Black Drones in the Hive: This 'staggering achievement' of an exhibition is making hidden histories visible

For more than 20 years, Montreal-based interdisciplinary artist Deanna Bowen has been working to excavate public and personal histories — both those that have shaped our cultural narratives and those that have violently been made absent. 

The descendant of two Alabama and Kentucky-born Black Prairie pioneer families from Amber Valley and Campsie, Alberta, Bowen's auto-ethnographic practice makes use of photography as a language unto itself. It's a kaleidoscopic method of storytelling that is exceptionally suited to making visible the means and methods of white supremacy in Canada. 

Her ongoing exhibition, Black Drones in the Hive, is a staggering achievement originally produced by the artist under a commission from the Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery and curated by KWAG's then-Senior Curator Crystal Mowry. It is now hosted at the TMU Image Centre in Toronto, where it can be seen until December 3rd.

Bowen has received many high-profile honours for her work. This continued in June 2021, when she won the prestigious Scotiabank Photography Award — a much-overdue recognition of her decades-long engagement with photography in particular. 

But as Bowen says below, in an interview alongside her collaborator and the show's curator Crystal Mowry, the issues she's faced from the awarding body and people in Toronto's art community since winning the award have left her feeling profoundly disappointed.

"What's become clear in this experience," says Bowen, "is that my work has been willfully buried."

I sat down with the artist-curator duo to speak about the contradictory nature of arts institutions, the role of proof in deconstructing national narratives, and the hierarchies of remembrance that continue to shape cultural practice and policy.

CBC Arts: A connective thread in Deanna's work is her interest in uniting personal with "official" histories. Did that approach appear at all in this show?

Deanna Bowen: The exhibition originated as a site-specific project that riffed off the fact that it was happening at Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery. The history that unfolded was something that is very close to me, especially in terms of ideas of cross-border Canadian and American identity, as well as the history of Southern Ontario as a community of all-Black towns formed at the end of the Civil War, many of which no longer exist for a variety of extractive reasons. Amber Valley is on the brink of that too, as are the other Black towns my family is connected to. All of these Black histories are dying.

Crystal Mowry: This also seems like standard practice for you, Deanna. I can't imagine you taking on a project that didn't require a kind of pre-existing knowledge.

DB: It's about proof. When I started my work on the Ku Klux Klan I went down South to record the first meeting of my American and Canadian family in 100 years. I took a film crew with me to try and record their oral histories over the course of seven days as they met on the plantation their shared ancestors were from. It was a deeply profound and intense event. But I never actually received the footage — the absence of which absolutely crushed me. I had to learn to make use of the absence of images while also navigating the burden of proof that was placed on me to prove these histories in a specific way. 

Talking openly about the Klan in Canada in those times wasn't easy to do. A lot of our white cultural colleagues had more power then, which meant it was a lot harder to bring this history to the fore because everybody was skeptical, everybody insisted I had to prove myself. People were absolutely hostile to me. White feminist gatekeepers in particular were a problem for me in terms of silencing my work; trying to get past them was crushing. There are so many layers to how deeply unbelieved I was at that moment in Canadian art. The need to have proof in order to be able to talk about what I want to talk about began at that moment. 

CM: My mind draws an immediate connection between proof and the historical expectations placed on photography. It makes perfect sense that you would feel the most grief coming from corners where photography is a central area of study. Some of the lessons we've learned throughout the run of this project have taught us that there are people within the arts community who don't seem entirely convinced that what Deanna is doing is part of a trajectory of photographic practice. She can win the most important photography prize in the country and people will still ask, "I don't know if this is photography?" And to that, I say it's evidence. It's proof. It's doing the same work.

That very much speaks to the context of Deanna's work: the intertwining of official modes of record with these acts or materials that are a testament to Black presence. The truth here, if it is to be found, comes out of that interrogation. It's a relational practice.

DB: There is a psychology of whiteness that is completely unable to process how history is still impacting our present. I don't know how to get past this deeply rehearsed, knee-jerk response to fact that Canadians have been encouraged to adopt, other than to work with proof, and more than that, proof from their own archives. My own archives — Black archives — would be interrogated beyond recognition. I had to function as they function to be able to continue to tell the story.

CM: In undertaking this show, I was not prepared for such frequent reminders that doubt is alive and well in the minds of white folk. There are always going to be people who doubt your commitment but, with Deanna's project, I found myself being doubted over and over again. Is it doubt of the vessel doing the conveyance? Because I don't think it's doubt of the document. I think it's the alchemy that occurs between the document and the proof as we are presenting it. The proof that we are tied to.

For some, it might be easier to believe if we as people are taken out of the delivery. This says a lot about how we think about authority in institutions — it's still very much treated as something that can only be embodied by whiteness.

