The Worker’s Maypole: Andrea Bowers
Excerpt from the summary by Mark Godfrey, Tate:
It is part of a larger body of work that Bowers started in 2012 using the same materials, which she chose to reflect those she saw being used that year in the Occupy encampments in New York, across the United States and elsewhere around the world, in protests against social and economic inequality. [...]
Bowers’s work addresses contemporary political concerns through its use of everyday, inexpensive materials (in this case, reclaimed cardboard and permanent marker pen) and through slogans and questions which address the viewer directly. At the same time, she reflects on the historical precedents of current political campaigns in her choice of source material. Bowers also celebrates a continuity of political activism that links her work to a moment in the 1890s – represented by Walter Crane – just as Crane anchored his socialist message in the folk imagery of historical rural England. By making a link to both of these historical periods, Bowers shows that while some of the causes she discusses are prompted by very contemporary crises, the rights she demands are universal and timeless.
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