Deborah Koenker

Last updated

Deborah Koenker
Born1949
Chicago, Illinois, United States
NationalityAmerican-born Canadian
Education
Known for Installation art

Deborah Koenker (born 1949) is an interdisciplinary artist. [1] Her installation art explores social and feminist themes using a wide range of media. [2] She is interested in a number of issues, such as social justice. [3] She is also a writer and curator. [1]

Contents

Career

Deborah Koenker was born in 1949 [4] in Chicago. [1] After she received her BA at the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1971, she did post-graduate studies at Saint Martin's School of Art, in London, England (1972-1973) and then in 1973 moved to Vancouver where, in 1975, she became one of the founding members of the Malaspina Print Society, a cooperative artist studio, [5] and its first director. [3] [1] Her early practice was aesthetically object-based, printmaking and sculpture that evolved into installation art which she found fascinating because in creating it she worked with space and couldn`t predict the result. [6] She went back to art school in 1985 and received her MFA from Claremont Graduate University, Claremont, California. [7] In 1992, she left behind her object-based work. [7]

Exhibitions

For the past three decades Koenker has exhibited prints, drawings, sculpture and mixed media installations in public galleries and artist-run centres in Canada, the USA and Mexico, [2] but in time, crossed over from traditional to non-traditional practice. [8] In 1999, she did an installation for her solo show Adrift at the Open Space Gallery in Victoria which travelled to the Richmond Art Gallery in Richmond, BC. The show conveyed dealing with daily illness, in Koenker`s case, Chronic Fatigue Immune Dysfunction Syndrome (CFIDS). [9]

In 2002, Koenker began Learning to Draw, embroidery over drawings and engravings of the Old Masters (still ongoing). [10] In 2003, she became interested in the Mexican agricultural workers in the Okanagan and began work on a project that took three years to complete and involved 84 volunteer participants, Las Desaparecidas (The Missing ones), shown in 2006 in Mexico, the U.S. and Canada. [8] She developed the show with the help of people living in the town of Tapalpa, Jalisco, Mexico, who participated in creating a long textile piece with their embroidered fingerprints. Together with digital photos of these participants and the names or photos of victims, it was a tribute to the hundreds of missing and murdered women and girls in Ciudad Juárez and Chihuahua City — mostly poor factory workers employed in the primarily US owned manufacturing plants along the border. [11]

In 2016, Koenker completed a solo exhibition at the Kelowna Art Gallery on migrant Mexican farmworkers hired by the Okanagan Valley’s fruit orchards and vineyards titled Deborah Koenker: Grapes and Tortillas. [3] (The words "Grapes and Tortillas" are from a poem by Lawrence Ferlinghetti). [12] Through the show, Koenker hoped to give viewers some sense of the culture of Mexico, including its darker side. [13] The show was a tribute to the farmworkers, their life, beliefs and what matters to them. [1] As well as portraits in photographs of 160 of the men and women, Koenker added other elements to the overall installation. The largest of these referred to Mexican shrines. There was also a facsimile of a Mexican kitchen, and a shrine to the Virgin of Guadalupe, accompanied by a musical soundtrack. [1] In 2016 as well, she did a residency/exhibition for the Klondike Institute of Art and Culture in Dawson City, Yukon, a collaborative project with Karen Kazmer aka Volcano Collective. [3]

Public collections

Her work is included in many public collections, such as the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria. A full list is given in the catalogue for Deborah Koenker: Grapes and Tortillas, pages 141-142.

Curatorial work

Koenker`s practice also involves curatorial projects, catalogue essays and reviews, such as the exhibition which she curated, Wanda Koop`s Face To Face, in 2009-2010 at the Richmond Art Gallery, Richmond, B.C. [2] In 2016, she left her position as an Associate Professor in Visual Arts at Emily Carr University in Vancouver to concentrate on her art practice. [2] [14]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Kelowna</span> City in British Columbia, Canada

Kelowna is a city on Okanagan Lake in the Okanagan Valley in the southern interior of British Columbia, Canada. It serves as the head office of the Regional District of Central Okanagan. The name Kelowna derives from the Okanagan word kiʔláwnaʔ, referring to a grizzly bear.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Peachland</span> District municipality in British Columbia, Canada

Peachland is a district municipality in the Okanagan Valley on the west side of Okanagan Lake in British Columbia, Canada. It was founded in 1899 by John Moore Robinson, although the region had long been home to the Okanagan people. Peachland is approximately half-an-hour's drive south of the city of Kelowna and about a 20-minute drive north of Summerland. The Okanagan Valley is very narrow in the area and there are few terraces that mark former lake levels and the former lake bottom. As a result, the city is largely located on a steep sidehill. Like many other areas in the Okanagan, Peachland is rapidly growing, with new residents coming from all across Canada. Across the lake from Peachland is Rattlesnake Island, home of the legendary Ogopogo. Peachland is approximately 370 km from Vancouver, British Columbia, on the British Columbia south coast.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Kelowna International Airport</span> International airport in British Columbia, Canada

Kelowna International Airport is a Canadian airport located approximately 10 minutes or 6.2 nautical miles northeast of Kelowna, British Columbia, Canada, on Highway 97.

Germaine Koh is a Malaysian-born and Canadian conceptual artist based in Vancouver. Her works incorporate the artistic styles of neo-conceptual art, minimalism, and environmental art, and is concerned with the significance of everyday actions, familiar objects and common places.

