A wide framed image of the NGC building with various photographs covering across the building's length.

Deanna Bowen, The Black Canadians (after Cooke), 2023, installation view at the National Gallery of Canada, 2023. Photo by the National Gallery of Canada. Image courtesy of Deanna Bowen.

Artists in a Time of Nation-Building: Part Two
Expanding the Frame: An Interview with Deanna Bowen

Christina Battle

In early December 2025, Mark Carney delivered a speech for the Governor General’s Awards in Visual and Media Arts, directly addressing Canadian artists. He emphasized artists’ important role: “At a time when the world has become more divided, your work as artists, as creators, as storytellers, is more valuable than ever. You tell Canada’s story, you help us understand each other better in all our complexity, diversity, and audacity.”

That same day, I had been talking with Deanna Bowen, herself the recipient of a 2020 Governor General’s Award. Since that early December conversation, we have spoken numerous times about the role of artists in this moment of Canadian nation-building, working together to clarify our thinking on it. The discussion that follows is condensed from several conversations between December 2025 and February 2026 and has been edited for length and clarity.

Before our interview began, we had been discussing artistic practice and our experiences within the Canadian arts sector–something we speak about frequently. On these occasions, though, broader politics were profoundly linked to our framing and consideration of Canadian arts in ways that hadn’t been as direct before.

You can read an introduction to this long-form interview, published in March 2026: “Artists in a Time of Nation-Building: Part One.” What follows is Part Two.

Christina Battle (CB): I want to come back to something that you said a couple breaths ago about Canadian culture and art making—about the realities of what the nation is right now: What does it mean for a government, a politician, to rely on art to nation-build in a cultural sense, when, as artists, our idea of what the reality of the nation is might be so different from their understanding?

Deanna Bowen (DB): You have to pay attention to language these days. It’s really a conversation of whether or not the nation can get its head around an autonomous Black or racialized person. The racism of Canadian national politics is such that if the politicians don’t change, they will just continue with their heads in the sand about what the nation and its history are about. Carney’s whole speech at Davos, talking about the reality of the situation versus suspended disbelief—I mean, everything that politics and the global order were prior to this moment was built on lies, and everybody kept it up. And I hate that I’m even quoting this man, but he’s right. Denialism of the old global order cannot work right now. Flat out, it just cannot, and so the most basic way to describe this moment is that all of the political parties have been enjoying a very leisurely political reality—not robust, not rigorous, not tested for times like this. They do not have the skill set to respond to this moment.

It’s a totally different game. It doesn’t look like anything we’ve done before, because none of this has happened before. The perception of what order looked like up until the Trudeau era—that’s no more. You can’t return to that, because it’s not true and everybody’s seen it now. There’s a president out there with all the resources, saying: Fuck global order. He has unmasked imperialism as it is, versus the lie that Canada and everybody else were/is performing in this kind of arrangement of nations and international law. No matter what you do, at the end of the day, Canada is still participating in imperialism—this is still about imperialism.

CB: Right. Even as you’re outlining it all and helping to make it more visible as strategy, I’m thinking about this doubling down on imperialism and colonization that has become collectively more visible now because it’s shrouded underneath this idea of Canadian culture. Like, we have to do it, because otherwise we lose our culture.

DB: Canadian values.

CB: Canadian values. And, as you said, there’s nothing more imperial than what’s going on right now in this heightened moment of Canadian exceptionalism. This is actually what Canada is and always has been.

DB: Quite literally, yeah. What needs to happen, and what I think artists need to be doing right now, is to step back and acknowledge the colonial framing of this moment. We’ve seen it, and we’ve kind of disregarded it. But what’s needed, from a filmmaker’s perspective, is a wider shot, so we can really understand what the fuck is going on. Because, again, the King is almost dying, his house is absolutely not in order, and this mofo got on a plane and came here!

CB: Exactly!

DB: You know what I mean? The hand of the monarchy is so apparent right now.

CB: It’s been quite invisible for some time, certainly for most Canadians. We’re in this moment where we’re kind of skipping over the critique of it and launching right into: We must protect our colonizer history, because this is who we are! Because without it, who are we, I guess.

