Andrea Bowers merges art and social activism to focus on feminist, labor, political, and environmental issues. Grounded in the legacy of feminist art, Bowers’s conceptual and socially engaged work comprises collaborative projects, drawing, installation, and video. The drawings, which include meticulously detailed pencil drawings and large-scale cardboard images sourced from political graphics, serve as empathetic tools. The installations, photographs, and videos reflect the artist’s direct political stance in conversation with current issues and art historical movements, while her participatory projects use activist strategies to reach multiple constituencies and to reconsider the historical record.

In her practice, Bowers uses the formal qualities of scale as a language to discuss politics and activism. Her series of large drawings on found cardboard appropriate political graphics that present images of powerful women made between the late 19th century and today. These works re-present and monumentalize images of women as a powerful political force in and of their individual selves rather than as allegorical representations of liberty, equality, and labor. In her intimate pencil and colored pencil drawings, Bowers renders images of individual protestors sourced from her own collection of photographs taken at protest marches and other demonstrations to draw attention to the labor of individuals participating in collective action.

Bowers was born in 1965 in Ohio, and lives and works in Los Angeles. She received her MFA from the California Institute of the Arts in 1992. Recent solo exhibitions include Andrea Bowers: Exist, Flourish, and Evolve at MoCA Cleveland, Cleveland, OH in 2024; Andrea Bowers, a survey exhibition which opened at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago in 2021 and traveled to the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles in 2022; Grief and Hope, Museum Abteiberg, Mönchengladbach, Germany (2020); Light and Gravity, Weserburg Museum fur modern Kunst, Bremen, Germany (2019-2020); Bureau of Feminism, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2017); and Andrea Bowers: #sweetjane, Pomona College Museum of Art and Pitzer College Art Gallery, Claremont, CA (2014).

Recent group exhibitions include Rewilding, Kunsthaus Baselland, Basel, Switzerland; How to Survive, Anchorage Museum, Anchorage, Alaska (2023); Language in the Time of Miscommunication, Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, Scottsdale, AZ (2023); Working Thought, The Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA (2022); Empowerment, Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Wolfsburg, Germany (2022-2023); New Time: Art and Feminisms in the 21st Century, University of California, Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley, CA (2021);  Stories of Resistance, The Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, St. Louis, Missouri (2021); In Plain Sight, Henry Art Gallery, Seattle, WA (2019-2020); Climate Change Is Real, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, CA (2018);  Half the Picture: A Feminist Look at the Collection, Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY (2018); among others.

Her work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; the Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, DC; the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA; the Tate Modern, London; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and many others.