The UBC's Okanagan Campus is one of the University of British Columbia's campus' located in Kelowna, British Columbia, Canada.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ben Stewart</span> Canadian politician

Benjamin Richard Stewart is a Canadian politician, who has represented the riding of Kelowna West in the Legislative Assembly of British Columbia since 2018 as a member of the British Columbia Liberal Party. He previously represented the riding of Westside-Kelowna from 2009 to 2013.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Barbara Astman</span> Canadian artist (born 1950)

Barbara Anne Astman is a Canadian artist who has recruited instant camera technology, colour xerography, and digital scanners to explore her inner thoughts.

Sylvia Tait is a Canadian abstract painter and printmaker.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Okanagan Valley (wine region)</span> Wine-producing area in British Columbia, Canada

The Okanagan Valley wine region, located within the region of the same name in the British Columbia Interior, is Canada's second-largest wine producing area. Along with the nearby Similkameen Valley, the approximately 8,619 acres of vineyards planted in the Okanagan account for more than 80% of all wine produced in British Columbia, and are second in economic importance for wine production to the Niagara Peninsula of Ontario. Some 182 licensed wineries existed from south to north in the valley in 2018, with many situated along the 135 km (84 mi)-long Okanagan Lake and its tributaries and downstream lakes, including Skaha Lake, Vaseux Lake, and Osoyoos Lake. The Okanagan has diverse terrain that features many different microclimates and vineyard soil types, contributing characteristics which are part of an Okanagan terroir.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ericka Walker</span> American artist and printmaker (born 1981)

Ericka Walker is an American artist and printmaker. She lives and works in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sonny Assu</span> Ligwildaxw Kwakwakawakw contemporary artist

Sonny Assu is a Ligwilda'xw Kwakwaka'wakw contemporary artist. Assu's paintings, sculptures, prints, installations, and interventions are all infused with his wry humour which is a tool to open the conversation around his themes of predilections: consumerism, colonization and imperialism.

Marina Roy is a visual artist, educator and writer based in Vancouver, British Columbia.

Randy Lee Cutler is a writer, academic, educator and artist working in Vancouver, British Columbia. She has a PhD in Cultural History from the Royal College of Art. She currently works as a Professor at Emily Carr University of Art and Design in the Faculty of Art.

Charlene Vickers is an Anishnabe, specifically Ojibwa, artist from Kenora, Ontario currently living and working in Vancouver, British Columbia. She graduated from the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design and received an MFA from Simon Fraser University. She is on the board of directors at grunt gallery in Vancouver, BC. Her work Sleeman Makazin is in the permanent collections at the Museum of Anthropology at University of British Columbia (UBC) in Vancouver, BC. She creates political work and, in one work, she responds to "the plight of missing and murdered aboriginal women in British Columbia".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Arabella Campbell</span> Canadian artist

Arabella Campbell is a Canadian artist based in Vancouver, British Columbia. She graduated with a Bachelor of Arts from the University of British Columbia in 1996, and a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Emily Carr University of Art and Design in 2002. She attended the San Francisco Art Institute from 1998 to 2000. She has exhibited locally, nationally, and internationally. She works out of a warehouse studio in False Creek Flats, Vancouver.

Claudia Cuesta is a Colombian artist based in Sechelt, British Columbia.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Elizabeth Zvonar</span> Canadian artist

Elizabeth Zvonar is a Canadian contemporary artist who works primarily with mixed-media collage and sculpture based in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. She is currently represented by Daniel Faria Gallery, Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

Diyan Achjadi is a Vancouver-based printmaker, drawer and animator whose practice explores themes of cross-culture imaginings, influences and contaminations. She was born in Jakarta, Indonesia to a West-Javanese father and English-Canadian mother.

Merike Talve was a Canadian curator, artist and independent writer who lived and worked in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. Her body of work was centred on Contemporary Artists exhibiting in Vancouver in the 1980s. Her writing contributed to the documentation of Vancouver art exhibition related activities during this time period. She was known for her writing and curatorial activities related to contemporary art, including installation art, time-based media art, and the feminist art movement.

David T. Alexander is a Canadian painter, known for breathing new life into the landscape tradition of Canada as well as for working in a serious and ambitious manner to reinvigorate the contemporary practice of landscape painting.

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 "Deborah Koenker". www.connect.ecuad.ca. Emily Carr University, Vancouver. Retrieved February 25, 2021.
  2. 1 2 3 4 "Alumni". sfai.org. SANTA FE ART INSTITUTE. Retrieved February 25, 2021.
  3. ↑ "Artist's in Canada". app.pch.gc.ca. Government of Canada. October 17, 2012. Retrieved February 25, 2021.
  4. ↑ "Malaspina Printmakers Society, History and Mandate". www.malaspinaprintmakers.com. Malaspina Printmakers Society. Archived from the original on March 19, 2021. Retrieved February 25, 2021.
  5. ↑ "Deborah Koenker interview at the Kelowna Art Gallery, Jul 20, 2016". www.youtube.com. Kelowna Art Gallery. Retrieved February 25, 2021.
  6. 1 2 Wylie 2016, p. 31.
  7. 1 2 Wylie 2016, p. 35.
  8. ↑ "Adrift". openspace.ca. Open Space Gallery in Victoria, BC. Retrieved February 26, 2021.[ permanent dead link ]
  9. ↑ Wylie 2016, p. 33.
  10. ↑ "las desaparecidas". www.richmondartgallery.org. Richmond Art Gallery, Richmond, BC. Retrieved February 25, 2021.
  11. ↑ Wylie 2016, p. 29.
  12. ↑ Wylie 2016, p. 36.
  13. ↑ "Deborah Koenker". www.malaspinaprintmakers.com. Malaspina Printmakers Society. Retrieved February 25, 2021.

Bibliography

This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.