Sandra Bowden in the Press

Finding Faith Through Art All Over the World

Mon, 23 Jun 2025 15:12:37 GMT

From Pink Magazine — February 2025 Issue

by Lesley Kyle
Photography by
Lindsay Pettinicchi Photography, LLC

Sandra Bowden is a collector of beautiful things. Twenty years ago, Sandra and her husband arrived in the Lowcountry to be near family—two children, four grandchildren, and 10 great-grandchildren —some of whom were heading toward Savannah. A friend lived in the area, and as an avid golfer, the choice to live in Hilton Head seemed obvious.

“We had only a few days to make a decision and bought our house in three hours,” explained Sandra. The rush to find a landing pad resulted from the recent sale of their prior home. With a smile in her voice, Sandra said, “It was a good choice!” Sandra’s family had roots in central New Hampshire. Her mom’s side of the family received original land grants in the farming community where Sandra was raised. Sandra’s early education took place in a one-room schoolhouse, and her teacher had also taught her mom. Faith was central to Sandra’s upbringing.

In the 1960s, it was common for area churches to host art festivals, and a small church invited Sandra to participate and contribute some paintings. “I hadn’t done any religious painting, so it challenged me,” said Sandra. “It was a seminal moment for me and ignited ideas of what might be possible in religious art.” Sandra contributed three pieces to that first festival, including a collage piece that spoke to her.

Read the rest of the article at It's All Pink.

Sandra Bowden Curated Profiles

Fri, 10 Mar 2023 20:35:56 GMT

Sandra Bowden Profiles

Mount Tabor Ecumenical Centre for Art & Spirituality Villa Via Sacra, Barga, Italy
– Reflecting the Glory at the Mount Tabor Ecumenical Centre for Art & Spirituality Villa Via Sacra, Barga, Italy — 21 October 2019
Biola University Center for Christianity Culture & Arts – Sandra Bowden’s work is featured in the Biola University’s Center for Christianity Culture & Arts daily devotion page (The Lent Project) on Day 38 - Friday, March 26
http://ccca.biola.edu/lent/2021/#day-mar-26
Renaissance as Resurrection
Leo n Battista Alberti's Holy Sepulchre in Fifteenth-Century Florence.
ArtWay Profile by Todd Jenkins
Sandra Bowden Profile from Sacred Pilgrim
"Work: Curse or Calling" at Calvin College's Center Art Gallery
Sandra Bowden, Visualizing Words and ‘The Word’
March 2017 CIVA Featured Artist

Anyone entering Saint Christopher’s Episcopal Church in Chatham is met by a display of original art in the “Gallery at Saint Christopher’s,” created in 2014 to utilize the hallways and staircases in the buildings.

The gallery’s creator and curator of its changing exhibitions is a visual artist with an international reputation as a religious artist. Chatham resident Sandra Bowden is like an iceberg whose tip appears above the surface of the water, hiding an artistic presence most recently on display at the Vatican and in Barga, Italy.”

Download the full article from the Cape Cod Chronicle in this PDF .

Christian Century: In the Beginning Was the Word

Read the Christian Century article for Sandra Bowden

Art selection and comment by John Kohan: “Books, printed pages, lines of calligraphy, and single letters are raw materials for Massachusetts artist Sandra Bowden.”

Podcasts with Sandra Bowden

Fri, 10 Mar 2023 20:26:18 GMT

Sandra Bowden — The Biblical Artist

Dr. Dru Johnson interviews scholars, and artists. In December 2020 he interviewed Sandra Bowden for his Biblical Artist Series. The Biblical Mind is dedicated to helping its audience understand the deep structures of Scripture.

It is published by the Center for Hebraic Thought, a hub for research and resources promoting biblical literacy and the intellectual world of the Bible.

Visit the Center for Hebraic Thought for the full show notes.

By Sandra Bowden & Dr. Dru Johnson & Ned Bustard on December 11, 2020

Sandra Bowden is a mixed-media artist with pieces displayed everywhere from small rural churches to the Vatican. A self-described “visual theologian,” Sandra incorporates architecture, Scripture, Hebrew lettering, and Christian artifacts into her biblical art pieces to express the mystery of God’s relationship with his creation.
01 March 2021

Visual Arts and the Church

In this episode, Sandra Bowden discusses the relationship between the artist, visual arts and the church. Sandra is an artist and painter from New York and is the past president of Christians in the Visual Arts.

This interview was recorded at the Transforming Culture: A Vision for the Church and the Arts Symposium.

The total length of this episode is 9:29 minutes

The Signs of The Sacred – The Imprints of The Real

Thu, 29 Dec 2022 20:44:39 GMT

In the monumental spaces of Bernini's Braccio di Carlo Magno THE SIGNS OF THE SACRED – THE IMPRINTS OF THE REAL. Twentieth-century Graphic Arts in the Contemporary Art Collection of the Vatican Museums opens on Tuesday 10th December 2019, at 5.30 p.m. The exhibition, curated by Francesca Boschetti with the coordination of Micol Forti, Head of the Contemporary Art Collection of the Vatican Museums, invites the public to amazement and discovery.

