Artist Andrea Bowers has long considered materials to be carriers of history—objects shaped by use, resistance, necessity, and care. Reuse is not simply an aesthetic strategy: it is a political and ethical position that emerges from her years of engagement with environmental activism, collective protest, and feminist practice.

This commitment runs through Bowers’s practice. In her large-scale drawings, discarded placards and collaged packaging become both surface and subject. She builds canvases from these recycled materials, then renders images by hand with painstaking care. Her sculptures follow a similar logic, created with materials that are often used in activist infrastructures—repurposed wood, salvaged furniture, rope and netting, handmade signs, and other everyday materials.

From the outset, the design of Bowers’s exhibition at Glenstone was inspired by a challenge from the artist to reuse and reconfigure as much material as possible, emerging from the spirit of her practice and from the museum’s own sustainability efforts. The plan for the exhibition evolved through careful looking: at existing materials in storage, those used in prior exhibitions, discarded crates, and tools.

“Every artist should take an action with their exhibitions to do something more sustainable,” remarked Andrea Bowers at a recent talk at the National Museum for Women in the Arts.

For the exhibition, the gallery architecture follows the same logic. Bowers proposed reusing the floorplan developed by Jenny Holzer for a presentation that immediately preceded Bowers’s, with minor revisions. Space that previously held one artistic voice now shares another, without the need for major construction.

“Andrea’s practice reminds us that materials hold histories. In shaping this exhibition, we wanted the architecture to do the same—to carry forward elements from past presentations while making reuse and sustainability visible to visitors,” said Nora Severson Cafritz, Senior Director of Collections at Glenstone.

Throughout the exhibition, elements from six earlier presentations at Glenstone reappear in altered roles. These choices echo Bowers’s own practice of allowing materials to retain memory—to remain legible rather than overwritten.

Tables supporting the bound volumes of Letters to the Army of Three(opens in a new tab) were finished with newly cut sheets of birch, stained to match existing vitrine bases created for R.H. Quaytman(opens in a new tab) in 2022.

A cantilevered bookshelf made to meet Roni Horn’s specifications in 2017 has gone on to hold books for many exhibitions. At present, it holds publications by Judi Bari and other climate justice activists. Installed perpendicular to a series of Bowers’s tree-sitting chairs, visitors are invited to engage directly with the books.

The projector for the video testimony My Name Means Future was previously used for both Pipilotti Rist’s exhibition in 2018–19 and Shirin Neshat’s exhibition in 2019–20. The projector stand is repurposed from vitrine mounts used in Ellsworth Kelly’s 2023–24 exhibition.

Petra Kelly’s video collage is displayed on a CRT TV that was previously acquired by Glenstone to support its time-based media collection.

Bowers’s work repeatedly confirms that resistance is collective, cumulative, and unfinished. Materials circulate. Strategies are shared. Nothing is singular. In this exhibition, the museum’s physical infrastructure joined that continuum. The result is an exhibition that does not treat sustainability or reuse as a trend, but as a condition. Materials have been here before. They will be used again. What matters, as Bowers’s work reminds us, is that materials do not simply vanish when their first purpose ends. They persist, waiting to be reimagined.