CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 7/13/2021

A galvanizing new survey of artist-activist Andrea Bowers

“Educate, Agitate, Organize” (2010) is reproduced from Andrea Bowers, the comprehensive catalog published in advance of the artist’s major one-person exhibition opening at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago in November 2021, en route to the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles in June of 2022. “Despite the overwhelming social stasis on issues as wide-ranging and complex as the world itself, Bowers has maintained her dogged efforts to witness, repair and advance our pursuit of justice,” MCA curator Michael Darling writes. “Across more than twenty years, she has developed a highly unique practice—which blends research, craft, activism, theory and art history—to do just that. In a way, she has formed a new kind of social documentation, a contemporary analogue to the history paintings that for centuries memorialized the events, movements and protagonists of civic and social change. Rather than concentrating on a single medium such as the painters or sculptors of yore, however, or being otherwise beholden to the moment as documentary photography requires, Bowers has been able to compose a wide-ranging mosaic of contemporary political activity, telling the stories of protestors she has singled out for their heroism and acknowledging the novel methods that they use to get their points across in her seamless, captivating creations that only an artist of extraordinary gifts and vision can achieve. Indeed, she has embedded herself in the histories and processes of protest so that we might also celebrate the efforts of these individuals, organizations and movements who have, through impassioned work, provided seeds of hope that our systems and institutions can change for the better. And after more than two decades of determined devotion to this practice, we can now look back on the diversity of her output and see ourselves, as well as our societal struggles, reflected in it, just as generations in the future will look to her work as powerful reminders of battles fought, big and small.”

Image courtesy of the artist and Vielmetter Los Angeles.