Bowers

“When the world goes dark, where do you find the light?”-AB

Alexandra Bowers was born and raised in the Sonoran Desert. Over the years growing up in the desert she has learned first-hand how easy it is to disassociate with what exists naturally just beyond our backyard walls, city scapes, and developments. Technology, automobiles, and man-made structures all help to detach us, physically and psychologically, from our arid surroundings. Bower’s artwork challenges this norm.

Bowers has practiced the art of pyrography, the process of free handed drawing into word with burn marks resulting from the controlled application of a heated object, since 2010. She’s careful to chose subjects she emotionally connects with that have evolved to survive in an extremely harsh climate, and human encroachment. Much like a photograph, her subjects are captured in a specific state of life, through pyrography, a poetic and tragic parallel to the environment they are forced to adapt to in order to exist.

In addition to pyrography, Bower’s has expanded her mediums to include traditional drawing materials, watercolor, and installation. Throughout all mediums and presentations, her work highlights these fragile, living organisms, to bring awareness back to them and spark consideration in the viewer before they move on, or disappear.

Alexandra Bowers is a Phoenix-based artist who received her BFA in 2012 from Arizona State University. Inspired by the natural environment, Bowers utilizes imagery collected while exploring to produce wood-burned and mixed-media studies of plants and animals. Bowers has had the privilege of showcasing her work extensively in Arizona, and across the country, most notably at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts. Bowers’ work has been showcased in Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport’s Museum Gallery and was subsequently acquired for its permanent art collection. She was one of three chosen for the first “Summer Artist Residence Program: Biomimicry Challenge” at the Tempe Center for the Arts. In 2020 her work was selected for the Tempe Municipal Court as part of the Tempe Public Arts program. It has since been purchased to stay in the Tempe Portable Works permanent art collection. In 2021 Bowers was chosen by the Mesa Contemporary Arts Museum to debut her solo installation “A Murmuration of Found Feathers in Flight.” Bowers asked the community to send her photos of found feathers, which she used to recreate over 800 mixed-media pieces for the installation. She was recently chosen by the Biomedical Institute of Phoenix and Bentley Gallery to collaborate with a heart specialist from the University of Arizona as part of the first “Artist and Researcher” cohort. In the Spring of 2025 Bowers opened her solo exhibition “Plant Medicine: An Altar by Alexandra Bowers” at Lapis Room in Old Town Albuquerque, New Mexico. As Bowers remains on her journey as an artist, she continuously seeks opportunities to enrich the arts nationally and internationally. Bowers debuts her first show in Denver Colorado at POP Gallery.