Featured Artist
What links Nancy Bowen’s work at Westchester Community College Art Gallery—from abstract to narrative work—is the presence of the female body in some form. “I will always be compelled to create work from a feminist point of view, work that needles or asks questions, and given our current political and social climate, that seems even more necessary than ever,” Bowen says. The show runs through April 12th, 2023.
This show features a body of work ranging from 1992 to 2022. What was the process of selecting work for this retrospective?
Joe Morris, the curator of the Art Gallery at WCC, offered me an exhibition last November and we decided to do a “retrospective” of work that I had in my studio or in storage. He chose pieces that were in the studio and then I sent him photos of work I had in storage. We wanted to create a narrative of works that would create a dialogue with each other. And because the works cover thirty years, I picked pieces that were representative of the different series I had made.
Please guide us through some milestones in the show.
Ok, let’s start at the beginning. Material Compulsion is one of the earliest sculptures in the show. In the early 90’s I was making sculptures that expressed what it felt like to be in a body rather than what it looked like. I think of this piece as a sort of hybrid piece of furniture /digestion system. The piece reflects what I like to do—combine materials and imagery that shouldn’t really work together but does. I also thought it was funny to add the pink curlers to tie off the hair with a nod to the grid.
Now let’s move to Exalt from 2009. It was part of a series that was very loosely based on body parts in landscape. I also had been inspired by visiting Niki de Saint Phalle’s Tarot Garden in Tuscany. She built an interior that was completely covered in small irregularly shaped pieces of mirror. I wanted to replicate the dazzle of that experience. I based the silver part on Elizabethan ruffs. I thought of this piece as an ensemble of feminine signs that created something bold and sassy.
I will finish up with Double Rhode Island which is a fairly recent collage. I have been working with papers I took from my parents’ house at their passing. I began with two identical maps of RI dated 1916 with my father’s notes on them. Then I covered them with a massive repitition of tongues that I got from an image of the Hindu goddess Kali. I made an organic mass of tongues and surrounded it with a painted cell structure. I strung several necklaces of light blue skulls throughout the mass of red. In my mind it was like a representation of life and death in RI.
About the artist: Nancy Bowen is a mixed media artist known for her eclectic mixtures of imagery and materials in both two and three dimensions. Bowen has had over twenty solo exhibitions throughout the US and Europe including the Lesley Heller Gallery and Annina Nosei Gallery in NYC, Galerie Farideh Cadot in Paris, Betsy Rosenfield Gallery in Chicago, and the James Gallery in Houston. She has been included in group shows in various museums around the country. Bowen won an Anonymous was a Woman Award in 2017. She has also won awards from the NEA and NYFA. She has held residencies at MacDowell, Yaddo, Jentel, the Dora Maar House, and the European Ceramic Work Center among others. She received a BFA from SAIC and an MFA from Hunter College. She is a Professor of Sculpture at Purchase College, S.U.N.Y. She maintains a studio in the Brooklyn Navy Yard. @nancybowenarts
Nancy Bowen: Sometimes a Body Is Not Just a Body Jan26 to April 12, 2023 Westchester Community College Art Gallery