Skip to main content

Andrea Bowers



Andrea Bowers is well-known as a feminist and social activist. Her art tackles hard and uncomfortable subjects: political, historical, and personal. She was born in 1965 in Ohio into a rather conservative home that was Republican but didn't really participate in politics. Through her liberal art education and her view of issues effecting women, minorities, and the marginalized, she has taken on her very powerful stance on these issues. Bowers makes contemporary issues personal through her work. She takes these large and politically heated issues and narrows them down to the individuals who are actually effected. This makes it personal and real and allows a different point of view on the issue that one might not normally think about if they themselves aren't affected by it.She has followed a path that other social activist artist tend to follow- she was an observer, became a passive commentator through her work, and is now a devoted activist. She is very thoughtful in the way she uses her art to say something. She doesn't tend to show anger or irrational outrage. Her work is quiet and powerful, using negative space to draw attention to the individual and their circumstances. It's very effective.


girlfriends

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Tony Sweat

I had a religion professor at BYU whose undergraduate degree was fine arts, his focus was painting. He wanted to do this as his life's work, but he soon found that his life was being directed in a different path and he went back to school to become a seminary teacher and then a professor at BYU. Luckily for us, he didn't stop painting. His art began to focus on church history. One of my favorite pieces that he has done is of the prophet Jospeh Smith and a one of the people who scribed for him in a room doing the translation of the Book of Mormon. This picture is significant because it is really the only historically accurate artistic interpretation of how most of the Book of Mormon was translated. The Gift and Power of God, by Tony Sweat Tony uses models for his painting and I believe he uses them both in live sessions and from photographs he's taken from the live sessions. His work is often narrative and fills an important nitsch in the Mormon art world: As close as p...
Post a Comment
Read more

Grandpa Chan

Grandpa Chan (Lee Chan-jae, 76) is a Korean water color artist whose practice includes making water colors of the world around him in order to communicate with his grandchildren who live half a world away. He learned Instagram just so he could draw for them. On his account "Drawings for my grandchildren" he posts his images on Instagram along with a story or memory to go along with them. Although he has begun to use his fame to sell prints of his work- all the money he earns goes to a project called  The Unloneliness Project, and initiative from The Foundation for Art & Healing , and to his grandkids' college funds.  When I first started following him on Instagram, he lived in Brazil, but he has since moved back to Korea. His images are moving. Sometimes they tell stories about what is happening in his life at the moment, sometimes the stories are more about what is going on in the world - especially when large world events happen (good or bad). He is poignant and...
Post a Comment
Read more

Kerry James Marshall

Kerry James Marshall, Detail of Souvenir IV, 1998 Kerry James Marshall grew up at the exact time and places that is took to create himself as an artist. He was born in Birmingham, AL in 1955 and grew up in Watts- the projects outside of LA. He now lives and works in Chicago. He is the voice of confrontation. He confronts us with the ideas that maybe we don't think about or possible don't want to think about. His work looks at slavery, marginalization, misconception, and discrimination in the black community. He makes no apologies that his work is meant to be “unequivocally, emphatically black.” His art is also very reminiscent of folk art - with a contemporary edge. In 1978 he graduated from Otis College of Art and Design and he has taught at the School of Art and Design at the University of Illinois at Chicago. His style is unique and his figures are essentially the color black - which is a signature of his work. His art takes you somewhere, a place where you are forced t...
Post a Comment
Read more