I thought a lot about those kinds of hierarchies of credibility while visiting the show — for example, the look at the historical reception of the work of [Uncle Tom's Cabin author] Harriet Beecher Stowe and that of Josiah Henson. It's less who is or isn't remembered, but what forms of remembrance are best able to sustain and reproduce white nationalist narratives over time.

DB: There's a conflation between Josiah Henson the myth, as written about in Uncle Tom's Cabin, and the real Josiah Henson, which is a reality that also speaks to what was happening to other Black people during that time. It is a profound mythology that speaks to what serves white people's sense of responsibility at any given time. 

There are desperate connections to all of what we're talking about here that speak urgently to my experience of mounting this show at The Image Centre. My years of research into the Ku Klux Klan — the way they look, the things they say, the maneuvers they engage in, the ways in which they work — came into focus during the install of this show. It was so clear to me and I was rattled in a way that I rarely am. In terms of my prior understanding of what winning the Scotiabank Prize supposedly opens up space for, I feel that I have been completely undermined and positioned as delinquent in every way.

CM: Again, it's that deeply and intensely woven relationship between what we find evidence of in the past and what we experience in the present. For us, the latter materialized in many ways, from finding ways to exclude us from our own project to not being completely candid about how a project like this one is actually being politically instrumentalized in different ways. 

DB: It's been profoundly disappointing. What's become clear in this experience is that my work has been willfully buried.

The twofold hurt of this, to be frank, is the interpersonal violence I have experienced from people in Toronto's art community who hold power in terms of how certain aspects of my career — as well as core aspects of this exhibition — have thus far played out. To have the launch of my monograph, the launch of this exhibition at The Image Centre, be so problematic… none of these issues are a coincidence.

It's incredibly violent that the institutional interest in your practice often comes with a complete denial that the very same kinds of implications that your work brings to light are ever present within the institution itself.

DB: It's a mindfuck. The problem with having a practice that's oriented around systems like these is that I see those systems and how they work in everything I experience.

CM: It's reflective of your methodology as well. The metre is always running with you.

DB: I'm having a hard time turning it off, to be honest.

It doesn't need to be turned off — it's an urgent instinct. It's telling you that your freedom is being compromised.

DB: It's not just anti-Blackness, it's misogyny. And it has completely governed the way that our work here, as Black women, has been discredited. It's a means to undermine our scholarship and our truth.

A part of the show that lends itself to talking about this experience you both have shared is the act of witnessing and the act of testimony. 

CM: I certainly see myself as a witness to this show taking shape for Deanna. Part of that was seeing how every person who had a part in ushering this work into the world at KWAG came away with knowledge of where this work comes from. They understood that it was worth remembering. 

During the installation of Deanna's show at The Image Centre, I was able to host a visit with the participants of TMU's Black Creative Research Residency. These amazing, bright Black folks — the next generation of learners and disruptors — knew that they were seeing something special. They didn't need to be convinced. They wanted to wade into granular details and share what they knew because they understood what reciprocity means to projects such as this one. I would give all the time in the world to do that kind of work. 

It would be grossly negligent for us to create the impression that we don't talk about the space of communion that this project offers. Despite it all, there are many people who understand what this project means to us and to other people.

DB: Sometimes even I can lose sight of the fact that this work is a bigger, spiritual conversation between myself and my ancestors. It has always been about witnessing and trying to understand the things that have happened to my family, especially when trauma has made much of that language inaccessible. In order to heal, it has been necessary to witness what they experienced. 

My mom is now in her later years — as well as in her later stages of Alzheimer's — which means that [work of] witnessing has been a tool for me to be able to talk to her in the present. This witnessing is a payment of a debt; it is a job that has been passed onto me. It is painful and dark, and it doesn't help that the patterns repeat in history and it doesn't help that the current cultural climate we are in is so similar to the one of 100 years ago. 

As an artist, there's another layer to that witnessing. Due to the nature of my work, I've studied white Canadian audiences for a very long time and understand how they respond to the truth of having to encounter themselves. The work is definitely coming out of that place of double consciousness. I'm also the kid of a preacher, so there's also that pedagogical aspect. I grew up with my grandfather in the church and I was on stage at a young age. That instinct toward public oration and his sensibilities toward sharing knowledge very much informs my practice. And, like every other show I've done, Black Drones in the Hive is a gift for future Black researchers and future Black artists.

Just to go back to this feeling you've mentioned — that sometimes you forget that what you are doing is an act of witnessing — I think those moments of forgetting can often be a function of the structures that shape the exhibition of your work. Institutional spaces are designed and maintained in opposition to that kind of spiritual work and care work.

