Presented as part of The Speculative Archive: Contemporary Black Experimental Film and Video, Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich & Deanna Bowen in person, in conversation with Christopher Harris and Allyson Nadia Field.

Sum of the Parts: What Can be Named (Deanna Bowen, 2010, 19’, digital)

Deanna Bowen’s 20 minute color video work sum of the parts: what can be named (2010), is a recorded oral performance that recounts the journey of the Bowen family from its earliest documented history in Clinton, Jones County, Georgia in 1815, as told by Bowen herself.

The Paul Good Papers (Deanna Bowen, 2012, 23’, digital)

The Paul Good Papers was an interdisciplinary residency co-commissioned by Gallery 44 and the Images Festival of Independent Film, Video & New Media to commemorate Images’ 25th Anniversary. The project highlights the role of the Ku Klux Klan in opposing school integration and the beating of photojournalist Vernon Merritt III.

Outfox the Grave (Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich, 2020, 5’, digital)

A short film and a spell of protection.

Too Bright to See (Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich, 2024, 25’, digital)

Weaves archival materials with cinematic narrative scenes filmed with an unconventional and modern cast. Drawing inspiration from Caribbean aesthetics and Surrealist artwork, this film installation brings attention to new aspects of Roussi-Césaire’s legacy that are undocumented in the public arena, while addressing the broader question of the continued erasure of women from historical accounts.

Deanna Bowen is a descendant of two Alabama- and Kentucky-born Black Prairie pioneer families from Amber Valley and Campsie, Alberta. Bowen’s family history has been the concern of her auto-ethnographic interdisciplinary works since the early 1990s. In recent years, her work has involved close examination of her family’s migration and their connections to Vancouver’s Hogan’s Alley and Black Strathcona, the “All-Black” towns of Oklahoma, the Kansas Exoduster migrations, and the Ku Klux Klan in Canada and the US. Sum of the Parts: What Can be Named (2010) is a performed oral history recounting the “disremembered” journey of the Bowen family from its earliest documented history in Clinton, Jones County, Georgia in 1815, as told by Bowen herself. The Paul Good Papers (2012) is a multimedia installation and performance project based on the filmmaker’s research into the third wave Ku Klux Klan and its connections to Canada. The video being screened originated as a looping video projection based on Good’s recording of school integration attempts in Notasulga, AL in February 1964.

Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich is a filmmaker and artist who makes films concerned with the inner worlds of Black women. Valuing opacity and abstraction over linear narrative, Hunt-Ehrlich blends narrative and documentary elements to create surrealist interpretations of Black history and experiences—stories underrepresented in the Western film canon despite the continuous presence of Black filmmakers since cinema’s inception. Designed as an installation piece, Too Bright to See (2024) weaves archival materials with cinematic narrative scenes filmed with an unconventional and modern cast. Drawing inspiration from Caribbean aesthetics and Surrealist artwork, this work brings attention to new aspects of Suzanne Roussi-Césaire’s legacy that are undocumented in the public arena, while addressing the broader question of the continued erasure of women from historical accounts. Preceded by Outfox the Grave (2020), described by Hunt-Ehrlich as “a short film and a spell of protection.”

Made possible by the generous co-sponsorship of the Richard and Mary L. Gray Center for Arts & Inquiry, the Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory, Chicago Studies, the Karla Scherer Center for the Study of American Culture, the Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture, Department of Cinema and Media Studies, Department of Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity, and the Center for the Study of Gender & Sexuality.

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Tags: Chicago, Hyde Park, Logan Center, The Speculative Archive: Deanna Bowen & Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich