About

Nancy Bowen is a mixed media artist known for her eclectic mixtures of imagery and materials in both two and three dimensions. Her sculpture and drawing exists in an in -between zone of form and idea, of abstraction and representation. 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 drawings.

Bowen has had solo exhibitions throughout the United States and Europe including the Provincetown Arts Museum, 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. She has been included in group shows in various museums around the country.  Her work has been reviewed widely in such journals as Art in America, Artforum, Glass Magazine, Sculpture Magazine and a host of newspapers. 

She has won awards from Anonymous was a Woman, the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, The MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, The Brown Foundation at the Dora Maar House in Menerbes, France, The Jentel Foundation and the European Ceramic Work Center among others. 

She received a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and an MFA from Hunter College (CUNY).  She has taught at Columbia University, Bard College, Sarah Lawrence College  and R.I.S.D. She is an Emerita Professor of Sculpture at Purchase College, S.U.N.Y.  where she taught from 2001-2024. 

Bowen maintains a studio in the Brooklyn Navy Yard. She is represented by Nunu Fine Arts, NYC and Taipei.