Grant Recipients Roy Lichtenstein Award Visual Arts 2022

Eve Fowler

Portrait of Eve Fowler smiling and looking towards the camera. She wears a medium blue cardigan and a black shirt. She has medium length blonde hair and stands in front of a white background.
Photo by Steven Perilloux.

Artist Statement

My creative practice hinges on a form of collaboration that has bearing witness at its core. This is manifested through a decades-long art practice and through ongoing work with fellow artists, filmmakers, writers, and curators under the rubric of the exhibition project which I organize called Artist Curated Projects. Over the last ten years, I have sustained an engagement with the creative work of Gertrude Stein that has taken the form of billboards, posters, prints, paintings, film, and installations employing materials such as vinyl, neon, and collage. At the core of what I do is the intimacy of collaboration. Everything is with and for—bearing witness cannot happen alone. My works queer the archive and resist patriarchal notions of insular subjectivity, ushering in new and feminist forms of being and being with each other.

- December 2021

Biography

Eve Fowler is an interdisciplinary artist whose work investigates the problems, possibilities, and ethics of what it means to bear witness to the work, body, and life of another. Whether working through a camera’s lens or in paint, installation, sound, or public space, her practice moves in and with the margins, towards what has been unrepresented, ignored, or struck from the record.

These Sounds Fall Into My Mind, her solo exhibition at Morán Morán, Los Angeles, CA (2019), explored the nature of artistic lineage, lingering upon phrases drawn from texts by Virginia Woolf and Gertrude Stein in filmic collages and monochromatic paintings. In the voiceover to a video work—from which the title of the exhibition was taken—Fowler can be heard rejecting the influence of these authors, even as she quotes again from their writings, demonstrating that acts of refusal can be another mode of responding positively to a creative heritage.

Fowler has also had solo exhibitions at Dundee Contemporary Arts, Dundee, Scotland, United Kingdom (2018) and PARTICIPANT INC, New York, NY (2016). Her work is in the permanent collections of the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA; and the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.

She has published two books that incorporate photography, text, and collage: Anyone Telling Anything Is Telling That Thing (Printed Matter, 2013) and Hustlers (Capricious Publishing, 2014).

Fowler is the recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship (2021); the David and Roberta Logie Fellowship at Harvard University’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study (2018-2019); an Art Matters Foundation Award (2017); and a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant (2016).

Fowler organizes exhibitions at Artist Curated Projects. She holds a B.F.A. from Temple University and an M.F.A. from Yale University School of Art.

Video excerpt from with it which it as it if it is to be (part II), 2019, video, color/sound, 34 minutes 9 seconds. Courtesy of the artist and Morán Morán.
A gallery hall with light grey floors and white walls. On one wall, a pink canvas is illustrated with the words:
Installation view of what a slight. what a sound. what a universal shudder. at Dundee Contemporary Arts, Dundee, Scotland, United Kingdom, 2018. Photo by Ruth Clark.
A white shelf in a gallery with two layered record sleeves and an active record player on it. One sleeve is printed in purple with the (partially obscured) words:
Installation view of what a slight. what a sound. what a universal shudder. at Dundee Contemporary Arts, Dundee, Scotland, United Kingdom, 2018. Photo by Ruth Clark.
A white gallery wall with 24 framed images arranged 8 by 3. Each image shows text written in red and blue marbled letters with a white background.
Installation view of what a slight. what a sound. what a universal shudder. at Dundee Contemporary Arts, Dundee, Scotland, United Kingdom, 2018. Photo by Ruth Clark.
A sculpture of white neon tubes shaped into the words:
with it which it as it if it is to be, 2016, neon, 14" x 150." Photo by Ruth Clark.
Video excerpt from with it which it as it if it is to be (part I), 2016, 16mm film transferred to video, b/w, sound, 33 minutes 2 seconds. Courtesy of the artist and PARTICIPANT INC.
Two canvases are hung from a white wall. On the left, a purple canvas with black text reads:
Installation view of the difference is spreading, at Mier Gallery, Los Angeles, 2015. Photo by Lee Tyler Thompson.
A photograph of someone sitting on a chair, looking directly at the camera. They are wearing a black t-shirt that has
Untitled, 2005, chromogenic print, 60" x 48."