2025 Pratt Lecture: After the Scream, a conversation with Shary Boyle and Crystal Mowry
Wednesday, January 15 @ 7:00 pm
Wu Centre (DUNN 113), Mount Allison University
Join Shary Boyle and Crystal Mowry at the 2025 Pratt Lecture for a conversation titled After the Scream. A reception will follow the lecture in the foyer of the Purdy Crawford Centre for the Arts.
Crystal Mowry (she/her) is the Director of Programs at the MacKenzie Art Gallery. She previously held the position of Senior Curator at the Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery where she oversaw the gallery’s exhibitions, collections, and publishing activities for over a decade. Her work often explores the tension between perceived authenticity and troubled forms of representation. As a curator operating primarily within the context of a public art museum, she treats her role as equal parts co-conspirator and translator, often seeking ways to support artists in the development of new projects. Her curatorial work includes group exhibitions such as I’ll be your Mirror, The Perennials, What the Bat Knows, and Romancing the Anthropocene, one of three zones commissioned by the City of Toronto for its annual Nuit Blanche event. Her solo projects with artists Deanna Bowen, Maggie Groat, and Ernest Daetwyler have received Exhibition of the Year Awards from the Ontario Association of Art Galleries (now Galleries Ontario Galeries). In 2020 she was a recipient of a Waterloo Region Arts Award and in 2024 was shortlisted for the Hnatyshyn Foundation Mid-Career Award for Curatorial Excellence. Her writing has appeared in various artist-focused publications on the work of internationally active artists such as Brendan Fernandes, Shary Boyle, and August Klintberg among others. She regularly participates on industry juries and advisories, most notably for the Sobey Art Award (2015), the Scotiabank Photography Award (2021), and the Canadian pavilion for the 2026 Venice Biennale. Crystal was born in Tkaronto (Toronto) where she completed undergraduate studies in sculpture and installation at the Ontario College of Art and Design University before earning a Master of Fine Arts degree at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in (Kjipuktuk) Halifax. She is currently based in Treaty 4 (Regina) where she lives with her family.
Shary Boyle is the recipient of a 2021 honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts from the Ontario College of Art and Design University where she graduated in 1994, before developing a multidisciplinary practice centred on drawing, sculpture and performance. She has created, exhibited, and performed full-time for 25 years, receiving the Gershon Iskowitz Prize in 2009, the Hnatyshan Award in 2010, and representing Canada at the Venice Biennial in 2013. Her solo exhibition Outside the Palace of Me was organized by Toronto’s Gardiner Museum and travelled to The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (2022), the Vancouver Art Gallery (2023) the Museum of Arts and Design in NYC (2023/24) with a final stop at the Mackenzie Art Gallery in Regina in 2024. Shary was thrilled to produce the community arts project Sappyfest for Dummies last summer in Sackville New Brunswick, where she is currently based.
The Pratt Lecture is generously sponsored by the Class of 1957.
Organized by the Pierre Lassonde School of Fine Arts.
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