Andrea Bowers

Andrea Bowers (born 1965) is a Los Angeles–based 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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).

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.

Your Donations Do Our Work (2009) was a two-month project created alongside feminist colleague Suzanne Lacy.Your Donations Do Our Work was an exhibition where a community thrift store located in University of California, Riverside Sweeney Art Gallery, aimed to collect undesired items from the members of the community.

These donated items would then be refurbished by volunteers and distributed to a “barter-system like store” in Laton, California where Master of Fine Arts students attending Otis College exchanged these renovated items with consumers for community organization work.

Bowers and Lacy stated that their real goal was to observe what “gender, labor, class, and race” seem like on a more personal community level.

The idea of integration between multigenerational feminists lead to the construction of this collaboration.

In this video (2010) Bowers depicts environmental activist Tim DeChristopher speaking on camera about his sabotage of a 2008 government auction that was to make 150,000 acres of untouched Utah land available for oil and gas drilling.

His account of deliberately fraudulent bidding is intercut with panoramic footage of the territory that was up for grabs; in each sequence, a tiny speck in the distance grows until the viewer can see that it is Bowers herself, carrying a slate on which she writes that location's parcel number.

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 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.

Transformer Display for Community Fundraising (2011) was created in collaboration with artist Olga Koumoundouros.

Initially staged in Los Angeles, it consisted of a bricolage-based transient sculpture designed to raise money for and disseminate information about local activist organizations and neighborhood-based charities.

A further incarnation at Art Basel Miami Beach (2011), titled Transformer: Display of Community Information And Activation, took the form of a cluster of activist kiosks and a replica of the semi-legendary Miami homeless camp Umoja Village, which burned down mysteriously in 2007 after the city's efforts to remove it via legal means proved ineffective.

#sweetjane (2014) explores the Steubenville, Ohio, rape case and the social media-driven activism that brought the young men responsible to trial.

At the Pitzer College Art Galleries was installed a 70-foot-long drawing of the text messages sent between the teenagers in the 48 hours after the assault on the young woman, who is known in the media and throughout the trial as Jane Doe.