Artist, writer and teacher Roewan Crowe lives on the horizon line.
Artist, writer, curator and teacher Roewan Crowe is energized by acts of disruption, radical transformation. Born under the big skies of Saskatchewan and raised in scofflaw Alberta, Crowe left the prairies to deepen her engagement with art and feminism, and to do graduate studies in community psychology and arts-based research at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto. After completing her doctoral studies, a return to the prairies inspired art and writing centered on queer feminist reclamation practices that ask questions about the land. Roewan Crowe is an Associate Professor in the Women’s and Gender Studies Department at the University of Winnipeg and Co-Director of The Institute for Women’s & Gender Studies.
Artist/Research statement: In her artistic practice, Roewan Crowe often enters into fatal wounded landscapes—sometimes violent and xenophobic —to explore possibilities for regeneration. Recent work includes: digShift (ongoing), a decolonizing and environmental reclamation project using site specific performance and multichannel installation to explore the shifting layers of an abandoned gas station; Lifting Stone, a queer femme performance/installation creating intimate poetic encounters; and the queer Western Quivering Land (ARP Books), a gritty feminist meditation on the possibilities of art to reckon with the ongoing legacies of violence and colonization.
Her longstanding community practice is concerned with creating space for and building engaged feminist/queer/artistic communities. Her scholarly work seeks to open meaningful encounters with art through feminist engagement with a particular focus on artistic practitioner knowledges, collaboration, collectivity, and artistic processes. In collaboration with Mentoring Artist for Women’s Art she organized and curated Art Building Community, a project that saw the launch of ten new works and a weekend symposium. Her scholarly work seeks to open meaningful encounters with art through feminist engagement. She is particularly interested in exploring and writing about artistic practitioner knowledges and artistic processes. With collaborator Michelle Meagher, she published the article, “Letting Something Else Happen: A Collaborative Encounter with the Work of Sharon Rosenberg” in Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies.
Recently, as part of the artist collective, CONSTELACIONES, she traveled with artists Helene Vosters, Monica Martinez, Christina Hajjar, and Doris Difarnecio to the Atacama Desert in Chile (2016) to perform and create a monument, an unauthorized sound sculpture with ceramic forms created by Martinez. CONSTELACIONES embodies collective healing through art-making, kinship and vulnerability—rejecting isolation, silence, and disconnection in the face of trauma.
Dr. Roewan Crowe and Dr. Helene Vosters co-edited the open access digital book, Return Atacama: Engaging Histories of Political Violence Through Performance and Durational Witnessing which assembles the many movements, reflections, and practices surrounding hemispheric artist collective CONSTELACIONES’s 2016 performance Return Atacama. This richly visual collection from the award winning HemiPress Gesture Series incorporates photography, video, drone footage, poetry, and prose, to produce a polyphonic experience of this politically urgent performance. Blurring the distinction between artistic and scholarly work, both the performance and this publication, which bears its name, probe the possibilities and limits of transnational creative collaboration, while “challenging the containment of trauma associated with political violence within isolated historical events and disciplinary or geographic locations.”
Dr. Crowe’s most recent endeavour is: the greenhouse artlab: a queer feminist space for making and thinking on the 5th floor of the UWinnipeg library
the greenhouse artlab is a space that focuses on artistic process and queer + feminist ecologies. It opens possibilities for the creation of new artistic works and research; collaboration on art projects with other artists, scholars, and community members; and hosting artist residencies and working with students/community members on artistic/creative projects. Dr. Roewan Crowe began to conceive the greenhouse artlab upon receiving space at the University of Winnipeg (U of W) after the studio space she held in Sparling Hall had been condemned. An abandoned greenhouse space belonging to the Department of Biology had become available after they received a new greenhouse at the U of W’s brand new Richardson College of the Environment. The greenhouse artlab offers multiple possibilities for creating a new kind of artist-research program built around the multiple possibilities of this bright, transparent, removed space situated on the top floor of the library. Not only is it well suited to artistic creation, but it is also intended for growing things. Crowe is steaming-up the greenhouse artlab, highlighting the need to build STEAM, not only STEM spaces in higher education (the added “A” standing for “Arts). The greenhouse artlab also facilitates feminist cultural production by UW students enrolled in the department of Women’s and Gender Studies who are interested in learning about feminist art and artistic practices. The greenhouse artlab also hosts short-term feminist art residencies and public workshops that engage with queer + feminist ecologies, both on and off campus.
Roewan Crowe is an Associate Professor in the Women’s and Gender Studies Department at the University of Winnipeg and Co-Director of The Institute for Women’s & Gender Studies..