Andrea Bowers

Andrea Bowers (born 1965) is a Los Angeles-based American artist working in a variety of media including video, drawing, and installation. As a feminist and social activist, Bowers' work often invokes contemporary political issues, American history, and protest. Her work was included in the 2004 Whitney Biennial and 2008 California Biennial.

Andrea was born in Wilmington, Ohio, and grew up in "an apolitical Republican family." She holds an MFA degree from California Institute of the Arts. She also holds a BFA degree from Bowling Green State University, Bowling Green, Ohio.

Bowers' recent work addresses such topics as immigration, environmental activism, and rape. A 2014 solo exhibition at the Pomona College Museum of Art, #sweetjane, drew on research the artist conducted on the 2012 Steubenville High School rape case in Ohio. This exhibition draws attention to women's rights and rape culture, highlighting experiences of violence against women.

Her work has been exhibited around the world, including museums and galleries in Germany, Greece, and Tokyo.

Although Bowers' works have been strongly political for most of the last decade, the tone is generally meditative rather than contentious. Her art bears witness to the human cost of ideological conflict, often revealing divisions among allies and the ways good intentions don't ensure open communication. In the video Circle (2009), 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.

Even before her projects became overtly political, they often revealed an unmistakable concern with finding the individual within the collective. Her 1997 project, Spectacular Appearances, consisted of a set of videos and drawings documenting the behavior of spectators at sporting events and other large public gatherings. Ostensibly a critique of mass culture, its central insight is about the loss of subjective experience as we are seduced by spectacle. Similarly in Bowers' later projects, the distractions of propaganda and mass media can blind us to the experience of marginalized others, just as they can blind us to our own experience.

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