Study from May Day March, Los Angeles 2010 (Immigration Reform Now) and We Are Immigrants Not Terrorists

2010 - Drawing & Print (Drawing & Print)

Andrea Bowers

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The small drawings that comprise Study from May Day March, Los Angeles 2010 (Immigration Reform Now) and We Are Immigrants Not Terrorists are based on photographs taken at a political rally in downtown Los Angeles in which thousands of individuals demonstrated for immigrants’ rights. The protesters and their supporters carried signs and wore t-shirts whose messages are highlighted in the drawings. However, in them, Bowers isolates the images of the protesters from the multitude that surrounds them in the original photographs, and, therefore amplifies their messages. Included in Bowers’s 2010 exhibition, The Political Landscape , these small drawings were part of the project that explored the current problems surrounding the Mexican-American border and the thousands of deaths that result from trying to cross it.

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Socially engaged and politically outspoken, Los Angeles-based artist Andrea Bowers builds her work around issues of social justice and advocacy. Her artistic practice often uses political protests and movements as sources of inspiration and content, as she draws isolated figures holding picket signs with delicate attention, or replicates the archive of a cause in the space of the gallery. Labor movements, women’s rights rallies, anti-war protests, and immigration demonstrations, past and present, are among the myriad moments of political action that Bowers draws upon in her works.

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Colors:

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• protest.n.02
• inequality.n.01
• march.n.02
• immigration.n.01
• boundary_line.n.01
• politics.n.01
• bright/vivid
• collective history
• feminism
• contemporary participation
• cultural commentary
• american
• california institute of the arts alumni