Nancy Bowen

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. She has received awards from Anonymous Was A Woman and the National Endowment for the Arts, among others. Bowen is a professor emerita at Purchase College, SUNY and is based in Brooklyn, New York. Provided by Wikipedia