Andrea Bowers

Hold These Truths

• Crazy Bitches, 2016 (detail)
  Colored pencil on paper
  50 1/2 x 96 inches
  55 1/2 x 101 x 2 1/2 inches framed
  Courtesy of the artist and Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York

In the 2016 body of work Whose Feminism is it Anyway?, artist, feminist and social activist Andrea Bowers draws from historical political graphics and the work of trans women activists committed to social justice. Qualities considered characteristic of being a woman or feminine are completely dismissed in the large scale colored pencil drawing Crazy Bitches.

From afar the piece reads as an ornate floral gift-wrapping pattern, however, camouflaged within lies a text written by the radical material feminist group, Some Crazy Bitches, that proudly refuses “the mechanisms that create and maintain identities of womanhood.”

The large-scale photo series Trans Liberation, in collaboration with artist and organizer Ada Tinnell, celebrates revolutionary figures in the trans women’s fight for equal rights, all the while underscoring the lack of inclusion of transgender women and women of color in historical and contemporary feminist movements.