installed in a gallery: a TV monitor on a plinth, two framed prints, a framed print of a newspaper spread, a print of city subdivisions, a vitrine with an open book.

thumbnail_03-DeannaBowen-2019.jpg

03-DeannaBowen-2019.jpg

A corner wall of a gallery space with a photograph and a print of city subdivisions hanging on each side of the wall. A vitrine with an open book sits to the right. 

thumbnail_04-DeannaBowen-2019.jpg

04-DeannaBowen-2019.jpg

Four monitors are installed in a circle in a gallery. They are all on stands, with the screens facing inwards. Cords and black tape lines lay on the concrete floor. 

Deanna Bowen

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