Deborah Koenker

Deborah Koenker (born 1949) is an interdisciplinary artist. Her installation art explores social and feminist themes using a wide range of media. She is interested in a number of issues, such as social justice. She is also a writer and curator. in Chicago. and its first director. She went back to art school in 1985 and received her MFA from Claremont Graduate University, Claremont, California. In 1992, she left behind her object-based work.

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,

In 2002, Koenker began Learning to Draw, embroidery over drawings and engravings of the Old Masters (still ongoing). 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. 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.

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.