For over thirty years, Andrea Bowers (American, b. 1965) has made art across a variety of mediums, from video to colored pencil to installation art, that activates. Her work combines an artistic practice with activism and advocacy, speaking to deeply entrenched social and political inequities as well as the generations of activists working to create a fairer and more just world.
In 2023, Andrew Kreps Gallery presented Bowers' sixht solo show with the gallery, titled Joy is an Act of Resistance. Other recent solo exhibitions include: Exist, Flourish, Evolve, Museum of Contemporary Art, Cleveland, OH (2024), Moving in Space without Asking Permission, Fondazione Furla and GAM – Galleria d’Arte Moderna, Milan, Italy (2022), Andrea Bowers, curated by Michael Darling and Connie Butler, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2022) was before at Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2021), Energy with Intention, Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects, Los Angeles (2021), Grief and Hope, Abteiberg Museum, Mönchengladbach, Germany (2020), Think of Our Future, Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York (2020), Light and Gravity, Weserburg Museum, Bremen, Germany (2019) Climate Change is Real, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, CA (2019), Hammer Projects: Andrea Bowers, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2017), Womxn Workers of the World Unite!, Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati (2017), Andrea Bowers: Sanctuary, Bronx Museum, New York (2016), In Situ 1 - Andrea Bowers, Espace Culturel Louis Vuitton, Paris (2014), #sweetjane, Pomona and Pitzer College Museum of Art, Claremont, (2014), The Weight of Relevance, Wiener Secession, Vienna, traveled to The Power Plant, Toronto (2007).
Her work, is currently included in the group show Ordinary People: Photorealism and the Work of Art since 1968, at MOCA The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA, on view through May 4, 2025. In addition, Bowers has participated in other numerous group exhibitions, which include: Get in the Game: Sports and Contemporary Culture, SFMOMA, San Francisco (2023), Dear Earth, Hayward Gallery, Southbank Centre, London (2023), New Time: Art and Feminism in the 21st Century, Berkeley Art Museum, Berkeley (2021), Stories of Resistance, Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis, MO (2021), It’s Urgent, Luma Westbau, Zurich (2020), Women take the Floor, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (2019), Agora, The High Line, New York (2018), Power to the People. Political Art Now, Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt (2018), Documenta 14, Fridericianum, Kassel (2017), La Terra Inquieta, Triennale di Milano, Milan (2017), The Revolution Will Not Be Gray, Aspen Art Museum, Aspen (2016), Drawing Now, Albertina, Vienna (2015). Bowers’ work is held in the permanent collections of The Hammer Museum of Art, Los Angeles, MoMA, New York, The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington DC, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Tate Modern, London and Museum Abteiberg, Moenchengladbach, Germany, among others.
Bortolami, James Cohan, kaufmann repetto, Anton Kern, Andrew Kreps, and kurimanzutto are pleased to present the inaugural exhibition at their new shared space, The Campus, in Claverack, NY. Embracing a collaborative model, the galleries have turned an abandoned former school building into a platform for dynamic cultural exchange. Organized by Timo Kappeller, the inaugural exhibition will run from June 29 through October 27, 2024.
Fondazione Furla and GAM – Galleria d’Arte Moderna of Milan are proud to present Moving in Space without Asking Permission, an Andrea Bowers exhibition curated by Bruna Roccasalva. Andrea Bowers’s first solo show in an Italian institution, Moving in Space without Asking Permission offers an immersive experience within the work of the artist and her commitment to the struggle for gender equality and women’s emancipation.
For more than 30 years, the Los Angeles–based artist Andrea Bowers (b. 1965, Wilmington, Ohio) has made art that activates. She combines artistic practice with activism and advocacy, speaking to deeply entrenched inequities as well as the generations of activists working to create a more just world. Bowers has built an international reputation as a chronicler of contemporary history, documenting activism as it unfolds and collecting research on the front lines of protest. Her practice contends with issues such as immigration rights, workers’ rights, climate justice, and women’s rights, illustrating the shared pursuit of justice that connects them.
This is the first museum retrospective surveying over two decades of Bowers's practice. Highlights of the exhibition include Memorial to Arcadia Woodlands Clear-Cut (2013) and My Name Means Future (2020). These two works, both focused on issues related to environmental justice, highlight the range of mediums employed by the artist. The former is a large-scale sculpture based on her involvement with tree-sitting activists protesting the destruction of old-growth trees in California; the latter is a video that features Tokata Iron Eyes, a young Indigenous rights activist whose ancestral lands have been threatened by the Dakota Access Pipeline project.
Andrea Bowers is co-organized by Michael Darling, former James W. Alsdorf Chief Curator at the MCA, and Connie Butler, Chief Curator at The Hammer Museum. It is presented in the Griffin Galleries of Contemporary Art on the museum's fourth floor.
Through documenting contemporary activists focused on women’s rights, migrant justice, workers’ rights and climate justice, Andrea Bowers is committed to an intersectional feminism that dismantles gender privilege and builds community that collectively cares for one another. Her multivalent art practice documents and honors the activists whose everyday actions forge meaningful change. The Visiting Artists Lecture Series is organized by Art Studio faculty and master of fine arts candidates. It invites some of the most compelling practitioners and thinkers working today to UC Davis— including nationally and internationally recognized artists, critics and curators—for public lectures, readings and critiques with students and faculty across disciplines. Organized by the Department of Art and Art History. Co-sponsored by the UC Davis, College of Letters and Science and the Manetti Shrem Museum.
In a large solo exhibition entitled grief and hope, Museum Abteiberg presents the multi-media oeuvre of American artist Andrea Bowers, a crucial body of work that focuses on environmentalism, ecofeminism and climate justice.
Political commitment and artistic work can not be separated for the US-American Andrea Bowers (born 1965 in Ohio, lives in Los Angeles). For over two decades, she has stood for an artistic position that combines thoughtful aesthetic practice with a political attitude from a feminist perspective. Civil resistance and its translation into an artistic language find in their work a skillful balance, uniting socially relevant content with conceptual and formal approaches. Their engagement with different forms of nonviolent protest is motivated by a historical awareness and archival curiosity about the history of political activism and feminism, as well as their visual language.
Democracy appears to be in crisis, the era of post-democracy has already dawned. The symptoms are manifold: populist leaders, fake news, autocratic backlash, totalitarian propaganda, and neoliberalism. For some time, however, society has also been experiencing the path of the art’s return to the political—a re-politicization is palpable. Images of demonstrations in the media have shaped public perception in recent years: waving flags, posters, or banners on streets and squares, at the Women’s March, in anti-Brexit campaigns, or in Occupy actions. There have been renewed waves of protest relating to very diverse contexts, countries, and political systems. This has affected artists as well. They create works that they regard as instruments of critique and explicitly motivated by politics.
