Roewan Crowe is a Canadian feminist artist, writer, curator, and educator. In 2011 she was honoured for her

social justice Social justice is justice in terms of the distribution of wealth, opportunities, and privileges within a society. In Western and Asian cultures, the concept of social justice has often referred to the process of ensuring that individuals fu ...

work in the arts by the Government of Manitoba as part of their celebration of Women in the Arts: Artists Working for Social Change. Her first book of poetry, ''Quivering Land'', was published in 2013 by ARP Books. Roewan Crowe is currently 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. Her creative and scholarly work explores queerness, class, violence, queer ecology, and what it means to be a settler. She lives and works in

Winnipeg Winnipeg () is the capital and largest city of the province of Manitoba in Canada. It is centred on the confluence of the Red and Assiniboine rivers, near the longitudinal centre of North America. , Winnipeg had a city population of 749,6 ...

, Manitoba.

Early life and education

Crowe was born to working class parents in

Saskatoon, Saskatchewan Saskatoon () is the largest city in the Canadian province of Saskatchewan. It straddles a bend in the South Saskatchewan River in the central region of the province. It is located along the Trans-Canada Yellowhead Highway, and has served as t ...

, moving to Spruce Grove,

Alberta Alberta ( ) is one of the thirteen provinces and territories of Canada. It is part of Western Canada and is one of the three prairie provinces. Alberta is bordered by British Columbia to the west, Saskatchewan to the east, the Northwest Ter ...

in 1969. After completing an honours bachelor of arts degree at the

University of Alberta The University of Alberta, also known as U of A or UAlberta, is a public research university located in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. It was founded in 1908 by Alexander Cameron Rutherford,"A Gentleman of Strathcona – Alexander Cameron Rutherfor ...

, Crowe moved to Toronto to complete graduate studies in community psychology and arts-based research at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the

University of Toronto The University of Toronto (UToronto or U of T) is a public research university in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, located on the grounds that surround Queen's Park. It was founded by royal charter in 1827 as King's College, the first institution ...

. After she completed her doctoral studies, she returned to the prairies.

Art

Roewan Crowe creates work through the use of performance, installation, video, text, and theory, and her recent work creates intimate landscapes, making space for feelings, connection, and

queer ''Queer'' is an umbrella term for people who are not heterosexual or cisgender. Originally meaning or , ''queer'' came to be used pejoratively against those with same-sex desires or relationships in the late 19th century. Beginning in the lat ...

encounters. Noted work includes: stop-motion animation ''Queer Grit'' which has traveled to video and film festivals internationally; ''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 ''My Monument'', a multimedia exhibition with artists cam bush, Steven Leyden Cochrane and Paul Robles. That video uses Crowe's book ''Quivering Land'' to explore vanished feminist/queer/alternative cultural sites. Her longstanding community practice is concerned with creating space for and building engaged feminist/queer/artistic communities . In collaboration with

Mentoring Artists for Women's Art Mentoring Artists for Women's Art (MAWA) is a feminist visual arts education center based in Winnipeg, Manitoba. Created in 1984, this non-profit organization encourages and supports the intellectual and creative development of women in the visual ...

(MAWA) in 2008, she curated Art Building Community, a project that saw the launch of ten new works and a weekend symposium.

Writing

Crowe is the author of the book ''Quivering Land'' as well as scholarly articles and several chapbooks.

''Quivering Land''

''Quivering Land'' is a queer Western, engaging with poetics and politics to reckon with the legacies of violence and colonization in the West. Reviews of ''Quivering Land'' include: '' Herizons: Women's News and Feminist Views'', and

Canadian Women in Literary Arts Canadian Women in Literary Arts (CWILA) was a Canadian non-profit organization that was founded in Spring 2012 and active until early 2019. CWILA was the foremost compiler of gender-related statistics on Canadian book-review culture. Beyond simply r ...

, an inclusive national literary organization.

Selected Scholarly Articles

Roewan Crowe is particularly interested in exploring, and writing about, artistic practitioner knowledges and artistic processes. In 2014, with collaborator Michelle Meagher, she published the article, "Letting Something Else Happen: A Collaborative Encounter with the Work of Sharon Rosenberg." Other scholarly writing includes: "So You Want our Ghetto Stories: Oral History at Ndinawe Youth Resource Centre" with Robin Jarvis Brownlie. Remembering Mass Violence: Oral History, New Media and Performance, S. High, E. Little, Thi Ry Duong (eds). Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014, pp 203–217. "Slow Art in a Time of Flash Floods: What's a Queer Feminist Settler To Do?" Multimedia essay, Studio XX Electronic Review, .dpi, Issue No. 25, "Inevitable Transitions," 2013. "digShift: a Queer Reclamation of the Imagined West," Multimedia essay, No More Potlucks: Online Journal of Contemporary Arts, "Wound," Issue 7, Jan. 2010. "Feminist Encounters with the Hollywood Western." T. M. Chen, D. S. Churchill (eds). London and New York: Routledge Press, 2007, pp 113–130. "Crafting Tales of Trauma: Will this Winged Monster Fly?" Provoked by Art: Theorizing Arts-informed Inquiry, L. Neilsen, J. G. Knowles, & A. L. Cole (editors). Halifax: Backalong Books, 2004, pp 123–132. "Angelic Artful Encounters." Journal of Curriculum Theorizing Special Issue: Performances in Arts-Based Inquiry, Mullen, C. A. & Diamond, P., Spring 2001, pp 81–94. "She Offers Fragments." The Art of Writing Inquiry, L. Neilsen, J. G. Knowles, & A. L Cole, editors, Backalong Books, 2001, pp 125–131.

References

External links

Roewan Crowe official website

''Art Building Community website''

''ARP Books''
{{DEFAULTSORT:Crowe, Roewan 21st-century Canadian poets 21st-century Canadian women writers Artists from Saskatoon Art writers Canadian feminists Canadian women poets Canadian LGBT poets Queer artists Queer feminists Queer writers Writers from Saskatoon Year of birth missing (living people) Living people 21st-century Canadian LGBT people Canadian LGBT academics