Jill Dawsey illustrates the pressing relevance of feminist artist Andrea Bowers’s iconography, built upon lineages of protest, political struggle, and narrative-making for reproductive rights. Through the visceral, material act of drawing, Bowers commands an immediacy in how we must activate history to frame and mobilize our present. The Los Angeles-based artist's first ever museum retrospective surveying over two decades of work is currently on view at the Hammer Museum.

This interview took place in the kitchen of Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects on a July day near the end of the run of Andrea Bowers’s exhibition "The Political Landscape." The show consisted of two large projects and a suite of small drawings. The first project, which one encountered upon entering the gallery, was No Olvidado (Not Forgotten), a mural-like drawing consisting of 23 ten-foot-high panels that listed the names of people who have died in the attempt to cross the Mexican-American border. The second was a single-channel video projection, The United States v. Tim DeChristopher, which examines DeChristopher’s disruption of a government auction of wilderness land for oil and gas exploration.