DB: Yeah, right. We started talking about this as a segue from conversations about the Canadian art world. The old-guard of the Canadian art world is the thing that kind of inspired— is ‘inspired’ the right word? We’ll say inspired for now—a lot of the anti-Black violence that came out of the last five years.1For example, this review by Paul Gessell, fueled by a letter circulated by the NGC’s former curator of Canadian art, Charles Hill, preceded Deanna’s National Gallery exhibition, leading to an overwhelming amount of vile and racist backlash toward the artist, including death threats. And what they were actually attempting to dismantle was the structural change happening to make space for other people.

CB: Right.

DB: The old-guard patrons of the white, old nationalist Canadian art world haven’t been able to keep up with an inevitable generational shift for years now, likely via willful ignorance. Money and networked thuggery can’t hold back time forever. The veneer is off. It’s almost like the people that we’re talking about—of the political moment, of the Canadian art moment—are all people that fundamentally cannot let go of the mythology that was entangled in Canada’s former cultural narrative of the Group of Seven and blah, blah, blah. If you take away the “patriotic” bullshit of the Group of Seven, if you put them within the broader political moment of that time, and you embrace the reality that their paintings are propagandist work that concealed a Nazi and a white supremacist framework and that informed the National Gallery of Canada’s (NGC) construction from the beginning—if you take away the sheen, if you take away the lie of what they say their works represent, then you come to see what it was about. And when you do that, when you start tracing who supported that moment and you backtrack to who that was and where they were, then you ultimately come to understand that we’re talking about wealthy white supremacist British and Germans who ultimately settled in southern Ontario after World War II because the government let them in. And where did they settle? They settled atop Black settlements in southern Ontario. How Josiah Henson’s Dawn Settlement – one of the first and oldest settlements – became the segregated town of Dresden is a perfect example of this. They are fully aware of their role in the erasure of Black culture in the province of Ontario. Fully aware.

Group of Seven painter Lawren Harris was born in Brantford, Ontario. Brantford, a historic stop on the Underground Railroad, is named after Mohawk Chief Thayendanegea (also known as Joseph Brant). His parents were members of the New York Mohawk tribe, and his sister Molly married Sir William Johnson, the British superintendent of the Northern Indians of America. Brant was a polyglot, a revered leader and military officer who lived as a white settler in the US and Canada; he was also a slave trader whose home had been built by forty of his own Black slaves.

That is a direct line, so Harris and these people couldn’t possibly not have known about the presence of Blackness in this country. They couldn’t possibly not know of the presence of Indigenous people. They certainly couldn’t not have known George Brown, one of the fathers of Canadian confederation, the Canadian Liberal Party, and the Toronto Globe newspaper (a rival publication to John A. MacDonald’s The Empire). And what does that mean for right now? There’s a shitload of people in the Canadian art world who are losing their minds because that shield of silence and historical amnesia is no longer there, and they’re losing their status by nature of the fact that their hidden histories are becoming exposed.

CB: Right.

DB: It’s the same thing as what we’re seeing now, when it turned out that it was Judith Schulich who was behind Nan Goldin’s work being censored by the Art Gallery of Ontario. That’s Schulich of the Schulich School of Business at York University, of The Schulich Foundation. These wealthy people think they can just do what they did at the AGO and wipe something out. It’s just absurd power. Miles away from the “democratic,” “we can do it together” mantra of your average, voting Canadian.

CB: What about this moment, this headline from today’s Globe and Mail: “AGO trustee, major donor Judy Schulich led internal push to prevent Nan Goldin acquisition.” Do you think that the narcissism of that power still stands in this moment that we’re in? That they still think that they can operate in that way now? I guess we’ll see what happens; this article was only posted 10 hours ago.2since this discussion, (4 months later) Schulich left the AGO board of trustees.

[Laughter]

DB: I mean, the outing of Judith Schulich in that story is significant. What’s interesting is that the press is doing their job.

CB: Yeah, that’s new.

DB: Right? That they’re doing the job of holding the AGO accountable and of making connections between this and the Anti-Palestine, Wanda Nanibush moment. It’s critical because the press has changed, and they understand what the story is right now.

CB: Do you think that these folks, the old money that has held so much power for so long, can’t keep up?

