Andrea Bowers
Photo: Julie SadowskyOpening Talk: Andrea Bowers
About the Event
Join a lively discussion celebrating the opening of Andrea Bowers's mid-career survey at the MCA. Bowers is known for her intimate collaborations with environmental and social justice activists that inspire her artwork. Her research-based practice encourages viewers to visualize the impactful efforts and stories of these advocates for immigration, worker's rights, environmental justice, and women's rights. In this conversation, Bowers discusses her work as an artist, how her work has developed through the teachings of other artists and activists, and the questions she asks as she builds work out of these encounters.
The evening will begin with an introduction to the exhibition by curators Connie Butler and Michael Darling, followed by an intimate conversation between Bowers and her close friend, curator Lucía Sanromán, who is also a writer featured in the exhibition catalogue.
About The Speakers
Lucía Sanromán
Lucia Sanromán 2020
Photo: Yvonne VenegasLucía Sanromán is the Director of the Laboratorio de Arte Alameda, the premier experimental kunsthalle in Mexico City where since joining in March 2018 she has implemented a program that balances experimentation with social commitment to local neighborhood ecologies and dynamics through programs and exhibitions, including the recent Escucha profunda: prácticas hacia el mundo al revés {Yutsil, María Sosa, Naomi Rincón Gallardo y Fernando Palma Rodríguez} (10/16/2021 to 02/13/2022). Previous to this she joined Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, as director of visual arts in October 2015, and became YBCA curator at large in September 2018. Under the program title Changing the Ratio she organized at YBCA a series of survey exhibitions of key women artists who are also pioneers of socially-engaged practice: Tania Bruguera: Talking to Power / Ha-blándole al Poder (2017, co-curated with Susie Kantor), Futurefarmers: Out of Place, in Place (2018), and Suzanne Lacy: We Are Here (2019, co-organized with SFMOMA curators Rudolf Frieling and Dominic Willsdon). In addition, she curated a series of exhibitions titled The City Initiative featuring architects, designers, planners, and artists creating pro-vocative work in the urban environment responding to civic urgencies.
Andrea Bowers Exhibition
Andrea Bowers Church Banners (Adalberto United Methodist Church, Chicago, Member of New Sanctuary Movement), 2007/2008 Color pencil on paper Diptych; Each 50 x 74 in. (127 x 187.96 cm)
Private collection, Denver, Colorado. Courtesy of the artist and Vielmetter Los Angeles. Photo: Robert WedemeyerFor over thirty years, multidisciplinary visual artist Andrea Bowers (American, b. 1965) has made art that activates. Bowers works in a variety of mediums, from video to colored pencil to installation art, and explores pressing national and international issues. 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.