DB: In my research, I discovered Charles Irby, an American scholar from UC Santa Barbara who studied Amber Valley in the 1970s. He had written in his notes — which would have been dated to the time of my great-grandfather's generation — that Amber Valley and its community was the most disillusioned Black community he had ever encountered. To think back to this idea of what Canada was supposed to be [for Black Americans migrating North]… it's a degree of disappointment that my family would never openly speak to. That loss of faith is what I lived through during my childhood. So many experiences of lost faith, lost life. The generational impact of that is ongoing — by the time you get to my mother's generation, all hope is gone. So I struggled to get faith in this project. It's been a long journey of trying to find it. 

When I started my practice I was devoid of it. My state of mind when I came to Toronto and started making work is not something I speak of often. I feel very fortunate to have wandered into Crystal's life at a juncture when I had the language to articulate all that I wish to speak to — I haven't always had the opportunity. I don't know what we would've been like as an artist-curator team 20 years ago, but I feel like now is the right time and that she is the perfect person to help me articulate all of this.

CM: I don't know that I would've been the curator you needed 20 years ago. You came into my life when I was at peak awareness of my own disillusionment. And this project came into the world at a time when a lot of people are feeling the same way. It wouldn't have been the project it is if we had made it 20 years ago.

It's so important for us to recognize the life experience brought to the mid-career stage of an artist's practice. Our field spends a lot of time and money investing in artists in their green state, but not so much on mid-career artists, many of whom are in the process of making their most interesting work.

DB: There are bigger questions about the market to be asked there. Why are young artists so attractive? I think it's about being malleable and controllable. To be groomed to produce a decade or so of saleable work.

It's also clearly a way to avoid the truth of the harmful histories these institutions have shaped with more established Black artists and audiences, both of whom hold that cultural memory. That remembrance is a barrier to the ahistorical, extractive relationships they're trying to shape.

CM: This idea of cultural memory makes me think of patrimony and the way that Canadian art museums navigate that. Parts of this project have become cultural patrimony — Deanna's reproduction of the 1911 Anti-Creek Negro Petition, for instance, has a history that is tied to KWAG and revealed complicated aspects of its own collections. That work is certified cultural property now and, with that status, comes the recognition that the work is important to understanding national identity. It is a visible record that cannot be made irrelevant to Canadian history.

That's the other kind of labour that echoes throughout this project. The work has to change the place and space that it lands in. And if it isn't, the host isn't doing their job. There's nothing that prohibits us from expecting reciprocity in those relationships. 

I was thinking about how KWAG established that relationship of mutual recognition when I viewed the petition installed at The Image Centre. Do you think that the issues you've encountered here in Toronto are due, in part, to a failure of The Image Center to understand the necessity of that kind of shared engagement?

DB: I've experienced a great deal of frustration with this. There is a feeling that some institutions are wanting the flashy, final outcome of my work, but not the labour that it necessitates. And so much of their vision for my work doesn't align at all with what my work is actually doing — they wholly misunderstand that I am taking control of their systems in order to disseminate Black histories. It can be rattling for them to come to terms with the fact that they are not the active producers of such a space.

It goes back to that desire for truth, to know that the people who book me have a substantial interest in my work. The Scotiabank experience has certainly been a lesson in what happens when a hosting body is not interested in what you actually have to say.

I've heard you use the phrase "the scrapbooks of imperialists" to describe archives, and it has me thinking about galleries and museums as the cultural spaces of imperialists. How is it possible to place work like yours in those spaces? I feel like that's the contradiction and root of the discontent at work here.

DB: That's exactly it. Up until recently, I've had the privilege of working with brilliant, feminist curators. People like Crystal, Kimberly Phillips, and Georgina Jackson; I'm spoiled for having had these opportunities to work with brilliant women who are interested in shaking up the system. They're people who are willing to throw their careers on the line and also knowledgeable enough of the systems we're working in to make these spaces happen with meaning and import.

What has been recently introduced to me are communities of people whose values do not align with mine. They're thinking about art stars that they can claim; they're thinking about the market. But I'm thinking about changing the institutional narrative.

They want to be part of my work, but only the right kind, like the commercial work that I've been producing. It's less political, more intimate; it's personal, and it can absorb me into their systems and collections in a way that is non-controversial and absolves them from deeper engagement with my practice. 

There is definitely an ease on the part of collectors and exhibitors when it comes to photography assumed to work solely within the realm of Black subjectivity.

DB: Certainly. There are 150 years of photographic history that speak to that. Much of that has defined these institutions' view of Black art and also does the job of policing any Black artmaking that doesn't conform to that. And many of the individuals — people like Crystal, people like Gaëtane Verna — who were instrumental in countering that narrow view of Black cultural production in Toronto have left the city.

You can't get around the reality of how Black women have shaped Canada's art landscape. At one point, it was almost all Black women [doing that work], and once we built up the momentum, it was then usurped by reactive funders and organizations who introduced the misogyny, egos, power games, and corporate greed that work to erase us.