In English with ASL interpretation
Free – Registration required
Join artist Deanna Bowen and curator Kimberly Phillips as they discuss the exhibition A Harlem Nocturne, presented by OBORO, Ada X and GIV in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. The exhibition is circulated by the Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver, with the generous support of the Canada Council for the Arts.
A Q&A period will follow the conversation. If you have not had a chance to see the exhibition A Harlem Nocturne, please visit our site to view photographs of the exhibition, read the exhibition essay, and access links to complementary activities.
Deanna Bowen 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 the central pivot of her auto-ethnographic interdisciplinary works since the early 1990s. She 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, her work has involved 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 Kansas Exoduster migrations and the Ku Klux Klan in Canada and the US. She is a recipient of a 2020 Governor General Award for Visual and Media Arts Award, a 2018 Canada Council Research and Creation Grant, an Ontario Arts Council Media Arts Grant in 2017, a 2016 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, and the 2014 William H. Johnson Prize.
Kimberly Phillips is Director of SFU galleries. Previously, she was Curator at the Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver. She holds a PhD in art history from the University of British Columbia and was an Izaak Walton Killam Doctoral Fellow. Her postdoctoral studies were supported by the Deutsche Akademische Austauschdienst at the Freie Universität, Berlin. From 2013 to 2017 she was Director/Curator of Access Gallery, a Vancouver artist-run centre committed to emergent and experimental practices. Her curatorial practice maintains a particular interest in the spectral and the resistant, as well as the conditions under which artists, particularly women-identifying artists, work. Phillips has authored, edited and contributed to numerous publications and exhibition catalogues, including first monographs for Jeneen Frei Njootli (2018), Sreshta Rit Premnath (2020) and Althea Thauberger (2020).
Photo: Deanna Bowen, Hotel Stratford, 2019.
Credit: Paul Litherland
