Andrea Bowers

No Olvidado (Not Forgotten) is the title of one of Andrea Bowers’ largest and most well-known works. Covering three walls of her 2010 exhibition “The Political Landscape” at Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects, the piece consisted of a massive 10-foot-tall drawing that stretched for almost 96 feet. Against a smudgy graphite background, it portrayed the white ghost of a chain-link fence topped with coiled barbed wire, through which shone hundreds of names; each represented someone who died while trying to cross the Mexico/U.S. border.

The list of names featured in the work was sourced from Border Angels, an organization that aims to protect those traveling through the Imperial Valley desert region, the mountains around San Diego County, and the border region itself. Although the format echoed that of Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial, the delicate materials and haunting imagery in Bowers’ piece evoked the shadowy lives of undocumented immigrants in the U.S. Like many of her works, No Olvidado served as a deliberately transient monument to the marginalized and forgotten.

Open Secret (2019) is a large-scale installation of draped printouts documenting the hundreds of men accused of sexual misconduct in the #MeToo era. The work became controversial when it was discovered that Bowers had used graphic photos of the bruised face and body of Helen Donahue, a sexual assault survivor, without Donahue's permission. Donahue was horrified to learn that images she had posted on Twitter in 2017 were being featured in an artwork that would be seen by tens of thousands of people and that reportedly had a price tag of $300,000. The offending images were removed by Art Basel and Bowers issued a formal apology.

#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.

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.

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.

As a feminist and social activist, Bowers' work addresses contemporary political issues such as immigration, environmental activism, and rape, 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.

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.

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).

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.

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. 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.