A Harlem Nocturne: Deanna Bowen

September 3 – November 7, 2021

Curated by Kimberly Phillips

Organized and circulated by the Contemporary Art Gallery

Guided Tours Available: Please feel free to use our self-guided tour booklet or request a personal tour.  Group tours also available by calling 226-312-2023 X4425.

Deanna Bowen's artistic practice concerns itself with histories of the Black experience in Canada and the US. Her focus is the "dark matter" in our midst: figures and events that have remained below the threshold of visibility not because they are impossible to find but because their existence reveals systematized racism difficult for the majority culture to acknowledge. Bowen reactivates historic material sourced from overlooked archives through a process of extraction, translation and enlargement, and then reinserts this material into public consciousness in a new form. 

A Harlem Nocturne presents a terrain of research that Bowen undertook in Toronto and Vancouver in 2017–19, recovered from civic documents, newspaper clippings and numerous personal and organizational archives. These materials trace a series of interconnected figures—many of them part of Bowen's own family—who formed an integral part of the Canadian entertainment community from the 1940s through to the 1970s. As Black bodies living and working in a settler colony underpinned by institutionalized racism, they were at once invisible and hyper-visible, simultaneously admired, exoticized and surveilled. They enjoyed certain celebrity in their local milieu but endured differing degrees of bigotry, segregation, and racial violence.  

Bowen aims to posit a powerful counterpoint to familiar narratives that oversimplify historical narratives of Canada's complex and vibrant Black presence. She reminds us that even seemingly insignificant documents can be rich repositories for unintended readings and the importance of questioning who has been charged with writing our histories and why. 

Biography

Deanna Bowen is a Montreal-based interdisciplinary artist whose practice examines race, migration, historical writing and authorship. Bowen makes a repertoire of artistic gestures 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 supporting her artistic practice, including the 2020 Governor General's Award for Visual and Media Arts, the 2017 Canada Council New Chapter and the Ontario Art Council Media Arts production grants, a 2016 Guggenheim Fellowship and the 2014 William H. Johnson Prize. She has exhibited at the Royal Ontario Museum, 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 (2014 – 2015) and the Art Gallery of York University, Toronto (2013).