Deanna Bowen, The Black Canadians (after Cooke) [detail], 2022. © Deanna Bowen. Courtesy the artist and MKG127
The Black Canadians (after Cooke)
In this monumental new work, Deanna Bowen expands her family history into a broader examination of discrimination in North America over the centuries.
Rooted in a chronology that begins with the artist’s great-great-great grandfather and ends with the birth of her mother in 1943, The Black Canadians (after Cooke) also maps the United Kingdom’s abolition of slavery in 1833 and the trade’s colonial legacy.
The title references a Maclean’s magazine article written in 1911 by Britton B. Cooke, which presented his argument against Black immigration to Canada from the United States. Bowen’s forebears were such immigrants, and were fleeing deadly violence on Muscogee territory in today’s Oklahoma. The family’s journey was further complicated by discriminatory Canadian policies affecting Indigenous land rights and Black immigration.
The seventeen panels of the installation include a panorama of influential White men from the period covered by the artist’s family narrative. One of the key figures is Canada’s Governor General, the Marquess of Lorne, who presided over the creation of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts, Royal Society of Canada and National Gallery of Canada, and completion of the Canadian Pacific Railway. Other notable figures include Canadian Prime Ministers John A. Macdonald, Wilfrid Laurier and William Lyon Mackenzie King, as well as civil servants such as Egerton Ryerson, Frank Oliver, Duncan Campbell Scott, Vincent Massey, and the Gallery’s first director and curator, Eric Brown.
Exploring the complex history of colonialism, the trade of enslaved peoples and Black migration through the lens of the artist’s own family’s experiences, The Black Canadians (after Cooke) restores generations of voices in a thought-provoking commentary on the enduring impact of prevailing cultural norms.
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I can’t see how I would be able to go forward and survive — even thrive ... if I didn’t go back.
— Deanna Bowen
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.
Photo : Courtesy of the Artist
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 Black Drones in the Hive (2020), 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 and Transition Magazine. She was also editor of the 2019 anthology Other Places: Reflections on Media Arts in Canada.
Leading
with Women
Leading with Women makes art accessible to all by extending large-scale installations to the Gallery’s outdoor spaces. Launched in 2021, the three-year series highlights three separate Canadian artists whose work is represented in the national art collection.
The first in the series was Barcelone by Geneviève Cadieux, which was unveiled in June 2021. The Black Canadians (after Cooke) by Deanna Bowen is the second installation of the series.
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