Current & Upcoming
Deanna Bowen:
A Harlem Nocturne
Organized and circulated by the Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver
Curator: Kimberly Phillips
McMaster Museum of Art
January 16 – May 9, 2020
Opening Reception: Thursday 16 January 2020, 6-8 pm
Curator's Talk | Kimberly Phillips: Friday, January 17, 12:30 – 1:20 p.m.
Artist Talk / In Conversation: Thursday, February 27, 7 – 9 p.m.
Deanna Bowen and Selina Mudavanhu, assistant professor, Communications Studies and Multimedia
Film Screening / Discussion: Friday, April 3, 7 – 9 p.m.
Location: Black Box Theatre, L.R. Wilson Hall, McMaster University
Deanna Bowen’s solo exhibition presents still and moving images following ongoing research into the artist’s family lineage in Canada. Bowen’s practice concerns itself with histories of Black experience in Canada and the US that remain below the threshold of visibility, not because they are impossible to see but because they are difficult for the majority of culture to acknowledge. Mining overlooked archives, forgotten documents, and related ephemera, Bowen employs a range of artistic gestures to bring traces of a complex, deeply personal and often violent past into public visibility. The exhibition takes up many of the concerns currently shaping discussions in photography and Black visual studies.
Image: Deanna Bowen, Theatre Under the Stars’ cast photo from Finian’s Rainbow, circa 1953, 2019, archival inkjet print on cotton rag, paper, 22.5 x 18.5 inches. Courtesy the artist, Theatre Under the Stars and Cecilia and Roger Smith
Ernest Daetwyler
The Boat Project/everythingwillbefine
Artist Garden | 2018 – 2020
Canadian artist Ernest Daetwyler will build a site-specific work in the Museum’s Artist Garden this summer. He will transform pieces of driftwood into a boat form, embedded with a steelcut text message, creating an environment for both active engagement and reflection. The surreal and poetic installation is intended to symbolize a time of change, challenges, and the existential fluctuations that life can present.
<more info>
Cancelled due to Covid-19 situation.
We will update this post If and when this exhibition is mounted at a future date.
Unguarded: SUMMA 2020
Guest Curator: Stylo Starr
April 4 – 25, 2020
Public Reception: Saturday, April 4 from 2 – 4 p.m.
Artists’ Talks: Tuesday, April 7, 12:30 – 1:20 p.m.
The McMaster Museum of Art is pleased to present the graduation exhibition of the McMaster BFA Class of 2020:
Sage Barker, Maria Basso-Jimenez, Jordan Blake, Caitlin Cino, Amanda Drinkwater, Kelsey Dykstra, Aislinn Farrell, Brittany Forrest, Dean Hossack, Celine Jeong, Sohyun Kim, Alexandra Roberts, Emily Roberts, Shveta Sharma, Sarah Urban, Jenna Wellman
Over the past four years, this class of 16 individuals has come together to learn, create, and understand one another in both artistic and personal settings. They have supported each other as they delve into new directions in their respective practices, across a wide range of media from clay and paint to digital and sound art. Throughout, they have worked collaboratively to develop and curate exhibitions, notably the ambitious 2018 spring fashion show, Renovate My Body.
Join us as we showcase the work of these emerging artists and celebrate a major milestone.
Instruments of Exchange: Coins from Antiquity to Today
Curated by Dr. Spencer Pope
September 12, 2019 - August 23, 2020
OPENING RECEPTION: September 12, 6- 8 pm
CURATOR’S TALK | Spencer Pope: September 19, 12:30 – 1:20 pm
Because they are instruments of economic exchange, coins contain richly detailed images that provide an assurance of their value. And because they are issued by a political authority, the images represent the community that produced and keep them in circulation. In this way, coins sit at the intersection of economic, political, and artistic interests. Coinage developed a visual language that spoke both to their value and their origin as early as the seventh century BCE. It remained a fundamentally conservative medium throughout antiquity and even beyond: their recognizability is part of their function. The visual language established in antiquity still governs many coins today, with the result that much of what circulates now is indebted to long-lived traditions. This exhibition will present coins from the McMaster Museum of Art and consider their role as instruments of exchange.
Enawendewin / Relationships
curated by William Kingfisher
May 7 – August 8, 2020
An exhibition of work by:
Anong Migwans Beam
Carl Beam
Ron Benner
Susan Blight
Jenn Cole
David Deleary
Melissa General
Mike MacDonald
Lisa Myers
This exhibition brings together artists whose works convey the importance of relationality in nature by integrating Indigenous knowledge and language in the everyday. Themes include: understanding food production as politics, decolonization methods, and the interaction between local and global concerns. These works are about looking closely at the world and towards the future, considering gardens and our relationships to nature as sites of learning and creation.
Image: Melissa General, Reclamation. Image courtesy of the artist
There is a wealth of sculpture to be explored all across McMaster University campus. Find out the stories behind more than 25 of them via the McMaster Campus Sculpture Tour (website/app). This tour app and website begins at the Museum and guides you to a variety of campus treasures - inside and out of buildings.
Featured sculptures include those accessioned into the collection of the McMaster Museum of Art and those independently commissioned on campus.
Please see our Facebook Page events for updates about Guided Walking Tours led by the museum of art's education team.