Deanna Bowen: Black Drones in the Hive

For more than twenty years, Deanna Bowen’s practice has evolved from its roots in experimental documentary video into a complex mapping of power as seen in public and private archives. Research and exhibitions are rarely mutually exclusive modes for Bowen, in part because her subjects are capable of revealing new perspectives over time. Whether it is through strategies of re-enactment or dense constellations of archival material, Bowen’s work traces her familial history within a broader narrative of Black survival in Canada and the United States.

Originally produced by the Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery, Black Drones in the Hive unfolds in a series of visual chapters to reveal the strategic erasures which have enabled Canadian canons (such as the Group of Seven) to exist without question or complication. The exhibition draws its title from a racist assessment of William Robinson, a Black journeyman, as written by a city official in Berlin, Ontario (now Kitchener) in the records of the Waterloo County House of Industry and Refuge (1869–1950). This sentiment echoes the centuries-long project of devaluing Black labour and the promise of autonomy. Combing historical texts, petitions, and archives ranging from the local to international, Bowen weaves together narrative threads of migration, power networks, and hierarchies of remembrance.

Content Notice: This exhibition contains offensive language.  

Italicized titles are used throughout this exhibition to indicate descriptive information assigned by the institutions from which the imagery was sourced. Some of this information contains outdated and offensive language. These descriptors have been maintained to acknowledge the ways in which Black life has been insufficiently – and at times, violently – framed within Canadian and American archives. 

Deanna Bowen is the descendant of two Black pioneer families who moved from Alabama and Kentucky to settle in Amber Valley and Campsie on the Alberta prairie. Born in 1969 in Oakland, California, the artist currently divides her time between Toronto and Montreal.

Through a repertoire of artistic gestures, Bowen’s work defines the Black body, tracing its presence and movement in time and place. Since the early 1990s, the core of her auto-ethnographic interdisciplinary practice has been her family history. In recent years, she has focused on a 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 Exoduster migration and the Ku Klux Klan.

Bowen has received numerous prizes and awards, including the Scotiabank Photography Award (2021), a Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts (2020), a Guggenheim Fellowship (2016), and the William H. Johnson Prize (2014). Previous exhibitions include The God of Gods: Berlin, Berlin (2020) and God of Gods: A Canadian Play (2019). Her writing, interviews and art have been featured in Canadian Art, The Capilano Review, The Black Prairie Archives: An Anthology and Transition Magazine. She was also editor of the 2019 anthology Other Places: Reflections on Media Arts in Canada.