The Hearth Gallery (Bowen Island Arts Council), partnering with Bowen Pride Society, is planning Bowen Pride Festival (2026), a community-based and multidisciplinary festival featuring a dynamic mix of art exhibitions and cultural events to celebrate LGBTQIA+ identities and lives as well as the coming-together of the community that we all belong to.

We welcome proposals from 2SLBGTQIA+ artists in all media styles: 2D, 3D, literary, and beyond—provided all work is original and created by the artist. Art in cultural styles to which the artist has no ancestral or cultural connection will not be considered. We encourage artists to use this year’s theme as a starting point. Take the freedom to explore the intersections of queerness, identity, and belonging in your work.

The title of this queer arts show at the Hearth gallery is “Hello, My Name is…,” an open-ended introduction that is meant to raise critical questions about the relationship among identity, art, and community. We seek, in presenting this opening, to encourage the public to consider a range of general questions: how do you feel when self-identifying or labelling? What are the comforts and challenges of labeling and identity categories? We will also focus conversation on issues of gender and naming, to enable the public to consider why we should have conversations about gender and sexual identities and expressions in local communities in Canada; how we give voice and offer space as a form of activism during precarious times for gender and sexual minority people; and - most importantly, for our Arts project - what Queer-identified artists can tell us about our world in holistic terms.

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