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Andrea Bowers
Andrea Bowers (born 1965), is an American artist working in a variety of media including video, drawing, and installation. Her work has been exhibited around the world, including museums and galleries in Germany, Greece, and Tokyo. Her work was included in the 2004 Whitney Biennial and 2008 California Biennial. She is on the graduate faculty at Otis College of Art and Design, and is Los Angeles–based.
Andrea was born in Wilmington, Ohio, and grew up in "an apolitical Republican family." Bowers holds an MFA degree from California Institute of the Arts where she got involved with a group of classmates and teachers which caused her to become more socially and politically active. She also holds a BFA degree from Bowling Green State University, Bowling Green, Ohio. By the early 1990s, the Feminist Art Program at California Institute of the Arts was diminishing during the same time Bowers was close to receiving her MFA in 1992. Bowers saw this motion as historically forgetting previous successful women in art. She decided to then maintain historical record of artistic and political movements through her own future art.
As a feminist and social activist, Bowers' work addresses contemporary political issues such as immigration, environmental activism, and women's and worker's rights, within the larger context of American history and protest movements. Bowers regularly invites people who have a stake in the issues that concern her to enter the gallery spaces where she exhibits and directly engage with art world regulars. Examples of this include a series of activist events that took place at Susanne Vielmetter, and her decision to link the opening reception for her show "Mercy Mercy Me" (2009) at Andrew Kreps with an international day of action proposed by climate activist organization 350.org. Bowers also continues to make a series of drawings based on photos of women taken at immigrant rights marches, feminist rallies, gay rights protests, and environmental activism in which the subjects are rendered in isolation on large sheets of otherwise blank paper. In Girlfriends (May Day March, Los Angeles, 2011) a feeling of isolation and vulnerability due to the subjects being out of context is particularly strong.
Bowers embraces her mediums such as drawings, video, photography, and sketches for them being seen as nontraditional. For example, vinyl and graphite were seen as lesser, economically cheaper, and more feminized art mediums. In the 1970s and 1980s, a feminist art movement spread amongst artists over the refusal to work with the medium of oil paints to portray their own political imagery. Bowers tediously seeks out information in older news articles, films and photos to create photorealistic pieces based upon historical events and people.
Her work was included in the 2024 exhibition Making Their Mark: Works from the Shah Garg Collection at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA).
Vieja Gloria (2003) describes the clash between activist John Quigley and Los Angeles County authorities over the proposed removal of "Old Glory," a 400-year-old oak located in Valencia, California. Quigley later convinced Bowers to undergo training in tree climbing and occupation, which she documented in the video Nonviolent Civil Disobedience Training-Tree Sitting Forest Defense (2009). In 2011 she took part in a tree sit in Arcadia, which she also documented. The tree sitting protest helped Bowers to broaden her understanding of her own art and politics.
Sanctuary (2007) is a film that comments on the ways marginalized people create spaces of refuge against overwhelming cultural and political forces. The silent film features Elvira Arellano, an undocumented immigrant who sought refuge in Chicago's Adalberto United Methodist Church. (Arellano and her eight-year-old son were eventually arrested and deported just three weeks after Bowers met with her).
Circle (2009) is a video that depicts four generations of women from the Native Alaskan Gwich’in people speak about their ambivalent relationship with other, non-local, activists against oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Shots of a vast Arctic landscape suggest that petty differences may mean little in the context of the immensity that unites them. Bowers' focus on individual voices humanizes what might otherwise read as petty squabbling in the face of enormous challenges.
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Andrea Bowers
Andrea Bowers (born 1965), is an American artist working in a variety of media including video, drawing, and installation. Her work has been exhibited around the world, including museums and galleries in Germany, Greece, and Tokyo. Her work was included in the 2004 Whitney Biennial and 2008 California Biennial. She is on the graduate faculty at Otis College of Art and Design, and is Los Angeles–based.
Andrea was born in Wilmington, Ohio, and grew up in "an apolitical Republican family." Bowers holds an MFA degree from California Institute of the Arts where she got involved with a group of classmates and teachers which caused her to become more socially and politically active. She also holds a BFA degree from Bowling Green State University, Bowling Green, Ohio. By the early 1990s, the Feminist Art Program at California Institute of the Arts was diminishing during the same time Bowers was close to receiving her MFA in 1992. Bowers saw this motion as historically forgetting previous successful women in art. She decided to then maintain historical record of artistic and political movements through her own future art.
As a feminist and social activist, Bowers' work addresses contemporary political issues such as immigration, environmental activism, and women's and worker's rights, within the larger context of American history and protest movements. Bowers regularly invites people who have a stake in the issues that concern her to enter the gallery spaces where she exhibits and directly engage with art world regulars. Examples of this include a series of activist events that took place at Susanne Vielmetter, and her decision to link the opening reception for her show "Mercy Mercy Me" (2009) at Andrew Kreps with an international day of action proposed by climate activist organization 350.org. Bowers also continues to make a series of drawings based on photos of women taken at immigrant rights marches, feminist rallies, gay rights protests, and environmental activism in which the subjects are rendered in isolation on large sheets of otherwise blank paper. In Girlfriends (May Day March, Los Angeles, 2011) a feeling of isolation and vulnerability due to the subjects being out of context is particularly strong.
Bowers embraces her mediums such as drawings, video, photography, and sketches for them being seen as nontraditional. For example, vinyl and graphite were seen as lesser, economically cheaper, and more feminized art mediums. In the 1970s and 1980s, a feminist art movement spread amongst artists over the refusal to work with the medium of oil paints to portray their own political imagery. Bowers tediously seeks out information in older news articles, films and photos to create photorealistic pieces based upon historical events and people.
Her work was included in the 2024 exhibition Making Their Mark: Works from the Shah Garg Collection at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA).
Vieja Gloria (2003) describes the clash between activist John Quigley and Los Angeles County authorities over the proposed removal of "Old Glory," a 400-year-old oak located in Valencia, California. Quigley later convinced Bowers to undergo training in tree climbing and occupation, which she documented in the video Nonviolent Civil Disobedience Training-Tree Sitting Forest Defense (2009). In 2011 she took part in a tree sit in Arcadia, which she also documented. The tree sitting protest helped Bowers to broaden her understanding of her own art and politics.
Sanctuary (2007) is a film that comments on the ways marginalized people create spaces of refuge against overwhelming cultural and political forces. The silent film features Elvira Arellano, an undocumented immigrant who sought refuge in Chicago's Adalberto United Methodist Church. (Arellano and her eight-year-old son were eventually arrested and deported just three weeks after Bowers met with her).
Circle (2009) is a video that depicts four generations of women from the Native Alaskan Gwich’in people speak about their ambivalent relationship with other, non-local, activists against oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Shots of a vast Arctic landscape suggest that petty differences may mean little in the context of the immensity that unites them. Bowers' focus on individual voices humanizes what might otherwise read as petty squabbling in the face of enormous challenges.