DB: I don’t think that these old-guard, old money players are accounting for the technological aspects of this moment in the sense that they could get away with the shit that they do in other moments before Trump, because everybody was playing the ”nudge, nudge, wink, wink” game of maintaining the lie of order. You can’t do it now. And even if you could, data is everywhere; news (or artworld secrets) travels across the internet in the blink of an eye. I think these people have wealth to the extent that they don’t need to care about (or even fathom) the fact that some activist or journalist will dig up the behind-the-scenes connections.

CB: And push back.

DB: Exactly. Because, again, it’s a very particular circle of extreme wealth that we’re talking about, and these people circulate with each other all the fucking time. Before, they could just call up somebody that’s connected to the Thomson family of Thomson Reuters, and that story would disappear.

CB: And it’s not just technology, but the culture of speed and how we come to understand and know what’s going on these days. I’m thinking about response during these times, and about how in the last two years—specifically, since October, 2023—I think artists in Canada have been collectively much stronger about making their voices and political stances visible, even more so than after a lot of the anti-Black stuff that was drawn attention to in 2020, after which we then saw the arts lose interest. I think things have changed a lot in terms of the ways that artists are collectively taking part in making these things visible, in a sense, right?

DB: The letter that Gabby (Moser) and I organized in response to Wanda Nanibush being pushed out of the AGO, which also called for a boycott of the Art Canada Institute, whose director, Sara Angel, was a signatory to the leaked letter from Israel Museums and Arts, Canada (IMAAC), was a very important moment.3After the letter was circulated, it was reported on in Hyperallergic: Questions Arise as Indigenous Curator Suddenly Departs Toronto Museum Now, whenever you read about the AGO, you reach back to that moment where somebody leaked a document that then led to a bunch of protests. In my mind, that’s the moment, right?

CB: I mean, I don’t want to be too optimistic, but this is the difference now.

DB: Right. And I’m happy for that, and I’m happy that the press is doing what it’s supposed to do. Jason McBride did an extraordinary job with that article about Wanda for The Walrus. It further amplified the situation to a broader readership. I say kudos to Jason. I say kudos to all the activism happening at that moment. I’m really glad for that, and I’m proud of that, to be quite honest. All of us did the right thing, and I think we’re awake now.4While editing this piece, an article came out in the Walrus: The Art World has a New Problem: Gag Orders by Tatum Dooley that draws further attention to issues facing those working in the Canadian Arts Sector and the imposed secrecy via the prevalence of Non-Disclosure Agreements.

CB: Being able to see now how those dots have been connected, as you said, and how even the Globe and Mail, which is one of the most conservative papers on record in the country, is now drawing attention to this, really comes from a lot of that work done in that moment.

DB: Yeah, and yay us, right? There’s a lot of press lately about how Canada needs its culture. It’s been slowly building ever since Mark Carney borrowed those works from the NGC. I was paying attention to his response to Trump’s comments about the Davos speech and how Canada “lives because of the United States,” in which Carney responded by saying: No, Canada thrives because we’re Canadian, which was just like: Oh, sweet Jesus, whoo. That’s just shy of that beer commercial.

CB: Exactly, right? “We are Canadian.”

DB: But then he also went on to say that Canada is comprised of “many different people.” A rebuke to Trump, no doubt, but it is also not Trudeau’s language. Given the kind of language of the moment, this is significant in this discussion about nationalism and nation-building, because he needs to assemble the masses to prepare for war—comma—and to fill the seats in all that new military equipment. It’s part of this larger discussion about what he’s called the “maturation of the nation.”

CB: Let’s also be real: who is going to fill those military positions? Poor folks, immigrants, racialized people. Rich white people are not sending their kids into the military.

The Black Canadians (After Cooke). Detail, E. Mackintosh. Afro-Canadian Unit, No. 2 Construction Battalion, November 1916. Museum Windsor. Image courtesy of Deanna Bowen.

DB: No, Vincent Massey and Lawren Harris (of the Group of Seven) got to sit that shit out at Hart House and the University of Toronto. That’s the reality of what old-guard networks and wealth do. In The Black Canadians (after Cooke) (2022), I talk about the No. 2 Construction Battalion, which was a Black battalion in World War I. Canada was segregated, and they didn’t want them to mix with the white soldiers, but Canada needed the bodies; they went through the British-born, they went through the Eastern European, they went through the farm boys, and then they still needed bodies. They needed the Indigenous troops and the Black troops. Why does that matter? Because they haven’t quite resolved that issue historically, and you’re going to have to do something to acknowledge these past contributions to get Black or Indigenous folks to line up to enlist again. All kinds of racialized bodies that have not been supported—all those displaced and racialized people who have been excluded from the narrative. Carney needs to bring back the notion of difference so everyone feels seen.

