Nancy Bowen still remembers the day in spring 1999 when a Columbia undergraduate came to her office asking for help. The student wanted to report her concern that a professor, Thomas Roma, had “acted in a sexually inappropriate manner” towards her. Nancy, then an assistant professor and the only full-time female professor in the visual arts faculty, brought the allegation to the department chair.
What followed, Nancy says, was isolation. Thomas Roma was placed on the committee reviewing her for tenure. She did not pass, and her employment at Columbia ended, even after she filed a gender-based complaint about how the review was handled. In January 2018, The New York Times reported allegations of sexual misconduct raised by four other female students against the same professor; he denied them through an attorney (who called them “isolated, innocent incidents, none of them predatory [which]... created fictitious versions of reality”) and retired the day after the article was first published.
More than two decades on, Nancy says the professional cost matters to her less than what happened to the students who came forward. “They were not followed up on in a way that we would now find adequate,” she says. “I’ve stayed in touch with some of those women and it was a very, very damaging experience.”
When I contacted former students who had spoken to the Times about Thomas Roma, some declined to comment further; others did not respond. For women who came forward before #MeToo became a global movement in 2017, speaking out did not come with the cultural protection it might today.
That history now runs directly into Nancy’s art. Her latest exhibition, From A To Z And The Bodies In Between at Nunu Fine Art in New York, turns that urgency into form. Now 71, Bowen uses mixed media – dictionary pages, ceramics and shells – for collages and sculpture that ask the questions that have shaped her career: who gets to define a woman’s body, who gets to define her freedom and at what cost?
Nancy was born in 1955 in Rhode Island, New York, and came up as an artist during second-wave feminism. “As a young artist coming up in second-wave feminism, I was moved in my early work to ask the question: ‘What would an image of a woman made by a woman look like?’” she says. “Over the past 40 years I’ve moved into an idea of what does it feel like to be in a body, rather than how it looks, and then into more abstracted versions of the female body.”
Mira Schor, a New York-based artist and scholar of feminist art history, places Bowen’s experience inside a longer arc. “#MeToo is just a recent moment in the history of feminist awareness,” she says, pointing to the women who began questioning domestic and workplace hierarchies in the 1960s. Schor argues the risk Bowen faced in 1999 has not disappeared. “Right now, more than in the past few decades, at least in the US, everyone who challenges patriarchal power risks being destroyed,” she says.
Since 2015, Bowen has built collages from early and mid-20th-century dictionaries found in her parents’ home. “It’s this idea of ‘what do women inherit?’” she says. “I inherited a female body just by virtue of being born into it, and upon my parents’ passing I happened to inherit a big library, so I have these two different things to work with.” She removes pages letter by letter, layers them with geometric patterns, and adds paper and pigment. A dictionary, she says, is “meant to fix meaning.”
She plays against that fixed meaning in Naked Obeisance (2023), a collage of book pages, gouache and rice paper at Nunu, where words including “taboo”, “labial”, “madhouse”, “naked” and “obeisance” begin to read like a sentence. “Words are being disallowed these days,” Bowen says, referring to the current US government’s recent restrictions on language around gender, inclusivity and diversity. The words she chooses are meant to feel “either offensive or provocative”.
Nancy’s family history adds another layer. She is descended from Samuel Sewall, one of the judges involved in the Salem witch trials, where women were accused and punished by colonial authority. It was not an inheritance she claimed easily. Sewall later repented publicly and spent his life trying to make amends; for Nancy, that did not absolve him, though she notes it mattered that a powerful man had recognised the harm he caused.
That tension runs through Fossils Of Desire (2026), her latest work. The form rises like a strange reliquary: a swollen orange torso with multiple breast-like forms, anchored to a dark, shell-studded base. Above it, glittering fish bones arc upward like a crown. Hypersexuality and playfulness contrasted with a skeletal structure representing the deaths and trials women had to pass through before desire and womanhood could be expressed without complete fear – at least in the West.
For Nancy, reclaiming the female body is not about youth or beauty. It is about refusal: refusing to disappear; refusing to let institutions decide when women are credible; refusing to accept that feminist history is over because it has been named once before.
“There has been a constant incremental stripping away of [women’s bodily] rights. It makes my blood boil.” Nancy says. “While making sculpture may not have any effect in the real world, it does keep the idea of resistance alive and it gives me a sense of agency. As an artist I can imagine a better outcome for the regressive situations we women find ourselves in.”
When asked what she hopes the new show might bring into the world, she pauses, eyes filling, and looks towards the far end of the gallery. “Yes, we’re women, and it’s great. We have brains. We have female bodies, but we’re still not recognised for it,” she says. “Maybe it’s possible that things could be different.”
From A To Z And The Bodies In Between by Nancy Bowen, is on show at Nunu Fine Art in New York until 25 July 2026
