Deanna Bowen: Black Drones in the Hive

23 March 2023 – 6 August 2023

About the Exhibition

Curated By

Crystal Mowry

Organized By

The Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery. Circulated in partnership with the MacKenzie Art Gallery.

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 Some of this information contains outdated and offensive language.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. 

About the Artist

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.

Headshot of artist Deanna Bowen

Photo: Courtesy of the Artist

Produced with the support of the City of Toronto through the Toronto Arts Council.

Canada Council for the Arts logo

Ontario Arts Council logo

Works in the Exhibition

Deanna Bowen. Berlin Constellation, 2020. Installation of 18 inkjet prints on archival paper Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery Permanent Collection. Purchased in part through the support of the Elizabeth L. Gordon Art Program, a program of the Gordon Foundation and administered by the Ontario Arts Foundation, 2021. Exhibition installation view from Black Drones in the Hive, 2020. Photo: Toni Hafkensheid.

Deanna Bowen, installation view of Black Drones in the Hive, 2020. Courtesy of the artist and the Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery. Photo: Toni Hafkensheid.

Deanna Bowen, After Wilhelm I in Black Drones in the Hive, 2020. Mixed media. 213 x 213 x 251 cm. Fabrication by Britt Sostar. Courtesy of the artist and the Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery. Photo: Toni Hafkensheid.

Deanna Bowen, installation view of Taps in Black Drones in the Hive, 2020. 1 minute, 20 seconds. Performed by Charles Ellison and filmed on location at OBORO, Montréal. Courtesy of the artist and the Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery. Photo: Toni Hafkensheid.

Deanna Bowen, detail of horns in Black Drones in the Hive, 2020. Courtesy of the artist and the Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery. Photo: Toni Hafkensheid.

Deanna Bowen, detail of abolitionist coin in Black Drones in the Hive, 2020. Courtesy of the artist and the Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery. Photo: Toni Hafkensheid.

Deanna Bowen, detail of Chatham, Ontario souvenir plate in Black Drones in the Hive, 2020. Courtesy of the artist and the Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery. Photo: Toni Hafkensheid.

Deanna Bowen, detail of Josiah Wedgwood & Sons, Anti-Slavery Medallion to Commemorate William Wilberforce and the Abolition of Slavery 1833 (reissue) in Black Drones in the Hive, 2020. Courtesy of the artist and the Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery. Photo: Toni Hafkensheid.

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