CB: Exactly, and to rally behind it because “we are Canadian.” We live because we are Canadian.

DB: That is exactly what it is.

CB: Haha! I know, it’s just so exhausting.

DB: It fries my brain. And again, the irony of this nation-building thing, even the critique of The Black Canadians (after Cooke) was formed around some notion of what this country is, and how dare I unmask it? And now, within Carney’s new framing, it becomes: Oh, yay, you’ve unmasked it for this maturing nation that needs a viable military presence right now because Trump. The irony is that both framings do the same work: overwriting the project and ignoring the fact that it is actually about my mother and me. This is about…

CB: The personal.

DB: It’s about the deeply personal, and everything that ‘they’ have applied to it, everything that has yielded so much hate from people, all of that shit is in their fucking heads. My work has always been about my mother, and the work I made for the National Gallery of Canada was about her, as she died. The NGC curatorial and comms teams and I were very explicit with the press about maintaining the work’s personal narrative and meaning. Yet, these unknown-to-me white people did all of this overwriting and meaning-making about their own machinations and all their own bullshit. Paul Gessell whipped up a frenzy of terror about me in a string of racist posts in the now-defunct arts publication Galleries West, which were then recirculated as truth in mainstream media outlets like the National Post and regional arts blogs. They published their racial hatred across the nation, which affirmed everything my mother and grandparents have ever said about this place; and in the end they indicted themselves. The hysteria hijacked the culmination of three decades of intimate, process-based work, and it has been a crushing realization that these arts writers are so ignorant and self-involved that they can’t (or won’t) grasp the personal aspects of the work.

Still of Deanna and her mother Leora from the “In the Making” screening. Read more about the CBC Arts doc in “Every Family, Every Community Needs an Archivist — Deanna Bowen’s Art Does This with Warmth and Care.” by Gabrielle Moser. Image courtesy of Deanna Bowen.

CB: They can’t.

DB: They can’t even grant me humanity to grasp the personal. When the haters came out, I was the one who needed to be taken out. My mother’s death and our family story mean nothing in their delusional white Canadian mythology—extraordinary ignorance and indifference.

CB: And the recognition that these are real people’s lives and histories is still absent.

DB: So, here comes Carney, presenting himself as a progressive realist, which is a half-truth because he’s not acknowledging that he is an imperialist too.

CB: He is very strategically a realist. As one should be in that role, I guess.

DB: Yeah, as one should be in a moment when the United States is threatening to annex the nation. I hate to say this, but I actually don’t have any issues with any of this within that context—comma—I’m fucked up because that means I’m actually supporting the extension of Canadian imperialism and British imperialism, which also fucks me up because nobody’s conferring with Indigenous people, or talking about the fact that this land is stolen. If we really want to be talking about who should be negotiating about what this land is and who it’s connected to. It would be the Indigenous community that would be talking about it, and we wouldn’t even be talking about Trump at all.

CB: Exactly. The crisis reveals a tripling down of Canada as a colonial state as the accepted norm.

DB: Absolutely, as a colony of King Charles III’s contemporary British empire.

CB: We live within such a colonial system, but on the surface, we project this sensibility of being decolonial, or post-colonial, all while also absolutely being colonial. I think we do it to a degree that is so amplified compared to other nations, and we’re in this moment of tripling down on our colonial self as a way to up ourselves as Canadians. It is happening so casually, and—at least mainstream—media doesn’t acknowledge what’s actually going on despite the fact that we all see it happening right before our eyes.

DB: I gave a talk at University College at the University of Toronto about Barker Fairley, Vincent Massey, and nation-building. Effectively, I was dismantling the master’s house using the master’s tools in real time. During that presentation, I discussed how the former interim Director and CEO, Angela Cassie, was treated at the National Gallery. She would have been the first Black director of any federal institution, a massive breakthrough. I showed a favourable piece from Ron FanFair Magazine, then something from the National Post and the CBC. I took a moment to note that Canada has three or four major national news outlets, and that maybe three old-guard, old-money families own all of the media outlets across the nation. She did a job no one else had dared (or had an interest) in doing, and she was attacked, shamed, and discredited in mobbish ways in the national press. Vincent Massey birthed the CBC; it also conforms with old-guard values. How and to whom would she go if she wanted to refute any of the claims against her?

