Family To Family: A Conversation with Deanna Bowen & Cheryl Foggo About What It Takes.
This is a Black Out Event: a conversation dedicated to Black audiences.
We are specifically inviting those who identify as being a part of the Black community and other racialized communities (Indigenous, People of Colour) to make up our audience for this event. With that in mind, we will not be turning away anyone who registers for a ticket for this event. We do ask that if you do not identify as Black or identify as being part of a racialized group, please ask yourself why you would like to attend, and what you will add to the space.
Deanna Bowen has described her work in general, and this exhibition specifically, as being about proof. On her shoulders rests the burden of being unbelieved while creating works that rest in the truth of having emerged from the blood and bones of her ancestors. Her thoughts on what it has taken, and what it has given to become the creative vessel of these intentionally buried stories of Blackness in Canada will be the theme of this conversation, between Deanna Bowen and Cheryl Foggo. Bowen and Foggo share connections of kinship in Calgary and Alberta’s Black spaces.
Cheryl Foggo is a multiple award-winning playwright, author and filmmaker, whose work over the last 30 years has focused on the lives of Western Canadians of African descent. Recent works include the release of her NFB feature documentary John Ware Reclaimed, available on nfb.ca, as well as the 30th anniversary edition of her book Pourin’ Down Rain: A Black Woman Claims Her Place in the Canadian West. Recent journalism can be found on CBC Black on the Prairies and in Westword Magazine. Cheryl is the recipient of the Lieutenant Governor of Alberta Outstanding Artist Award, The Doug and Lois Mitchell Outstanding Calgary Artist Award and the Arts, Media and Entertainment Award from the Calgary Black Chambers, all in 2021. She is a 2022 inductee into the Alberta Order of Excellence.
Deanna Bowen (b. 1969, Oakland; lives in Montréal) 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.