Fall 2024 Exhibitions at Art Windsor-Essex

Deanna Bowen, installation view of Taps in Black Drones in the Hive, 2020. 1 minute, 20 seconds. Performed by Charles Ellison and filmed on location at OBORO, Montréal. Courtesy of the artist and the Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery. Photo: Toni Hafkensheid.

Deanna Bowen: Black Drones in the Hive

November 21, 2024 – February 16, 2025
Artist and Curator Tour, AWE at Night: November 21, 2024, 7:15 – 7:45pm

Curated by Crystal Mowry
Organized by the Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery
Circulated in partnership with the MacKenzie Art Gallery
Presented at AWE with support from the Exhibition Circulation Fund, Department of Canadian Heritage

For more than twenty years, Deanna Bowen’s practice has evolved from its roots in experimental documentary video into a complex mapping of power as seen in public and private archives. Research and exhibitions are rarely mutually exclusive modes for Bowen, in part because her subjects are capable of revealing new perspectives over time. Whether it is through strategies of re-enactment or dense constellations of archival material, Bowen’s work traces her familial history within a broader narrative of Black survival in Canada and the United States.

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. The exhibition draws its title from a racist assessment of William Robinson, a Black journeyman, as written by a city official in Berlin, Ontario (now Kitchener) in the records of the Waterloo County House of Industry and Refuge (1869–1950). This sentiment echoes the centuries-long project of devaluing Black labour and the promise of autonomy.  Combing historical texts, petitions, and archives ranging from the local to international, Bowen weaves together narrative threads of migration, power networks, and hierarchies of remembrance.

Yuri Dojc, Irene Moore Davis, 2016, digital photograph on metal aluminum backing, 30″ x 40″. Courtesy of the artist.

North is Freedom: Descendants of Freedom-Seekers on the Underground Railroad

November 21, 2024 – June 22, 2025
Artist and Curator Tour, AWE at Night: November 21, 2024, 6:00 – 6:30pm

Curated by Dorothy Abbott

Yuri Dojc’s North is Freedom is an evocative photographic essay that celebrates the descendants of freedom-seekers who escaped slavery in the United States in the years before the American Civil War. Some came entirely alone and unaided; others found their way to Canada with the help of a clandestine network of “conductors” and “stations” called the “Underground Railroad.” Approximately 30,000 men, women and children fled north to freedom, settling from the Maritimes as far west as the Manitoba border. Most came to what is now Ontario, to places such as Windsor, Chatham, Buxton, the Niagara Peninsula, Owen Sound, and larger cities like Hamilton and Toronto.

Some 150 years later, starting in 2016, Canadian photographer Yuri Dojc began exploring the northern end of the “Underground Railroad,” presenting 30 images of descendants. Black and white, young and old, these are the grandchildren, great grandchildren, and great-great grandchildren of once-enslaved African Americans who have contributed to the growth of this great nation.

Jessica Rachel Cook, Under the blanket, 2023, repurposed church pews, anthracite coal, durum wheat, beeswax, antique tools, and mixed media. Purchased with funds from the Fred and Beverly Schaeffer Family Endowment. Photo: Frank Piccolo.

Seeds of Plenty

November 1, 2024 – February 23, 2025
Artist Talk with Jessica Rachel Cook: December 12, 2024, 7:00 – 7:30pm

Curated by Emily McKibbon

Seeds of Plenty brings together new acquisitions and unseen works by Indigenous artists from AWE’s collection. This rotating display also functions as a digitization gallery for AWE staff to professionally document these important works.

In 2023, AWE undertook a review of our collection to ensure that artworks in our holdings represented the diverse communities we served. Of our collection of roughly 4,000 artworks, AWE only holds 232 artworks by around 115 Inuit, First Nations and Métis artists. Of these works, many have yet to be digitized and published in our online collections database. This exhibition is intended to make these works more visible to our audiences in the gallery and online. The show includes the first work we acquired by an Indigenous artist—Inuit artist Joe Adlaka Aculiak’s Hunter with Bear—as well as our most recent acquisition—Under the Blanket (2022) by Oji-cree artist Jessica Rachel Cook (Constance Lake First Nation/Bkejwanong First Nation). With a renewed mandate to collect more work by Indigenous artists, with a particular focus on Indigenous artists living and working in this region, we hope to transform these holdings in the years to come.

About Art Windsor-Essex

Art Windsor-Essex respectfully acknowledges that we are located on Anishinaabe Territory – the traditional territory of the Three Fires Confederacy of First Nations, comprised of the Ojibway, the Odawa, and the Potawatomi. Today the Anishinaabe of the Three Fires Confederacy are represented by Bkejwanong. We want to state our respect for the ancestral and ongoing authority of Walpole Island First Nation over its Territory.

Art Windsor-Essex
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Windsor, Ontario N9A 7J1
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Accessibility: Art Windsor-Essex is a fully accessible venue. For more information, visit here.