There is no way that any of us in this country are actually getting an accurate reflection of what the fuck is going on in the world. And we really need to be talking about the way that these families control the Canadian narrative, because they essentially own Canadian identity. They are the authors of Canadian mythology, as it favours them (and their art collections). And anything that threatens the shield of this crafted fable about what this country is—anything that dislodges that—they start bullshitting in the press. I know this because—curiously enough—my family and our community have been the subject of numerous racist smears in the Canadian press since we arrived in the country. 

So, right now, everything that is happening in our art galleries and museums is literally the most absurd power grab—literally. The Judith Schulich attack on Nan Goldin is a perfect example, and there was nowhere to go to discuss it except on the internet. There’s limited art writing in the country, no means for public debate, certainly no room for different voices from a variety of classes and backgrounds.

CB: People were talking about it online, then an independent journalist (Samira Mohyeddin) revealed it was Schulich, and then it got picked up in the national and international news.5For a detailed account of the happening, see Nan Goldin Speaks Out on Art Gallery of Ontario’s Halted Acquisition by Rhea Nayyar in Hyperallergic.

DB: A lot of the way that reporting happens now builds off of what came out of the boycott of the Art Canada Institute, because there were all kinds of people out there that were doing activism and writing letters, and then tons of leaks were happening on the internet. I don’t think journalists were covering Canadian arts like that before. I mean, Josh O’Kane, who wrote about it for the Globe and Mail, was a reporter during that first wave of stories unfolding online, and so he now knows: where there’s smoke, there’s fire. I give him credit for paying attention and, yay, credit to us, and everybody who was participating in that first wave. And, yay for the Globe and Mail, for not firing this guy, and for giving him the latitude to continue to write about it. Jason McBride wrote a solid piece for the Walrus as well.

CB: I think it’s interesting because we’re in this moment of “Rah, rah, Canada” nation-building when we are looking at ourselves, and in a way that means the media also needs more exclusively Canadian content. So, a lot of the Canadian content, especially in the arts, that has been so neglected over the years, has suddenly been pushing through.

DB: If we’re lucky, Mark Carney’s been paying attention, because he’s an art collector. Ha.

CB: I mean, this is why I think, as artists, we need to examine his call to artists. Who is he speaking to here, and how are we meant to take this call to action that he’s putting upon us? We talked a lot last time about trying to reconcile the difference between what the moment calls for and the need not to look away from all of this murky history.

DB: We need a bigger frame. We need to take a step back—literally, from a cinematic perspective—and expand the frame. Let’s not get this twisted. When I say, “step back the frame,” what I’m really trying to get at, fundamentally, is all-caps IMPERIALISM. That’s what this is. It’s the old, quote, unquote, order of imperialism that follows the rules. It’s not just a Trump/Carney conversation. It’s really so much larger.

I’m trying to think of the last politician to lead with this notion of nation-building who was as comfy with the monarchy as Carney is. Vincent Massey was the first Governor General who was born in Canada,6Governor General: February 28, 1952 – September 15, 1959. and he was connected to the monarchy long before that. During his years at Wilfred Laurier, he was in his early 20s. He was the 1st Envoy Extraordinary of Canada to the United States under Mackenzie King,7November 25, 1926 – July 23, 1930. and that’s when, go figure, Canada suddenly had a massive influx of the Ku Klux Klan, which was later documented to be a British strategy meant to clear the new nation of all of its Black and brown bodies. All of this shit is entangled.

CB: Because we’re not separate from history. This idea of trying to think about nation-building without thinking about what it is that we are as a nation, and who we are as a nation, is impossible. Yet we’re being encouraged to do so.

The Black Canadians (After Cooke). Detail, Stuart Thomson. K.K.K. [Ku Klux Klan] Imperial Kouncil, 1925. City of Vancouver Archives. Image courtesy of Deanna Bowen.

