Deanna Bowen

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, Deanna’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.