When Bowers got in trouble in 2019, it was not over her identity, but for work she made in support of the #MeToo movement. At Art Basel in Switzerland, she presented an installation made of 167 panels, each one presenting the case of a person accused of sexual misconduct. Texts cited the person’s response to an accusation. There were photographs, too, mostly showing the accused.
One panel, however, contained an image of an alleged victim, Helen Donahue, taken from her own social media feed. Donahue complained that she had not given consent, as did another woman named (though not pictured) in the same panel. Bowers apologized, removed that panel from the work, then removed the work itself from circulation. It is now rolled up in her studio.
“I made a mistake,” Bowers told me. “I screwed up in that panel.”
In retrospect, she said, her own experiences with sexual violence may have caused her to lose “objective distance.” But it’s also noteworthy that this work, researched indirectly from news sources, deviated from her regular method of interviews and activist immersion.
By contrast, when she looked into the rape of a young woman by high-school football players in Steubenville, Ohio, in 2012, she visited the city, met the protesters and attended the players’ trial. In addition to drawings, she produced a searing video and installation, “#sweetjane” (2015), which has been omitted from the Chicago survey.
“It could be triggering or retraumatizing,” Darling, the curator, told me. But the decision reads as an excess of caution, keeping from view one of Bowers’s most powerful projects.
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