On the occasion of the exhibition Traces in the Dark presented at the Institute of Contemporary Art, the University of Pennsylvania, UnionDocs presents an artist presentation, screening and conversation with the Toronto-based artist Deanna Bowen. She presents the findings from her meticulous research on Canadian and American Ku Klux Klan activities in performance, prints, bookwork, and collage at ICA in a group exhibition about the things that lie in the margins of recorded history. Through this body of work, Bowen advances her argument that iconic images of civil rights protest ironically occlude the Klan’s activities, and, in response, she shines light on the invisible perpetrators. At UnionDocs, she discusses her research and screens her 2012 short film Paul Good at Notasulga, based on an original audio recording from 1964 of the late civil rights journalist Paul Good’s coverage of a violent incident. Liz Park, Whitney-Lauder Curatorial Fellow at ICA and the curator of the exhibition, will moderate a conversation about the burden and privileges of being the keeper of an archive and of being the storyteller with Bowen and the late journalist’s daughter Regan Good.
Traces in the Dark is on view at ICA through March 22, with performances by Deanna Bowen presented on select Wednesdays and Sundays. Please check the website for details: icaphila.org.
The price of admission to this UnionDocs event includes a complimentary copy of the Traces in the Dark exhibition catalogue, normally on sale for $12.
Conceptualized and produced as an analogue of the exhibition of the same title, Traces in the Dark is a collection of essays and artist folios that nest inside each other. The artist folios are: Imaginary Archive by Gregory Sholette and Olga Kclosedkina; “Hunting the Nigs” in Philadelphia: or an alternative chronology of events leading up to and one year beyond the Columbia Avenue Uprisings, August 28-30, 1964. by Deanna Bowen; and We were the mist, the smoke curtain, that hid everything by Harold Mendez. A curatorial essay by Liz Park and a new text by Sholette, “Heart of Darkness: 1956, 2015, 2065,” contextualize the artist folios.
Paul Good at Notasulga, Canada/US, 2012, 20 mins.
– Paul Good in Nashville, interviewing John Lewis and Lester McKinnie (Photo: Archie E. Allen)
– Monson Motor Lodge, St. Augustine, FL, 1964.
Installation photos by Aaron Igler/Greenhouse Media
Deanna Bowen is a descendant of the Alabama- and Kentucky-born Black Prairie pioneers of Amber Valley and Campsie, Alberta. Winner of the 
Liz Park is a curator and writer from Vancouver, Canada, currently based in Philadelphia as Whitney-Lauder Curatorial Fellow at the Institute of Contemporary Art. After receiving an MA in Art History/Curatorial Studies at the University of British Columbia, she held various curatorial positions including Curator-in-Residence at Western Front, Co-Director/Curator of Access Gallery, and Public Programmer at the Vancouver Art Gallery. She curated a number of exhibitions internationally including at the Glenbow Museum in Calgary, the Kitchen in New York, and Seoul Art Space_Geumcheon in Seoul, and her writing has been published by Afterall Online, Performa Magazine, Fillip, Yishu: A Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, Pluto Press, and Ryerson University Press, among other places. The topics of her curatorial research and writing include the politics of visibility, the representation of violence, artist-run institutions, and non-Western art in the global context of contemporary art. In 2011–2012, Park was Helena Rubinstein Fellow in the Curatorial Program at the Whitney Independent Study Program.
Regan Good is a poet and writer living in Brooklyn. She currently teaches creative writing at the Fashion Institute. She is writing a memoir (tentatively called The Good Family) about growing up in Westport, CT in the sixties and seventies when the town had a soul and money didn’t matter as much. Her father’s work during the Civil Rights Movement is at the heart of the memoir.
