Andrea Bowers works in a range of media to directly address political, social, and environmental issues. Collaboration is a key component to her work, whether working directly with unions and other organizing bodies and activist organizations on raising awareness, working directly with individuals to narrate their stories of abuse and survival, or plumbing archives to surface inequities and injustices, and and also recover potent historical images and slogans for present-tense use. Acutely aware of the iconic function of both image and text in the domain of art and social movements, she deploys both in her work, at times subtly and poetically and at times directly and powerfully.

This graphic treatment of a commonly used phrase was originally presented as a large-scale illuminated sign, composed of LED lights housed in letters created out of cardboard boxes. Referring of course to the many larger conversations around the failures of the higher education system in the US, it also relates directly to the particular circumstances of the context in which Bowers herself works as adjunct faculty Art + Social Practice at Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles (and in which many of us work at CCA). On an adjacent table Bowers displays copious documentation from her work as a member of the collective bargaining team of SEIU Local 721, making literal the volume of labor necessary to protect Labor from the self-preserving logic of institutional bureaucracy. The exhibition was titled “The Triumph of Labor,” in which photographs of present day activism taken by Bowers at a decades’ worth of workers’ rights marches joined her 22 ft. drawing of Walter Crane’s 1891 image of May Day celebrations. Together the works cross time and space, drawing parallels to labor struggles won, lost, and still being fought; and visualize the breadth of personal commitment and collective action, the coalition- and alliance-building that is necessary to provide a more equitable present for those laboring and those learning.

Andrea lent this specific graphic at our request; its sentiment an obvious statement about the enterprise we are undertaking here. Like Andrea, Ted too believed in the power of art to address and constitute new social forms, new solidarities, new relations to power both inside and outside the art world itself. In creating a means of sustained financial support for years to come, in Ted’s name, we are all valuing the role of artists who make these very ideas--of collectivity, generosity, action, nuance, and power--the heart of their work.

Andrea Bowers has been the focus of solo exhibitions at a variety of institutions from the Hammer Museum UCLA to the Tate Modern and Reina Sofia, Madrid and her work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Museum of Fine Arts Houston; Tate Modern; Whitney Museum of American Art and many others. She continues to teach in the Art+Social Practice at Otis, a program founded by Suzanne Lacy after her time as Dean at CCA (and mentor to Ted’s partner Susanne Cockrell) and founder of the Center for Art and Public Life (now named the Center for Impact).

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