Deanna Bowen (b. 1969, Oakland; lives in Montreal) is a descendant of two Alabama and Kentucky-born Black Prairie pioneer families from Amber Valley and Campsie, Alberta. Bowen’s family history has been the central pivot of her auto-ethnographic interdisciplinary works since the early 1990s. She makes use of a repertoire of artistic gestures in order to define the Black body and trace its presence and movement in place and time. In recent years, her work has involved 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 Kansas Exoduster migrations and the Ku Klux Klan in Canada and the US. She is a recipient of a 2020 Governor General Award for Visual and Media Arts Award, a 2018 Canada Council Research and Creation Grant, an Ontario Arts Council Media Arts Grant in 2017, a 2016 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, and the 2014 William H. Johnson Prize. Her writing, interviews and artworks have been published in Canadian Art, The Capilano Review, The Black Prairie Archives and Transition Magazine. Bowen is editor of the 2019 publication Other Places: Reflections on Media Arts in Canada.
Ken Lum (Canadian, b. 1956) is an artist with an extensive international exhibition record. He co-founded and served as the founding editor of the Yishu Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art. A prolific writer, he has published numerous essays. He has delivered keynote addresses at various prestigious events, including the 2024 Duldig Sculpture Lecture in Melbourne, the 2022 International Association of Empirical Aesthetics Congress in Philadelphia, and the 2010 World Museums Conference in Shanghai. His writings are compiled in Everything is Relevant: Writings on Art and Life 1991 – 2018, published by Concordia University Press in 2020. Lum has completed many public art commissions in cities such as Rotterdam, Leiden, St. Louis, Toronto, St. Moritz, and Vienna. He co-curated exhibitions, including Shanghai Modern: 1919 – 1945, Sharjah Biennial 7, and Monument Lab: Creative Speculations for Philadelphia. Additionally, Lum is a co-founder and serves as the Senior Curatorial Advisor to Monument Lab, a public art and history think tank in Philadelphia. He holds the Marilyn Jordan Taylor Presidential Professorship at the University of Pennsylvania.
Hamza Walker is Director of The Brick, a nonprofit art space in Los Angeles. Prior to joining The Brick in 2016, he was director of education and associate curator at the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, a non-collecting contemporary art museum. Recent exhibitions at The Brick include Nikita Gale, Takers (2022); Kandis Williams/Cassandra Press’ The Absolute Right to Exclude (2021); and Postcommodity’s Some Reach While Others Clap (2020).
Join Deanna Bowen, Ken Lum and Hamza Walker for an online panel discussion exploring the relationship between monuments and contemporary artworks that challenge canonical monumental forms and disrupt dominant historical narratives. The conversation will be centred on artistic practices and curatorial projects that address the production of memory in public space and the willful erasure of unacknowledged histories.
Artist Deanna Bowen will discuss her work that concerns itself with histories of Black experience in Canada and the US that remain below the threshold of visibility. Ken Lum, artist and co-founder of Monument Lab, will examine histories of public art and monuments that have assumed universality while ignoring the complex social landscape of individual and community difference. Curator Hamza Walker will present on his upcoming exhibition Monuments (Fall 2025 at The Brick), which brings together a selection of decommissioned monuments with pre-existing and newly commissioned contemporary artworks.
In 1958 a sculpture of King George VI by William McMillan, a second casting of the original sculpture leading up to Buckingham Palace in London, was gifted to the University of British Columbia. The work was unveiled by the Lieutenant-Governor in 1958 and dedicated by Queen Elizabeth II when she visited campus on 22 June 1958. Until recently the work was located near the Woodward Library on UBC campus, but was removed in 2021 due to construction in the area and remains in storage at the university.
The presence of King George VI on campus serves as a marker of British Columbia’s colonial history as well as Canada’s continued membership in the British Commonwealth. Since 2020, the removal of monuments has become widespread internationally in an effort to reckon with histories of slavery, colonization and other forms of oppression. As King George waits in storage, the Belkin has set out to reassess the future of the statue on UBC campus by considering the reverberations of monuments through open critical dialogue.
Deanna Bowen (b. 1969, Oakland; lives in Montreal) is a descendant of two Alabama and Kentucky-born Black Prairie pioneer families from Amber Valley and Campsie, Alberta. Bowen’s family history has been the central pivot of her auto-ethnographic interdisciplinary works since the early 1990s. She makes use of a repertoire of artistic gestures in order to define the Black body and trace its presence and movement in place and time. In recent years, her work has involved 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 Kansas Exoduster migrations and the Ku Klux Klan in Canada and the US. She is a recipient of a 2020 Governor General Award for Visual and Media Arts Award, a 2018 Canada Council Research and Creation Grant, an Ontario Arts Council Media Arts Grant in 2017, a 2016 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, and the 2014 William H. Johnson Prize. Her writing, interviews and artworks have been published in Canadian Art, The Capilano Review, The Black Prairie Archives and Transition Magazine. Bowen is editor of the 2019 publication Other Places: Reflections on Media Arts in Canada.
Ken Lum (Canadian, b. 1956) is an artist with an extensive international exhibition record. He co-founded and served as the founding editor of the Yishu Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art. A prolific writer, he has published numerous essays. He has delivered keynote addresses at various prestigious events, including the 2024 Duldig Sculpture Lecture in Melbourne, the 2022 International Association of Empirical Aesthetics Congress in Philadelphia, and the 2010 World Museums Conference in Shanghai. His writings are compiled in Everything is Relevant: Writings on Art and Life 1991 – 2018, published by Concordia University Press in 2020. Lum has completed many public art commissions in cities such as Rotterdam, Leiden, St. Louis, Toronto, St. Moritz, and Vienna. He co-curated exhibitions, including Shanghai Modern: 1919 – 1945, Sharjah Biennial 7, and Monument Lab: Creative Speculations for Philadelphia. Additionally, Lum is a co-founder and serves as the Senior Curatorial Advisor to Monument Lab, a public art and history think tank in Philadelphia. He holds the Marilyn Jordan Taylor Presidential Professorship at the University of Pennsylvania.
Hamza Walker is Director of The Brick, a nonprofit art space in Los Angeles. Prior to joining The Brick in 2016, he was director of education and associate curator at the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, a non-collecting contemporary art museum. Recent exhibitions at The Brick include Nikita Gale, Takers (2022); Kandis Williams/Cassandra Press’ The Absolute Right to Exclude (2021); and Postcommodity’s Some Reach While Others Clap (2020).