A Harlem Nocturne | Curatorial Essay by Kimberly Phillips

The following text was first published for the initial presentation of the exhibition, A Harlem Nocturne, at the Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver, in 2019 and is republished with permission by Walter Phillips Gallery on the occasion of the presentation of the exhibition at Banff Centre.


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 “The event that is documented does not fully coincide with itself [...]. It constitutes a trace, which is pedagogically oriented toward the future. One needs to learn from it.”
Thomas Keenan (1)

“The invention of photography. For whom? Against whom?”
Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin (2)

It is hypothesized that dark matter, which cannot be directly seen, accounts for a great amount of the total mass of our universe. Its existence is inferred from the gravitational effects it appears to have on everything else. One could imagine, therefore, that dark matter is in fact responsible for configuring the relationships of all things to one another, binding person to person, people to place, and present to past. When I think of the focus of Deanna Bowen’s artistic gaze, I imagine a kind of dark matter. Her practice concerns itself with histories of Black experience in Canada and the United States—very often connected directly to her own family—that remain below the threshold of visibility, not because they are impossible to see but because they are difficult for the majority culture to acknowledge. Mining overlooked archives and forgotten documents, Bowen makes use of a repertoire of artistic gestures to bring traces of a complex, deeply personal and often violent past into the realm of public visibility. 

Bowen’s solo exhibition at the Contemporary Art Gallery, A Harlem Nocturne, comprises two separate trajectories of research that follow the artist’s maternal lineage in Canada. In one gallery, a four-channel video installation presents footage from On Trial The Long Doorway, a project co-commissioned by CAG and Mercer Union in Toronto in the autumn of 2017. This project focused on a lost 1956 CBC teledrama titled The Long Doorway, in which Bowen’s great uncle Herman Risby had played a supporting role. It tells the story of a Black legal aid lawyer who is tasked with representing a white University of Toronto student charged with violently assaulting a rising Black basketball player. The Long Doorway was potent for Bowen because Canadian culture so infrequently, in her words, “takes up questions of race in its own place (3),”  and because the issues it examined in the mid-1950s are no less urgent today. Conspicuously, no archived recordings of the teledrama survive, so Bowen used the recovered script and set design notes to experimentally re-stage the work with five Black actors, each of whom performed multiple roles throughout the exhibition’s public, video-recorded rehearsals. Just as the original television piece refused any resolution to the tense questions it posed around race and class, visitors to Bowen’s multi-channel video installation at CAG are confronted with an amalgam of overlapping readings of the script, and we must follow the cast through myriad threads of dialogue as they parse out the scenes and deconstruct them from their own positions. Off-site at Western Front, a single edited cut presents Bowen’s restaged teledrama in its entirety. 

Across the hall in CAG’s larger gallery, a second major suite of works presents a terrain of research that Bowen undertook in Vancouver over the course of 2017-2018, recovered from civic documents, newspaper clippings, and numerous personal and organizational archives. This material traces a series of interconnected figures who formed an integral part of Vancouver’s Black entertainment community from the 1940s through the end of the 1970s. It includes Herman Risby, who performed in numerous Vancouver theatrical productions; renowned dancer, singer, songwriter and choreographer Leonard Gibson (who shared the stage with Risby in Vancouver’s Theatre Under the Stars 1952 production of Finian’s Rainbow); internationally recognized American choreographer, dancer and anthropologist Katherine Dunham, who performed with her company in Vancouver in 1947 (Gibson joined the company on stage as a last minute replacement and was then offered a scholarship by Dunham to study at her school in New York); Vancouver-based jazz vocalist Eleanor Collins, who appeared with Risby and Gibson in Finian’s Rainbow and became the first Black artist in North America to host her own television program, the CBC variety series The Eleanor Show, broadcast in 1955 (for which Gibson served as choreographer); Bowen’s first cousin once removed, Choo Choo Williams, a shake dancer (who took dance lessons from Gibson) and co-owner, along with her husband Ernie King, of the Harlem Nocturne nightclub at 343 East Hastings Street from its establishment in 1957 until 1968. (4) As Black bodies living and working in a settler colony rife with institutionalized police and societal racism, they were at once invisible and hyper-visible, variously admired, embraced, exoticized, surveilled, discriminated against or violently attacked. They enjoyed certain celebrity in their local milieu and endured differing degrees of prejudice, bigotry and segregation. What ultimately emerges from these recovered documents is the picture of a complex, varied and intersectional Black community in Vancouver, one offering a powerful counterpoint to common narratives that over-simplify the city’s Black presence by containing it within the spatial, economic and temporal confines of Hogan’s Alley. (5)

We encounter these figures in the exhibition by navigating a field of archival evidence—evidence being precisely that which is not self-evident, but which becomes evident only through the eyes and ears of others. (6) Bowen is careful to preserve what the late artist and theorist Allan Sekula calls the “radical antagonism” (7) of the documents’ different modes of pictorial address (the structures of power underlying grainy newspaper images and FBI files differ vastly from those of promotional headshots, televised dance numbers or family photographs). She translates each document into a discrete form, in an explicit effort to bring them into visibility. We regard choreographic notation, re-interpreted and re-performed dance sequences, large scale wall vinyl, framed prints, photocopied transparencies, hand-painted signs, sculpture, a book work and, off-site elsewhere in the city, a billboard. Everywhere we are confronted by Bowen’s tools of retrieval and viewing, whether overhead projectors, lightboxes or flatbed film editors; in fact these apparatuses are often the only means through which the material becomes visible and legible. Such legibility, however, is simultaneously challenged by the many registers of blackness that comprise A Harlem Nocturne: a darkly luminous black in lightbox and video works, a light-absorbing black flocking; draped black chiffon; and black redaction. These different modalities of black speak not only to the obstructions and opacity Bowen encountered in her research efforts, but also to her strategies for protecting communities close to her family by avoiding a repetition of the over-exposure they endured in their public and private lives. 

