Deanna Bowen (born November 5, 1969) is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice includes films, video installations, performances, drawing, sculpture and photography.
Her work addresses issues of trauma and memory through an investigation of personal and official histories related to slavery, migration, civil rights, and white supremacy in Canada and the United States.
Bowen was born in Oakland, California[2] and is the descendant of African Americans who migrated north to Canada, from Alabama and Kentucky (via Oklahoma and Kansas) in the early twentieth century.
[4] Bowen first became known for her single-channel video works exploring issues of family, race, gender, and sexuality, including milk-fed (1997), "an astounding balance of conceptual clarity and emotional power,"[5] sadomasochism (1998), and Deutschland (2000).
[7] In 2010, Bowen produced the video, sum of the parts: what can be named, in which she delivers a highly detailed oral history of slavery and migration as experienced by her family.
The exhibit also included the premiere presentation of a 24-minute looping video projection focused on Good's recording of the 1964 Civil Rights Movement campaign to integrate high schools in Notasulga, Alabama.
Featuring Ku Klux Klan archival material including photographs and documents, as well as replicas of Klan banners and robes, the exhibition received a fair amount of media attention as many considered the work to be controversial,[13] although Bowen was clear on the goals of the 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.
[14]In 2015, she extended her exploration of these issues to a U.S. context, investigating the Klan's history in Pennsylvania in work on display in the exhibition Traces in the Dark at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia.