I had crossed the line, I was free but there was no one to welcome me to the land of freedom. I was a stranger in a strange land. – Harriet Tubman
16 January – 17 March 2013
Opening Reception:
Wednesday, January 16, 6 – 9 pm
Deanna Bowen: Invisible Empires is a bold exhibition that presents a view on the Ku Klux Klan both during the American Civil Rights Movement era and its century-long history in Canada. Yes, in Canada. This radical new project stems from Toronto artist Deanna Bowen’s inquiry into her own ancestry of Black pioneers who emigrated from Oklahoma to northern Alberta in the early twentieth century, a crossing mirrored by the Klan themselves. Her autobiographical approach and archival investigations, though, deviate in this exhibition. Documents no longer serve the purpose of memorializing a traumatic past experience by means of an empathetic act of witnessing in the present, working through the traumatic archives of memory. Instead Bowen “crosses the line” into enemy territory by working with an “archive” of Klan material. “Working through” takes on a whole new dimension when the archives that supposedly are memorialized are those of the KKK, and when these documents and scenarios are re-enacted in the present for us to witness, and re-live. Laying it on the line, she in fact creates the KKK’s archive, memorializing it to another purpose and implicating us as spectators. In this endeavor, she, furthermore, “crosses the line” in what is expected or “permitted” of a Black artist by, in effect, reversing her area of concern from Black Studies to White Studies. This pioneering new work painfully breaks open the polarizing positions of racist ideologies embedded in the Klan’s history, as well as the discourses that evolve out of them by placing us squarely at the centre of the debate today: a line to be crossed or a line to be drawn?
The exhibition opens on Wednesday January 16, 6–9 pm with a commissioned performance re-creation of a twenty-minute October 24, 1965, CBC television interview between Calvin Craig, Grand Dragon of the Georgia Realm of the United Klans of America and the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan; his fellow Klansman George Sleigh; Civil Rights activist Reverend James Bevel; and This Hour Has Seven Days host Robert Hoyt. The exhibition continues through to Sunday, March 17, 2013. Continue reading
Cultural Pluralism in the Arts Movement Ontario (CPAMO) 
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