DB:  But we have a trope, right? So does the United States—what’s playing out right now, that’s their trope: from peace to civil war, that’s the American arc. We understand it. Canada’s arc includes being friendly to the US, and then, when shit hits the fan, we always revert to “But we’re not you.” We do it every single time America does some horrific thing. That is what spurs us to reflect on who we are as a people. It’s not that we know who we are; we just know who we aren’t.

CB: Our national identity is that we are not America. That’s it.

DB: And that assertion goes back to the Plains of Abraham. Carney is completely right to take it back there. And of course, on the other side, there is separatism; you have these two uncertainties of Alberta and Quebec who don’t want the labouring force—the migrant force—because they don’t want a mixed-race nation. But this time, Carney will have to rally everyone.

And that’s why his rhetoric differs from Massey’s. Because Carney cannot afford to run an Aryan political race, because we’re allegedly combating Aryan thoughts and ideas next door, right? So never mind that it’s still imperialism and that they are the same thing. This is a discussion about political strategy. And what we do not have that America has figured out for quite some time now is how to exploit that class of young person that’s willing to give up house and home for the sake of patriotism. Canadian culture has been stagnant and hiding behind the Aryan mythology that Massey, MacDonald, Laurier, MacKenzie King, and all the other prime ministers created. There has been no period where anything that happened between 1939 and the present day has been interrogated for the gross violent oppression that has been perpetrated against the “others” who live in this country. Carney is all about the next generation of art because of his need to appeal to the nation’s whitewashed masses, erased in the first 150 years of “Canadian” art.

CB: It’s deliberate, it’s economic, it’s strategic. No matter how I work it through my brain, it always comes back to: What he’s doing is smart. But my gut is like, “Oh, my God.” It’s infuriating, you know what I mean?

DB: From an intellectual perspective and from the place of loving a good puzzle, I can appreciate it as a really intelligent strategy. But effectively, it is still—all caps—IMPERIALISM.

CB: Okay, let’s watch Carney’s address to artists. Let’s listen to exactly what he is saying to us.

[Together, we watch Carney’s December, 2025 video for the Governor General’s Awards in Visual and Media Arts Ceremony]

DB: (after watching) Jesus, that is so fucking smart.

CB: I mean…I get stuck on the words because it is smart; it is strategic. It’s clearly problematic, but also, I get it. First off, do you ever remember a prime minister speaking directly to Canadian artists before? I sure don’t.

DB: And they sure the fuck don’t address them by first name.

CB:  Exactly. Everything about it is like: Wow. Leaning into the role of artists as storytellers, he says, “Your work as artists, as creators, as storytellers, is more valuable than ever.” It almost seems like a call to help him to write this story going forward.

DB: That’s what I think it is.

CB: He also says, “At a time when the world has become more divided.” So again, this was around December 5; it’s pre-recorded, but it was released early December, and I feel like since then we’re even more divided. I think the sort of future that is likely to come from a lot of this division doesn’t look great unless we really shore things up and move them in a different direction. I think he’s right that this is what artists do; I think we always have been doing this.

DB: Absolutely.

CB: But I get uncomfortable when the message that we need to keep doing it is being utilized by a government, by a politician, even if it’s in our collective best interest, which I’m happy to concede. What does it mean when the stories that we tell—especially these personal histories—because of the way that the nation is and has historically been, are always at odds with the mythology and the narrative of the nation?

DB: Yes, and I feel like I’m throwing in this additional sense of conflict that I have because I almost feel like the man’s talking to me directly, you know what I mean? Because of how I’ve seen him talk about other contemporary artists’ work. You know, I feel this other weird feeling of: Oh, my God, I’ve been seen. When he talks about being storytellers, it’s like: Well, yeah, that’s exactly what I do. I ended my video interview for the NGC by encouraging other artists to revisit their histories and tell their stories. That’s how you rewrite the narrative. And I’ve probably talked about how we’re the generation to do it, and not to wait for somebody else to write it, and blah, blah, blah. All that stuff that the people we’ve been fighting against don’t do, because their job is to conceal the secrets.

CB: And to keep one narrative at the centre.