A Harlem Nocturne takes up many of the concerns currently shaping discussions in photography and Black visual studies. Africa Studies scholar Tina M. Campt urges her readers to consider photographs as dynamic and contested sites of Black cultural formation, (8) and as “an everyday strategy of affirmation and a confrontational practice of visibility.”  She follows feminist theorist and photography historian Laura Wexler in stressing that “what we learn of the past by looking at photographic records is not ‘the way things were.’ What they show us of the past is instead a ‘record of choices’”—Campt extends this to suggest that photographs offer a record of intentions as well—as “it is only through understanding the choices that have been made between alternatives—learning what won out and what was lost, how it happened and at what cost—that the meaning of the past can appear.” (10)

Bowen’s work also reminds us of photography’s instrumentalizing power. As Allan Sekula maintained, photography relied heavily upon the archival model for its legitimacy: “We might even argue,” he suggests, “that archival ambitions and procedures are intrinsic to photographic practice.” (11) In his influential 1986 essay “The Body and the Archive,” Sekula describes the way that, “in a more general, dispersed fashion, in serving to introduce the panoptic principle into daily life, photography welded the honorific and repressive functions together.” (12) He continues: 

We can speak then of a generalized, inclusive archive, a shadow archive that encompasses an entire social terrain while positioning individuals within that terrain. [...] The general, all-inclusive archive necessarily contains both the traces of the visible bodies of heroes, leaders, moral exemplars, celebrities, and those of the poor, the diseased, the insane, the criminal, the nonwhite, the female, and all other embodiments of the unworthy.” (13)

Perhaps this “shadow archive” is ultimately Bowen’s dark matter—a representational paradigm that cannot be seen directly but silently constitutes the all-encompassing structure within which Black experience was contained, made visible, and variously vilified or admired in twentieth century Vancouver (and elsewhere). In daylighting its evidence, Bowen’s objectives are forensic. She understands how to search for these traces, because she too inhabits a body that is subject to its principles of organization. And therein also lies the force of her work, her visual and material mattering of that archive—both its residual and potential meanings—because, to borrow the words of artist Hito Steyerl, “a document on its own—even if it provides perfect and irrefutable proof—doesn’t mean anything. If there is no one willing to back the claim, prosecute the deed, or simply pay attention, there is no point in its existence.” (14)

1. Thomas Keenan, “What is a Document? An exchange between Thomas Keenan and Hito Steyerl,” Aperture 214 (Spring 2014), 60.
2. Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin, Vent d’Est (Rome, Paris, Berlin, 1969), film script published in Jean-Luc Godard, Weekend/Wind from the East (New York, 1972), 179.
3. Deanna Bowen, quoted in Lucius Dechausay, “This lost 1956 CBC show about race is as relevant as ever — so a Toronto artist is reimagining it,” cbc.ca/arts/exhibitionists (October 2, 2017), web.
4. Crucial information about Vancouver’s ethnically diverse East End nightclubs, and the decades of police discrimination they endured, is chronicled in Becki L. Ross, Burlesque West: Showgirls, Sex and Sin in Postwar Vancouver (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009).
5. See Wayde Compton’s Canadian Encyclopedia entry on Hogan’s Alley for a summary and further reading sources about the ethnically diverse neighbourhood, largely known for its African-Canadian population and effectively demolished after 1967 when the city began construction on a system of viaducts leading eastwards from the downtown core: https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/hogans-alley
6. Keenan, “Getting the dead to tell me what happened: Justice, prosopopoeia, and forensic afterlives,” Forensics: The Architecture of Public Truth, ed. Forensic Architecture (Berlin and New York: Sternberg Press, 2014), 45. He continues: “It is not an answer, but a question: it asks for a decision, for a reading or an interpretation, it asks to be told what it says.” See page 45.
7. Allan Sekula, “Reading an Archive: Photography between labour and capital,” The Photography Reader ed. Liz Wells (London: Routledge, 2003), 445.
8. See Tina M. Campt, Image Matters: Archive, Photography, and the African Diaspora in Europe (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2012).
9. Tina M. Campt, Listening to Images (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2017), 7.
10. Laura Wexler quoted in Tina M. Campt, Image Matters, 6.
11. Sekula, Ibid., 444.
12. Sekula “The Body and the Archive,” October, vol. 39 (Winter 1986), 10.
13. Sekula, Ibid., 10. Emphasis in original.
14. Hito Steyerl, “What is a Document? An exchange between Thomas Keenan and Hito Steyerl,” Aperture 214 (Spring 2014), 62.