Andrea Bowers: Democracy Needs Our Courage at Andrew Kreps Gallery

Andrew Kreps Gallery is showing Democracy Needs Our Courage, new work by Andrea Bowers, at its 22 Cortlandt Alley space through October 31, 2026. It is her sixth solo show with the gallery.

Bowers was born in 1965 in Wilmington, Ohio, and lives and works in Los Angeles. For more than three decades she has made videos, sculpture, neon, and drawings on paper and cardboard, often in collaboration with front-line activists working on feminist, labor, and environmental causes. A survey of her work is currently on long-term view at Glenstone in Potomac, Maryland, and her pieces are in the collections of MoMA, the Whitney, Tate Modern, the Hirshhorn, SFMOMA, and others.

The exhibition combines new drawings on paper and cardboard, neon and LED pieces, and a film program of documentaries and shorts from the 1970s to the present, curated with Lindsay Mofford. It is set against the lead-up to the 2026 midterm elections, a period in which the administration's response to protesters has grown harsher while candidates running on socialist platforms have been winning contested races.

The large drawings on collaged cardboard draw on slogans from worker movements of the early twentieth century and on Bowers's own archive of political graphics. In one, a woman sits triumphantly on an anvil, a long-standing emblem of workers' rights. In another, a woman uses the anvil as a tool to close the last link of a chain reading "vote for women."

A group of finely worked graphite drawings isolates individual protesters, each based on photographs Bowers took at demonstrations during Trump's first term. Their small scale is paired with a sense of monumentality, and their slogans, such as "families belong together," sit alongside the new light works reading "Fascism Isn't Freedom" and "Eco Not Ego."

The black cat, designed by Ralph Chaplin in 1910 for the Industrial Workers of the World and now used by the Minneapolis-based Black Cat Worker's Collective, appears above accounts of the Minnesota 15 and the Prairieland Nine, activists facing or serving sentences far heavier than those given after the January 6 Capitol attack. Together the works honor the growing risks activists take and offer fresh rallying cries.