DB: One very white, shallow, Aryan story at the centre of the press. The Winnipeg Art Gallery led the charge in actually interrogating the histories of their former directors.8For a deep dive into the timeline see: A Canadian Art Gallery Refuses to Reckon with Former Director’s Nazi Ties by Carmine Starnino in the Walrus. And it trickles into Toronto, where other artists and arts writers are starting to interrogate the narrative around the AGO, and Crystal (Mowry) and John (Hampton) are out in Regina at the Mackenzie unsettling things. You know, as a collector, Mark Carney would have to be somewhat aware of the kind of cultural narrative of contemporary art in the nation.

I can’t help but think about how the artwork that is made at any given time is in part informed by the prime minister at the time, right? The politics of the nation inform what we as artists can do; they (heads of state) set the tone. When we thought it was going to be a Conservative government, everyone in the sector was girding their loins for fear of what was going to be taken away from us and what we could or couldn’t say. Now we’ve got this prime minister that’s talking about a maturing nation. He actually needs to grow the population up really quickly. And I think he is well aware that not everything has been taught in Canadian history. I don’t think anybody actually really needs to be hit over the head with the fact that the story is incomplete.

CB: Grossly incomplete.

DB: And if you are an art-informed person, I would hope you would know that, or at least begin to question: Why is this so shallow? In this country, there is no alternative for any racialized body anywhere to speak nationally. No place except the arts, if you crack it open wide enough, right? If you give institutions the resources and an enhanced historical mandate to buy and collect Canadian art and to tell all the stories, then maybe we have a chance of shifting some things; but this is as it has always been.

[Sigh]

It feels odd to make the argument because of imperialism, but I feel quite confident that if the nation’s institutions don’t reflect us there, then why the hell do we even think we have anything to do with this nation? Certainly, if we (they?) go to war, why do I care?

CB: I think, though, that the crux of it is also that we’re in a time of austerity, so when he’s calling on artists to be these storytellers—I mean, he did support the arts in the most recent (2025) budget, but…

DB: Minimally.

CB: Exactly, and are you just expecting that we will serve the country by telling these stories, for free? Where’s the support? How serious of a call is it in that sense? Because the thing is, artists are already doing this work. We’re already invested in these histories and in this complexity and division that is Canada. His call is basically: Do this for us, help us through this.” At what cost to us?

DB: He would say we have no choice.

CB: I mean, he’s not wrong, because we basically do it already for free, anyway.

DB: I mean, I’d be doing it anyhow. I would be an asshole to stop now just because he said so.

[Both laugh]

CB: Exactly.

[Laughing]

CB: When you were talking about collections and the prompt for museums to buy Canadian—their collecting budgets have been cut. It’s not like he’s investing more in that as far as I know, so there’s a pretty big imbalance there. Maybe by the time this text comes out, that could change; who knows. But we’re seeing austerity budgets—they’re laying off tens of thousands of federal workers across the country right now.

DB: True, and so it might just be a conversation to prompt people to use the funding that we have to do the thing that he needs us to do.

CB: But then you still rely on those in positions of power within those provincial museums to do that work and support contemporary Canadian artists, but not all of them are.

DB: Some are. Some are doing things right. Again, applause for the Mackenzie, because I think they’re doing it.

CB: Absolutely, yeah.

DB: Some have never really updated themselves because they have been so dependent on founders’ money or family foundation money. They can’t keep up with the scrutiny driven by the rise of digital technology and access to information, and by the savvy next generation that recognizes it as bullshit. Some institutions are extraordinarily dated, stuck in the whole Group of Seven narrative, and they thought they would never have to change and they would never get hit. All this hysteria happening with those institutions is because they all bet heavily that it would never change.

CB: And it seemed like it wouldn’t, because even if you think about 2020 and all of the calls for change with the Black Lives Matter movement, all of that has dissipated and disappeared.

DB: All of it. I can say, with firsthand experience, that the changes that did take place were for show and unsustainable. Most institutions didn’t make the structural changes needed to actually support us before we got there, so much of our work involves thriving while also navigating gatekeeping racist white people who imagine themselves as benevolent agents of change.

CB: Then, here we are now, when things have changed so profoundly, so quickly. They couldn’t have anticipated it. When Carney calls on artists to embrace the complexity, it’s kind of at odds with him implying that he wants us to help solve the divisiveness, because the stories of these artists whom he’s speaking about—our stories—are divisive of the very way that the country is sewn together and the way that power and wealth sit within it. He is actually calling for a lot of complicated and harmful histories to come to the surface, and, if even recent history tells us anything, it’s likely that it is going to be met with more divisiveness.

