Talk | Andrea Bowers with Charles Gaines and Rodney McMillian

For more than 30 years, multidisciplinary visual artist Andrea Bowers 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.

Bowers received her MFA from the California Institute of the Arts in 1992 and since then has built an international reputation as a chronicler of contemporary history, documenting activism as it unfolds and collecting research on the frontlines of protest through an empathetic and labor-intensive practice. Her subject matter contends with issues like immigration rights, workers’ rights, climate justice, women’s rights, and more, illustrating the shared pursuit of justice that connects these issues.

The exhibition Andrea Bowers is the first museum retrospective surveying over two decades of Bowers’s practice. Highlights of the exhibition include Memorial to Arcadia Woodlands Clear-Cut(2013) andMy Name Means Future (2020). These two works, both focused on issues related to environmental justice, highlight the range of mediums employed by the artist. The former is a large-scale sculpture based on her involvement with tree-sitting activists protesting the destruction of old-growth trees in California; the latter is a video that features Tokata Iron Eyes, a young Indigenous rights activist whose ancestral lands have been threatened by the Dakota Access Pipeline project.

A pivotal figure in the field of conceptual art, Charles Gaines has long employed a generative process to create series of works in a variety of mediums. By creating space between a specific symbol and the systems applied to its representation through measurable values of color, Gaines’s distinctive approach forges a critical link between first generation American conceptualists and subsequent generations of artists who are pushing the limits of conceptualism today. Gaines lives and works in Los Angeles, where he has been a member of the California Institute of Arts faculty since 1989. Gaines’s work is currently the subject of a solo exhibitions at Dia. Other notable exhibitions include an exhibition of new work at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2021), a museum survey of his Gridwork at The Studio Museum, Harlem, NY (2014), and Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA (2015), as well as a mid-career survey at the Pomona College Museum of Art and the Pitzer College Art Gallery in Claremont, CA (2012). His work has also been presented at the 1975 Whitney Biennial and the Venice Biennale in 2007 and 2015. In addition to his artistic practice, Gaines has published several essays on contemporary art, including “Theater of Refusal: Black Art and Mainstream Criticism” (University of California, Irvine, 1993) and “The New Cosmopolitanism” (California State University, Fullerton, 2008). In 2019, Gaines received the 60th Edward MacDowell Medal.