User:RchurchCCSU/Andrea Bowers

Early life and education
Andrea was born in Wilmington, Ohio, and grew up in "an apolitical Republican family." Bowers holds an MFA degree from California Institute of the Arts where she got involved with a group of classmates and teachers which caused her to become more socially and politically active. She also holds a BFA degree from Bowling Green State University, Bowling Green, Ohio. By the early 1990s, the Feminist Art Program at California Institute of the Arts was diminishing during the same time Bowers was close to receiving her MFA in 1992. Bowers saw this motion as historically forgetting previous successful women in art. She decided to then maintain historical record of artistic and political movements through her own future art.

Work
Bowers embraces her mediums such as drawings, video, photography, and sketches for them being seen as nontraditional. For example, vinyl and graphite were seen as lesser, econimcally cheaper, and more feminized art mediums. In the 1970s and 1980s, a feminist art movement spread amongst artists over the refusal to work with the medium of oil paints to portray their own political imagery. Bowers tediously seeks out information in older news articles, films and photos to create photorealistic pieces based upon historical events and people.

Vieja Gloria
Vieja Gloria (2003) describes the clash between activist John Quigley and Los Angeles County authorities over the proposed removal of "Old Glory," a 400-year-old oak located in Valencia, California. Quigley later convinced Bowers to undergo training in tree climbing and occupation, which she documented in the video Nonviolent Civil Disobedience Training-Tree Sitting Forest Defense (2009). The tree sitting protest helped Bowers to broaden her understanding of her own art and politics.

My Name Means Future
My Name Means Future (2020) is a video focusing on the 2014 proposal of the Dakota Access Pipeline which caused protests from both environmental activists and indigenous activists. Indigenous members from the Standing Rock Sioux tribe expressed concerns over the risk of their drinking water becoming polluted in case the pipeline that goes underneath the Missouri River were to break and spill oil. The documentary depicts these exact concerns for both environmental rights and indigenous rights in an interview with Takota Iron Eyes, a young female social activist and member of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe. Bowers met Iron Eyes when she came to South Dakota to take part in the protests opposing the Dakota Access Pipeline. Bowers chose Iron Eyes to be the spokesperson for the documentary because the teenager was a feminist, social and environmental activist, which relates to the video's material.

In the five-part video, Iron Eyes speaks freely of her indigenous heritage, as well as, explaining different sacred areas in her native land that symbolizes importance to the Standing Rock Sioux tribe. Film taken from the drone allows the viewers to see the wide landscapes and environment that surrounds Iron Eyes as she continues to narrate. The grand scenery emphasizes what Iron Eyes is explaining, in her philosophy, that all living things, including humans, are linked to the natural world. She advocates for native rights by noting the land is an important historical and current location where many indigenous peoples engage in keeping their rights over the territory. Iron Eyes uses examples from the historical event of Massacre at Wounded Knee and the current issue of indigenous rights over the water source. Throughout the entire video Iron Eyes seems allowed to be herself as she describes her identity as an indigenous woman which relates back to her feminist position. The teenager even expresses she is a social activist from her spiritual background and teachings of a linkage between all living things and the planet. Think of Our Future (2020) was an extra installation to the video where neon-lit pieces hung on the walls with various short phrases advocating for better environmental and human rights in the future. These pieces were secondary compared to the documentary My Name Means Future (2020).

Letters to an Army of Three
Bowers was alerted to a collection of letters from women seeking abortions prior to Roe v. Wade addressed to the Army of Three, a group of 3 activist women who advocated for the legalization of abortion in the United States in the decade preceding the Supreme Court decision. The Army of Three had assembled a list of doctors who would provide abortions for women in need. Bowers employed what she describes as the “power of storytelling” in the video, Letters to an Army of Three, in which actors read the letters aloud. The letters were written by different women along with anyone that would be affected by not having reprroductive rights. Writers expressed their thoughts as feelings of alienation, desperation, and in one letter, suicide. The video was installed in her solo show at REDCAT. Bowers work has been credited with influencing political debates regarding reproductive rights. Though her work originated in response to the Bush Administration's position against abortion, it continued to be cited afterward.