Andrea Bowers’s A Call to Arms: Building a Fem Army is a monumental drawing composed of three political illustrations from the 1970s and 80s. Culled from the artist’s extensive archive of agitprop imagery depicting strong female figures, Bowers separated the iconic images of the women in A Call to Arms: Building a Fem Army from their original contexts to bring them together in a powerful new composition that calls for an intersectional contemporary feminist revolution. Three posters serve as the sources for this drawing: Ann Grifalconi’s 1971 illustration of Sojourner Truth; the International Marxist Group’s poster representing revolution and women’s liberation as inextricable; and Rafael Enriquez Vega’s 1984 ‘El Salvador’ Cuban poster for the Organization of Solidarity with the People of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. The original logo on the t-shirt worn by the central figure in the work has been replaced by the symbol of transgender empowerment. The drawing is made with black acrylic marker on collaged found cardboard.
