How Deanna Bowen's 2-storey mural traces the history of her family and the country itself

Q17:46How Deanna Bowen's 2-storey mural traces the history of her family and the country itself

Growing up, Deanna Bowen says she didn't think she'd live to see 25.

Her family was living hand-to-mouth in a rough part of Vancouver and there were no artists she could look up to.

"I grew up in the '70s … and I was living in a multi-generational housing situation," Bowen tells Q guest host Talia Schlanger in an interview.

"My grandparents had a place in Culloden Court, which was one of Vancouver's first social housing, and then we'd have … the grandparents, my aunt and my mom, and a bunch of other boy cousins: wannabe drug dealers, wannabe pimps — small-town hustlers at the end of the day, really. Very messy. And always getting into some kind of trouble."

Bowen's interest in art was unlocked in high school, where she was given "studio space" in a janitor's closet to keep her out of trouble.

"I'm not a bad kid, but I'm a kid from, obviously, a really messed up, boundaryless, weird kind of a situation," the artist recalls of her youth. "I talked back a lot and I was really just acting out because my home situation was just, man, what do you do with it?

"They would exile me to my studio whenever I acted out, which means, of course, I acted out more…. I'm very thankful that they didn't just label me as a bad kid and shut me down. They worked to figure out how to get me through and how to keep me out of trouble. To be quite honest, I was trying to get in trouble because I was trying to fit in with my family. But it's not really who I was…. By the time I graduated, I had this fabulous setup. And I'm deeply indebted to those people for thinking about these things when I was not."

Today, Bowen is a celebrated artist who makes video installations, drawings, sculptures and  photography. She's won a Guggenheim fellowship and a Governor General's Award, and represented Canada at the 56th Venice Biennale.

Her latest project, The Black Canadians (after Cooke), is an epic two-storey mural adorning the exterior of the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa. The piece tells the story of racism in North America over the course of centuries, but like all of Bowen's work, it's also about her family. 

The title of the mural refers to an editorial that ran in Maclean's magazine in 1911. The writer, Britton B. Cooke, argued against the migration of Black and Indigenous people to Canada, who were fleeing violence in the United States. 

"The horrifically violent displacement of Black and Black Indigenous people … is literally how and why my family comes to the country in the early 1910s," says Bowen.

"Instead of Canada being a haven, Canada actually contributed to keeping us back and sending a preacher — some stories say a doctor — into Indian Territory [in today's Oklahoma] and telling us all not to come because the land's no good, you're not wanted, you can't make it, etc., etc. But that logic, that mindset, still sticks. If you go to the south, you know, the idea of Black people in Canada is just crazy."

Through her work, Bowen tries to make sense of her challenging upbringing by connecting the dots between her experience and what her ancestors faced as immigrants to Western Canada.

"You can't go forward until you know where you come from," she says. "And all of the public history stuff that my work touches upon is — I'm not going to say that it's irrelevant, it helps me to better understand what my family went through.

"We are never going to be a talkative family to speak through the trauma or the difficulties that we've had, the hardships that we've had, because it's just too painful…. But by doing the research for as long as I have and filling the gaps, I'm able to understand the things that have caught their tongue, so to speak, the things that they have swallowed for the sake of the subsequent generations."

While Bowen once felt ashamed of her family, she says the process of creating The Black Canadians (after Cooke) has left her with "an enormous amount of pride."

"With all of our issues, and misgivings, and violence and all of that stuff, I completely understand why it is what it is," she says. "I've asserted that we are still here and the Canadian government or whoever it was that didn't want us — they did not erase us. And the story has been put on for display for everyone to see."

The full interview with Deanna Bowen is available on our podcast, Q with Tom Power. Listen and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

Interview with Deanna Bowen produced by Vanessa Greco.