En Plein Air
Group of Seven to share outdoor wall with racists at the National Gallery of Canada.
“Proposal for The Black Canadians (2022) at the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa,” from “Deanna Bowen,” published by Steidl/Scotiabank Photography Award (2022)
By the middle of July, I’m expecting the outside south wall of the National Gallery of Canada to be decorated with a series of blown-up vintage photographs of white-sheeted Ku Klux Klan members, a swastika-wearing Nazi, assorted academics accused of racist attitudes and members of the Group of Seven.
The 17 panels planned for the gallery wall are archival photographs assembled by Black Montreal artist Deanna Bowen to tell the story of the racism her family encountered in Canada, especially during the early part of the 20th century.
“Deanna Bowen,” published by Steidl/Scotiabank Photography Award (2022), 254 pages
The exhibition, The Black Canadians (after Cooke), is to be installed by July 14. The gallery has not released images of Bowen’s work, but the anticipated installation can be found in Deanna Bowen, a book published late last year to mark her receipt of the prestigious Scotiabank Photography Prize in 2021. In the book, the photos are superimposed on a drawing of the Ottawa gallery as an exhibition mockup.
Articles in Galleries West and other publications about the forthcoming exhibition seem to have riled the National Gallery.
“Inaccurate stories have recently been shared by media representatives regarding Deanna Bowen’s forthcoming installation, The Black Canadians (after Cooke),” the gallery said in a statement published Wednesday on its website. “They claim Deanna’s work ‘links the Group of Seven with white supremacy.’ This is untrue and misleading. Facts matter.”
Well, the fact is Bowen herself has indicated the racists and the Group of Seven are going to share space on the gallery’s exterior. The reason for the juxtaposition is open to interpretation. The artist says she is merely providing context, that the Group of Seven were creating certain impressions of Canada at the same time as racist acts were harming Black Canadians. But an Ottawa passerby looking at the gallery wall might well wonder why the Group of Seven is presented so cozily with racists.
“Bowen includes images of members of the Group of Seven in her work because they were contemporaries of the people and events that impacted her family,” the gallery says. “As an artist, Bowen also situates her work in reference to the site and location in which a project is exhibited: in this case the National Gallery of Canada, its collection and archive.”
Bowen currently has a nationally touring exhibition, Black Drones in the Hive, at the MacKenzie Art Gallery in Regina. At the MacKenzie, one sees exhibition spaces filled with vintage photographs and artifacts about Black slavery in Canada and the United States. However, in the last room, one large wall is filled with 13 landscapes, mainly works by the Group of Seven from the MacKenzie’s permanent collection. A set of slave handcuffs sits on a plinth nearby.
No text panels in that room explain why landscape paintings from the Group of Seven are sharing space with handcuffs and old newspaper accounts of slave auctions. However, a text panel at the entrance to the exhibition does shed some light.
“Originally produced by the Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery, Black Drones in the Hive unfolds in a series of visual chapters to reveal the strategic erasures which have enabled Canadian canons (such as the Group of Seven) to exist without question or complication.”
It’s true the Group tended to paint landscapes devoid of people. Some scholars argue this amounted to erasure of Indigenous Peoples from their territories, tacit support for colonial narratives of an empty land primed for European settlement, an assumption that set a path for residential schools and other deeply harmful policies.
The Group also tended to paint outdoors, at least when making their initial sketches. But these days, en plein air seems to be taking on a whole new meaning. There are good reasons to expect a provocative show – after all, why install the work outside amid such secrecy if not to generate buzz?
In any event, I’m looking forward to finally seeing Bowen’s work and hearing what people make of it. ■
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