Nancy Bowen is a mixed media artist known for her eclectic mixtures of imagery and materials in both two and three dimensions. Her work offers a poetic commentary on our quickly changing material culture. Like an artistic archeologist in this age of globalization and post-industrialization, she salvages (often disappearing) ornament and craft traditions, and incorporates them into sculpture and collages.
Bowen has had over a dozen solo exhibitions throughout the United States and Europe including the Kentler International Drawing Space, Lesley Heller Gallery, and Annina Nosei Gallery in NYC, Galerie Farideh Cadot in Paris, the Betsy Rosenfield gallery in Chicago, and the James Gallery in Houston. At MacDowell, she worked on a series of collages for her solo exhibition “For Each Ecstatic Instant” at the Kentler International Drawing Space in September 2018.
In 2017 she won an Anonymous was a Woman Award. She has also won award from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, MacDowell, Yaddo, The Jentel Foundation, the Brown Foundation Fellowship at Dora Maar House, and the European Ceramic Work Center among others. She received a B.F.A. from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and an M.F.A. from Hunter College (CUNY). She is currently an associate professor of Sculpture at Purchase College, S.U.N.Y. She maintains a studio in the Brooklyn Navy Yard.
Portrait by Chrysanne Stathacos
