Nancy Bowen

About Nancy Bowen

Nancy Bowen 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.

Nancy Bowen 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, 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.

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