Deanna Bowen

Massive photomural documents Black history at the National Gallery of Canada.

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Deanna Bowen’s The Black Canadians (after Cooke) is the newest configuration of the Montreal-based artist’s ongoing work. While critical race studies have become popularized and demonized in recent years, Bowen has been making this work for the better part of the last three decades. As a striking display across the south facade of the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, where it will remain for the coming year, The Black Canadians (after Cooke) is the largest work the gallery has ever installed, and the biggest platform yet for Bowen’s work.

A massive two-storey photomural comprised of 35 archival images, it presents a loose chronology, when viewed from left to right, of personal and public histories that begin with Bowen’s great-great-great grandfather and end with the birth of Bowen’s mother in 1943. The work towers above the gallery’s Taiga Garden and even over Maman, a 30-foot-high sculpture by French-American artist Louise Bourgeois. 

The black and white images, modified at times with deep blue hues and photo-negative inversions, feature a broad range of historical figures – including the British Royal Family in 1857 and former prime minister William Lyon Mackenzie King, photographed in Berlin during a 1937 visit to meet with Adolf Hitler. Bowen’s work, which plays on the positive and negative attributes of photography, visually considers what is seen and what is not seen, inviting viewers to consider whose stories are included and whose have been excluded from Canada’s cultural imaginary.

Bowen’s research centres her family’s history in relation to Canadian and American histories of colonialism, slavery and anti-Blackness. Some images, and their associated narratives, have already circulated in Bowen’s previous catalogues and exhibitions, whether at the University of Toronto’s Art Museum or as part of the touring exhibition, Black Drones in the Hive, which closes Aug. 6 at the MacKenzie Art Gallery in Regina. Bowen, who has received both a 2020 Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts and the 2021 Scotiabank Photography Award, sources her images largely from Canadian archives, and therefore is re-telling stories of Canada back to Canadians. 

While many Canadians view their country as a welcoming and inclusive place, Bowen points to the reality that Canada was founded, in the words of John A. Macdonald, the first prime minister, for the preservation of the Aryan race. The dominion’s creation, expansion and continuation required violent settler colonialism working in tandem with race-based exclusionary immigration laws and policies, supported by a public willing to unapologetically cultivate a white man’s nation. Over the years, countless examples of efforts to limit and restrict non-white immigration have made their way into Canadian legislation and petitions circulated amongst the populace. Although Black settlements were legally permitted – and were home to Bowen’s ancestors – they were actively menaced by the white majority. 

As an example of seething white hostility masked as cultural curiosity, a 1911 MacLean’s Magazine article by journalist Britton B. Cooke (the titular inspiration for Bowen’s show) asked its cosmopolitan readership whether they wanted more Black Canadians at that juncture of national development. Cooke frames the article in an argument for eugenics, concluding the future Canadian race should come only from “the best stock.” Published around the time Bowen’s ancestors were being displaced by the white terrorism of Oklahoma to settle in Alberta, the article’s proximity to a modern cityscape drawing by Lawren Harris, is one of many flashpoints of power, progress and privilege that Bowen’s work addresses. 

The WASP roots of this country are not limited to the Orange Order of law, politics and economics, but are also enmeshed in cultural institutions, such as the National Gallery of Canada, with a reach that extended from members of founding boards to the administrators they appointed, people who then supported the nascent national identity in the art they collected and the shows they organized. One image in The Black Canadians (after Cooke) is a closeup of the Massey-Harris logo, taken from a 1916 company share. Massey-Harris, at that time one of the British Empire’s largest manufacturers of agricultural machinery, generated wealth for the families that produced Lawren Harris and former governor general Vincent Massey, whose influence and affiliations would shape everything from national aesthetics to public-funding models. 

As such, episodes of what I view as white panic leading up to the installation of The Black Canadians (after Cooke) suggest just how little tolerance exists for narratives and histories that challenge the norm. From a letter circulated by Charles Hill, the gallery’s former curator of Canadian art, who says Bowen’s work besmirches the reputation of the Group of Seven, to tongue-wagging media reports, including an indignant commentary in Le Journal de Montréal, the grievances are ostensibly tied to the disarray of the gallery’s internal issues. The work should have the opportunity to speak for itself, without being drowned out by snide conservatism or empty liberal platitudes.

The gallery has placed a small didactic panel near its front entrance with a QR code for further information, including artist notes for each image and interviews with Bowen and community representatives. The work beckons a deeper engagement with Canadian history – fittingly on the 100th anniversary of the 1923 Chinese Exclusion Act – to better understand how racial discrimination was both legally and socially enforced. After seeing the work in situ and watching how people interacted with its massive renderings of white supremacy, I can only surmise any kerfuffle over The Black Canadians (after Cooke) is less about what the art is saying and more about white anxiety over who should have the power to speak it. ■

Deanna Bowen: The Black Canadians (after Cooke) at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa from July 2023 to fall 2024.

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