Black Drones in the Hive: A Talk with Deanna Bowen and Crystal Mowry
1-2 PM. Join artist Deanna Bowen and curator Crystal Mowry for a conversational talk about the Spring/Summer exhibition: Black Drones in the Hive.
Deanna Bowen (b. Oakland; lives in Montreal) is a descendant of two Alabama and Kentucky-born Black Prairie pioneer families from Amber Valley and Campsie, Alberta. Bowen’s family history has been central to her work since the early 1990s. She makes use of artistic gestures to define the Black body and trace its presence and movement in place and time. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship (2016), a Governor General Award for Visual and Media Arts Award (2020), and the Scotiabank Photography Award (2021). Bowen is editor of the 2019 publication Other Places: Reflections on Media Arts in Canada.
Crystal Mowry is the Director of Programs at the MacKenzie Art Gallery. She previously held the position of Senior Curator at the Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery where she oversaw the gallery’s exhibitions, collections, and publishing activities for over a decade. As a curator operating primarily within the context of a public art museum, she treats her role as equal parts co-conspirator and translator, often seeking ways to support artists in the development of new projects. Her curatorial work includes group exhibitions such as I’ll be your Mirror, The Perennials, and What the Bat Knows. In 2013 she co-curated Romancing the Anthropocene, one of three projects commissioned for the City of Toronto’s annual Nuit Blanche event. Her solo projects with artists Maggie Groat, Ernest Daetwyler, and Deanna Bowen have received Exhibition of the Year Awards from the Ontario Association of Art Galleries (now Galleries Ontario Galeries) and in 2020 she was a recipient of a Waterloo Region Arts Award. Mowry has written curatorial and experimental texts for artist-focused publications on the work of Brendan Fernandes, Shary Boyle, August Klintberg, Annie MacDonell, and others. She lives in Treaty 4 (Regina) with her family.