2025-26 R. K. Teetzel Lecture in Art

Contradictory Truths (after Gessel), or Black Genius and White Racial Hysteria in Canada's Arts and Academic Communities

Hybrid Lecture
Wednesday, September 17, 3:00 - 4:30 p.m. ET
In-person and online (followed by a reception)
Paul Cadario Conference Centre at Croft Chapter House 
15 King’s College Circle, Toronto ON M5S 3H7

*This event is free and all are welcome, though registration is required and seating is limited for in-person attendance.

In the 2025-26 R. K. Teetzel Lecture, Bowen will briefly reflect on her return to Toronto to speak about dismantling the “master’s house” with the “master’s tools” in a series of interdependent exhibitions spanning 2010-2025. The talk will specifically focus upon the critical success and deeply intimate process behind The God of Gods: A Canadian Play (2019), Black Drones in the Hive (2020), The Black Canadians (after Cooke) (2022) and The Golden Square Mile (2024).

Bowen will also speak to the personal significance of working with the National Gallery of Canada during the tenure of former Interim Director & CEO Angela Cassie. She will recount the ancestral wisdom that guided her through the profound trauma of confronting generationally recurrent anti-Black White mob violence in Canada(’s media). In this instance, we all witnessed the gross ignorance/arrogance of well-known, White Canadian arts professionals, journalists, faculty, and patrons who boldly flexed their privilege and access to malignant mainstream media outlets, which gave them the means to espouse blatant anti-Blackness and slander about a woman they have yet to meet. This talk is a welcome opportunity to reflect upon the strength/duty of matrilineal leadership, the logic and flexibility of Black madness, the invisibility of Black genius, and the radical powers of double/intersectional consciousness in Canada’s blindingly white educational and cultural spaces.

To attend this lecture in person and register for the ensuing reception, please complete the form at the link below and submit a registration under the name of each person who plans to attend.

To attend this lecture virtually please click the link below. A webinar link will be sent to the email listed on the registration. Please submit a registration under the name of each person who plans to attend. You must register to access the webinar link.

About the Speaker

Deanna Bowen 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 to define the Black body and trace its presence and movement in place and time. She is a recipient of numerous grants and awards, including the 2021 Scotiabank Photography Award, a 2020 Governor’s General Award, 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. Her 2020 self-titled Scotiabank Photography Prize book is printed and distributed by Stiedl Verlag. Deanna lives and works in Montreal, QC, where she is an Associate Professor of Intersectional Feminist and Decolonial 2D - 4D Image Making, Studio Arts at Concordia University. Bowen graduated with a Master's Degree in Visual Studies from the University of Toronto in 2008.

Event graphic photo: Deanna Bowen, The Black Canadians (after Cooke), 2023, installed at the National Gallery of Canada, 2023. © Deanna Bowen. Photo: NGC

The Teetzel Lectureship was established under the terms of the will of Mrs. Rita K. Teetzel, who graduated from University College in 1912. In her will, Mrs. Teetzel requested that a portion of her estate be used "for the furtherance of studies in Architecture for women in University College." This Lectureship aims to bring to the College and to the University of Toronto distinguished lecturers in art and architecture.