Deanna Bowen facts for kids

Deanna Bowen (born November 5, 1969) is an artist who works in many different forms, including films, video projects, live performances, drawing, and sculpture. She is known as an "interdisciplinary artist" because she uses many types of art to share her ideas.

Her work explores difficult but important topics from the past. She looks at personal and official histories related to slavery, the movement of people, the fight for equal rights (the civil rights movement), and racism in Canada and the United States. Bowen has citizenship in both the U.S. and Canada and works in Montreal.

Early Life and Schooling

Deanna Bowen was born in Oakland, California. Her family has a deep history in North America. She is a descendant of African Americans who moved from Alabama and Kentucky to Canada in the early 1900s.

In 1909, her great-grandparents were among the founders of Amber Valley, a settlement in Alberta created by Black immigrants. Bowen grew up in Vancouver with her mother and grandparents.

For her education, she earned a Diploma of Fine Art from Emily Carr University of Art and Design in 1994. Later, she moved to Toronto and completed a Master's degree in Visual Studies at the University of Toronto in 2008.

Artistic Career

Bowen became known for her powerful video art that explored family, race, and gender. Her early works were praised for being both clear in their ideas and emotionally strong. She later began creating larger art projects called "installations," which use video, sound, and objects to create an experience for the viewer.

Exploring Family History

In 2010, Bowen created a video called sum of the parts: what can be named. In this work, she tells the detailed story of her own family's history with slavery and their journey to Canada. This powerful video was shown at film festivals around the world.

Looking at Difficult Histories

Bowen is not afraid to explore challenging parts of history. For a 2012 project called The Paul Good Papers, she looked at the history of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK), a racist group in the United States. The project was based on a real audio interview between a journalist and a KKK leader. Bowen and another actor performed parts of the interview daily. The project's goal was to understand and show a dark part of history.

Another major project, Invisible Empires (2013), also examined the KKK's history, but this time in Canada. Many people don't know that the KKK was also active in Canada. Bowen used historical documents and objects to show this hidden history. She explained her reason for this work:

Most people build on this idea of Canada being a haven for blacks—the whole Underground Railroad and all of that history, which is real, but there are also these other histories about black treatment in Canada that don’t get brought forward.

Teaching and Speaking

Besides creating art, Bowen is also a teacher and speaker. She has taught art at several universities, including the University of Toronto Scarborough and Concordia University in Montreal. She has also been invited to speak about her work at events around the world, including the prestigious Venice Biennale in Italy.

Exhibitions

Bowen has shown her art in galleries and museums since the 1990s. Her work has been featured in solo shows, where she is the only artist, and in group shows with other artists.

Some of her major solo exhibitions include:

• The Paul Good Papers (2012) at Gallery 44 in Toronto.
• Invisible Empires (2013) at the Art Gallery of York University.
• On Trial The Long Doorway (2017) at Mercer Union, a gallery in Toronto.
• God of Gods: A Canadian Play (2019) at the Justina M. Barnicke Gallery in Toronto.

Her art has also been part of group exhibitions at major museums like the Nasher Museum of Art in North Carolina and the Canadian Museum of History.

Awards and Recognition

Deanna Bowen's important work has earned her many awards. These awards show how much experts value her art and her contribution to conversations about history and identity.

Some of her most important awards include:

• A Guggenheim Fellowship (2016), a very respected award given to professionals in the arts and sciences.
• The William H. Johnson Prize (2014), an award for talented African American artists early in their careers.
• A Governor General's Awards in Visual and Media Arts (2020), one of Canada's highest honors for artists.
• The Scotiabank Photography Award (2021), the largest prize for photography in Canada.

Collections

Many museums and organizations think Bowen's art is so important that they have added it to their permanent collections. This means her work will be preserved for future generations to see and study.

Her art is held in collections at:

• McMaster Museum of Art, Hamilton, ON
• Burnaby Art Gallery, Burnaby BC
• The Art Museum at the University of Toronto, ON
• University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA
• Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY
• Concordia University, Montreal, PQ