Nancy Bowen

Nancy Bowen, Artemis Dilemma, shell, ceramic, chair and mixed media, 52" x 16" x 16", 2016.

Nancy Bowen (born 1955) is an American visual artist. She is known for two main groups of work that share qualities of hybridity and multiplicity in their materials and inspirations: largely abstract sculptures and collaged works on paper. Writers such as curator Nina Felshin situate her sculpture amid a strain of feminist art based in the physical body (rather than social construction), which emerged in the 1980s to reclaim female imagery from male-dominated conceptions of women often theorized under the concept of the "male gaze." According to Felshin, in Bowen's work this involves an "exploration of the fragmented, internal body as a means of communicating the visceral experience of [embodiment] … By fashioning anatomically evocative objects from tactile, sensuous and sometimes decorative 'craft' materials … [she] emphasizes the body as a sensory instrument." Bowen's later collages connect her New England roots and Eastern spiritualism through the language of contemporary art.

Bowen has exhibited at venues including the Museum of Arts and Design (New York), Boston Center for the Arts, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati, Museum fur Angewandte Kunst (Frankfort) and Corning Museum of Glass. Bowen is a professor emerita at Purchase College, SUNY and is based in Brooklyn, New York. At SAIC, she was drawn to surrealism, outsider art, feminism and the work of women artists like Louise Bourgeois and her teacher Ree Morton, interests that planted the seeds of her longstanding exploration of the physical experience of the female body. Her first solo exhibitions took place at Galerie Farideh Cadot (Paris, 1981) and Susan Caldwell Gallery in (New York, 1983). She gradually introduced anonymous figures in metaphorical, dynamic poses exploring female experience and sexuality, placed over vividly painted relief or shadowbox structures, and later, abstract sculptural settings.

After completing an MFA degree at Hunter College in 1990, Bowen began producing the abstracted sculptural work for which she became more widely known, receiving critical attention for solo and two-person exhibitions at Annina Nosei Gallery (1990–93) and One Great Jones (1996) in New York, Betsy Rosenfield Gallery (Chicago, 1991), In 2001, she joined the art faculty at Purchase College, SUNY, serving as a professor in sculpture until 2024, when she was named a professor emerita. Critics suggest that her use of elements not inherently linked to the body seduces viewers to grapple with the work's sometimes visceral subject matter. Hyperallergic critic Faye Hirsch describes them as "elegant images that vault through time and place, from chakras … to astrological signs and defunct alphabets." Alternately graceful and clunky, ethereal and carnal, they triggered contradictory associations: prosthetic devices and ornamental plant stands, ambiguous body parts, constricting 19th-century undergarment support. Her exhibition "Figuring the Body" (1998, with Nancy Davidson) was anchored by the elaborate floor piece Black Heart, which featured a gigantic heart of clay sprouting tentacle-like copper wires that spilled onto a bed of turmeric powder rimmed by blood-red, leaf-like forms. Boston Globe critic Cate McQuaid described works like Cerebral Flora (2004) as "comical, excited and strangely beautiful" pieces that "make seen the unseen—the explosion of an idea or an anatomical eruption." Writer Sarah Sentilles identified redaction as crucial to this work "as a critical tool [that] reminds viewers there is always misinformation and missing information" and as "a refusal of oppressive meaning-making systems." The installation, Spectral Evidence (2021), consisted of twenty squat "grave markers" with wings, skull heads and shoes projecting from beneath that stood before a ghostly, faceless life-size figure wearing a black hair shirt. She has been awarded artist residencies from the American Antiquarian Society, Dora Maar House (Brown Foundation, France), and Yaddo, as well as from craft-oriented organizations such as the Centre International de Recherche sur le Verre et les Arts Plastiques (CIRVA), Pilchuck Glass School and European Ceramics Work Centre. Bowen's work belongs to the public art collections of the Corning Museum of Glass, Neuberger Museum of Art and DePauw University Galleries, among others.