Nancy Bowen is a mixed media artist known for her eclectic mixtures of imagery and materials in both two and three dimensions. Her sculpture and collage move betweenabstraction and representation. Like an artistic archeologist in this age of globalization and post-industrialization, her work offers a poetic commentary on our quickly changing material culture.
Bowen has shown widely in the US and Europe and is currently represented by Nunu Fine Art, NYC and Taipei. Her work has been included in group shows in various museums around the world. She has won many awards, most recently the Anonymous Was a Woman Award (2017) and the Trellis Fund Founders Awards (2024).
Bowen received a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and an MFA from Hunter College (CUNY).
She is an Emerita Professor of Sculpture at Purchase College, S.U.N.Y. She maintains a studio in the Brooklyn Navy Yard.
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I work like an “artist- archeologist” excavating and repurposing narratives around the female body, craft traditions, language and history. Using mixed media in two and three dimensions, I try to create an abstract visual language based on information from the real world. A common thread of “hybridity” runs through my work, colliding familiar forms and methods in unfamiliar ways to create an uneasy fusion of information and experience. My process is extremely inclusive; both in my approach to materials and in the imagery I use. I am a visual omnivore and have been inspired by works from many cultures and time periods.
Both the two- and three- dimensional work share a similar operation: the reorganization of preexisting materials to produce new relationships between language, matter and experience. My sculpture has generally been made of a variety of materials including clay, glass, steel, wax, resin and other non-traditional mixed media. I usually begin with a body fragment, which is confounded by the material aspects of the sculpture. My use of tactile materials combined with organic form accentuates the visceral sensuality of the work. Drawing on the visual language of applied arts such as pottery, furniture and other decorative objects, I tend to combine methods of traditional craftwork with modernist organic forms. The mixing of organic schema with decorative art forms creates a new genus of object- one which is unnameable, a kind of "strange/familiar" that is difficult to categorize and often difficult to describe with language.
I construct the drawings like I do my sculpture: combining different types of information and materials to be deconstructed and reconfigured in ways that point toward their inherent patriarchal structures. For the last decade or so I have focused primarily on reference books gleaned from my deceased parents’ library. Dictionaries and encyclopedias were crucial educational tools throughout the 20th century. In their pursuit of naming, classifying, and taxonomizing the world, these reference books came with a tacit promise of order and total knowledge, concrete and inert. I dismantle and embellish these texts to destabilize their assumed meaning. Stripped of their context, the words open up and become strange. They allow us to re-imagine our world and the imperceptible structures that shape it.
In all my work, I have embraced Oleg Grabar’s concept of ornament as “a discourse of love” (from The Mediation of Ornament). I adopt this attitude to integrate disparate fragments of objects and details from various sources. A delight in repetition, accumulation and ornament spans both bodies of work. My goal is to capture the joy in discovering the endless possibilities of creation. The results are often surprising, and sometimes humorous or poignant. It is my hope that the work presents a unique and mysterious addition to our rapidly changing material world.