DB: No, no, no—he’s rallying together the class of people that are more likely to enlist or be conscripted into the military. And what I mean by that is that people in those communities have already suffered from hardship. He needs those people because they actually could get their shit together to fight. He’s looking for the people that have not been shielded by the Aryan narrative and wealth. Vincent Massey and Lawren Harris are perfect examples of that. Both of them sat it out because they could; they had the power and wealth.

CB: But what I’m saying is: That is still going to be met with divisiveness, because, as you said, the major newspapers, everything is still controlled by that white narrative dominated by the class of wealth. And they do not see this coming. We saw this by the response against your work at the NGC. They are not going to easily get behind the idea of embracing the country’s complex, diverse narrative in the way Carney is calling for. And I think you’re right. He’s strategic about it because he needs—

DB: Another voice.

CB: Yeah, but to think that it’s going to result in less division? Because that’s what his speech calls for. He’s calling for “unity in a time of division.” He’s kind of playing it both ways, because look at the backlash against these stories over the last five-six years.

DB: Oh, for sure, but that was when Canada was still supporting the Israeli attacks on Gaza, before Trump’s war. And then it was like: Oh shit, we can’t support both, so we’re going to pull out of that. Then we’re going to call out all of those people that were our allies, like two months ago—war criminals and shit like that—because we have to pull back our resources to come over here to deal with this clown.

CB: True.

DB: I think what’s different about this artist class now is that we have more access. We have a bunch of things that previous generations did not have. We are standing on their shoulders; we’re just of a different time. My mother’s generation could never fight back against the Group of Seven in her lifetime, for a gazillion different societal reasons. But where we are now, we can do it differently. I don’t think the Masseys et al actually got as far as thinking that we’d ever get degrees or an education. They honestly thought that they would have wiped us all out by now.

CB: Or that we would challenge the ways that we are taught art history within the classroom—even if we quietly roll our eyes and write the papers or whatever, we’re still constantly on the back end, calling our friends and being like: Can you believe this bullshit? This is the power of being an artist, ultimately: We’re making our own work, no matter what we’re taught inside the classroom.

DB: You see what I’m saying?! The narrative of Canadian art history is of people within a particular class who circulated amongst royalty and politicians. All of them had some reach back to Empire. And we are now engaging with their grandchildren’s generation, who uphold the narrative because they’ve been raised to do so and have lived privileged lives because of it.

This brings us back to the ongoing conversation about decolonization. And you know, Indigenous communities are saying: Y’all need to be talking to us, because you’re not; these are just white people talking to other white people.

CB: Exactly.

DB: The other reality is capitalism, and poverty, and survival, and quoting this prime minister: “If you’re not at the table, then you’re on the menu.”

CB: When he said that, I was like: Oh shit, it’s over.

[Laughter]

DB: How can you translate that laughter?

Deanna Bowen is the descendant of two Black pioneer families who moved from Alabama and Kentucky to settle in Amber Valley and Campsie on the Alberta prairie. Born in 1969 in Oakland, California, the artist currently divides her time between Toronto and Montreal.

Through a repertoire of artistic gestures, Bowen’s work defines the Black body, tracing its presence and movement in time and place. Since the early 1990s, the core of her auto-ethnographic interdisciplinary practice has been her family history. In recent years, she has focused on a close examination of her family’s migration and their connections to Vancouver’s Hogan’s Alley and Black Strathcona, the “All-Black” towns of Oklahoma, the Exoduster migration and the Ku Klux Klan.

Bowen has received numerous prizes and awards, including the Scotiabank Photography Award (2021), a Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts (2020), a Guggenheim Fellowship (2016), and the William H. Johnson Prize (2014). Previous exhibitions include Black Drones in the Hive (2020), The God of Gods: Berlin, Berlin (2020) and The God of Gods: A Canadian Play (2019). Her writing, interviews and art have been featured in Canadian Art, The Capilano Review, The Black Prairie Archives and Transition Magazine. She was also editor of the 2019 anthology Other Places: Reflections on Media Arts in Canada.


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