Artist, writer, curator and professor Roewan Crowe is energized by wild acts of imagination and radical transformation.
Artist, writer, curator and professor Roewan Crowe is energized by wild acts of imagination and radical transformation.
Roewan Crowe
artist | writer | professor
Works include: Violet’s Impossible Garden, hum of the blue hive, how to 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.
Their 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 they 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.
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.”