Andrea Bowers

Los Angeles based artist Andrea Bowers (b. 1965, Ohio) has been recording and amplifying the work of activists present and past for more than two decades. Her multi-media practice includes drawing, video, sculpture, and installation work that foregrounds the experience of the people who dedicate their time and energy to the struggle for gender, racial, environmental, labor, and immigration justice and those who are directly affected by systemic inequality. Over time, her different bodies of work have become a document of the changing language, prerogatives, and dynamics of social justice movements.

For her solo exhibition La ragnatela at the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Andrea Bowers explores the experience of the international and Italian anti-nuclear movement of the 1980s. As an introduction to the exhibition, the artist presents a neon installation on the façade of the institution that pays tribute to and brings to life the best-known drawing by Opland (the pseudonym of Robert “Rob” Wout, 1928–2001), one of the most celebrated Dutch political cartoonists of the second half of the twentieth century. His most iconic drawing, created for the Dutch group Komitee Kruisraketten Nee (Committee Against Cruise Missiles) in support of the protests against euromissiles of the 1980s, depicted a tiny woman kicking a missile away. In the early years of the decade, as mobilizations against the deployment of nuclear missiles in Europe reached their height, the image appeared on numerous placards and posters in Amsterdam and The Hague. The unnamed woman was later adopted as a mascot by the international anti-nuclear and peace movement and the logo spread around the world, becoming Opland’s most widely reproduced work.

Bernardo Follini