Amazement: graphic arts, usually considered a field for specialists and experts, is indeed a privileged "observatory" to get to know the artists and appreciate their most innovative and experimental aspects. Especially in the twentieth century, the practice of engraving became a "place" of research that involves not only the procedures and materials but also the exploration of iconography and style. Each artist chooses one or more techniques - woodcut, etching, aquatint, drypoint, lithograph, silk-screen print - and measures himself with them to reach the desired result or to discover new solutions in the definition of the image on the matrix. A matrix that, through the printing process, transfers the signs onto the paper like a mirror.

Discovery: the exhibition presents for the first time an extraordinary selection of about 150 graphics, mostly unpublished, selected from about four thousand works that make up the entire collection of prints, engravings, drawings and photographs of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries of the Vatican collections. A "hidden treasure" whose life, stored in folders and protected from light, is normally far from the eye of the public.

Founded in 1973, in parallel with the creation of the section dedicated to the twentieth-century art desired and inaugurated by Pope Paul VI, the twentieth-century graphic art collection is a young and anomalous collection. In fact, it is not the result of the will of a collector, who chooses and collects the individual sheets with an overall idea to be constituted and enriched progressively, but rather a natural and spontaneous consequence of Pope Montini's "call" to the world of art to reconnect the historical link between the Church and contemporary culture. The rich nucleus of papers is, in the beginning, the result of the response of artists, heirs, and patrons, who personally gave the Pontiff prints and drawings, then merged into the Vatican collections. From the death of Paul VI onwards, the increase of the collection follows different criteria and the acquisitions are aimed at filling gaps in the existing historical nuclei, while maintaining a continuity with the original idea of giving witness to contemporary spirituality.

Preserved in special conditions of light, humidity, and temperature, the artworks on paper occupy very limited space in the Vatican Museums, where only a few units are visible in rotation. For this reason, the exhibition is a special occasion to see up close masterpieces by Edvard Munch, Paul Klee, Otto Dix, Max Ernst, Oskar Kokoschka, Umberto Boccioni, Giorgio Morandi, Felice Casorati, Piero Dorazio, Marc Chagall, Joan Miró, Henri Matisse. These artworks are sometimes accompanied by paintings and sculptures by the same artists or other authors, who have iconographic or chronological connections with the prints. A closeness that aims to underline the osmosis between graphic art and expressive languages considered "major".

Precisely because of the heterogeneity and richness of the artworks that compose it, the exhibition was conceived as a circular narration that begins with the Creation of the World and ends with the creation of the artwork. The exhibition itinerary, underlined by the set-up of the architect Roberto Pulitani, is divided into four sections: The Sentiments of the Sacred and the Human, The Imprints of the Real, Origin of an Idea and Sign and Colour.

The Sentiments of the Sacred and the Human includes subjects inspired in large part by the Holy Scriptures taken from the Old and New Testaments, highlighting the wide range of human feelings contained in religious iconographies. The Genesis, the life of Christ, from the Motherhood of the Virgin to the Apocalypse, take form in the graphics of the Catalans Joan Miró and Joan Josep Tharrats, in the powerful woodcuts by the expressionists Max Pechstein, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff and in the refined engravings of Felice Casorati, Sigfrido Bartolini, Rufino Tamayo, up to the stereoscopic Crucifixion by Salvador Dalí: two lithographs designed to be viewed with a special viewer that makes the image three-dimensional. The section focuses on the universality and actuality that some themes bring with them.

Georges Rouault, Marc Chagall, Marino Marini, Renato Guttuso, Guido Strazza in the years of the two world wars, use sacred iconographies to give voice and face to the injustices and sufferings of war. The Martyrdom by Lorenzo Viani tells the laic drama of the deaths in the sea through a sequence of images that recall the martyrdom of Christ and at the same time evoke the shipwrecks that happen at any time and in any place.

Vatican Exhibit BannerThe section The Imprints of the Real opens a glimmer on the wonder that activates in the careful and sensitive observation of the concrete details of everyday life, whether it be a still life, a tree, a city view. Emil Nolde, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Giorgio Morandi, Luigi Bartolini, Carlo Mattioli, Duilio Cambellotti, Anselmo Bucci are some of the artists in this section.

The third thematic line Origin of an Idea gives an insight into the delicate and precious moment, that of the creative process, when the idea of the artist begins to take shape and the creation of a work begins. Papers, plaster and bronze sketches tell the evolution and the stages of the creative path of artists such as Mario Sironi and Umberto Boccioni, Giacomo Manzù, Pericle Fazzini and Cecco Bonanotte and Santiago Calatrava.

Finally, the Sign and Colour section brings together mainly abstract works that show a range of possible solutions conceived from the dialogue between these two founding elements of the pictorial and graphic language. Among the interpreters of a personal re-elaboration of the vision of the world are Georges Braque, Hans Hartung, Lucio Fontana, Fausto Melotti, Venturino Venturi, Kazimierz Głaz.

The exhibition is accompanied by the catalogue published by Edizioni Musei Vaticani, with texts by Francesca Boschetti, Micol Forti, Barbara Jatta, Giorgio Marini, Giuseppe Trassari Filippetto.

First Prize for Sola: Grace-Faith-Scripture

Mon, 12 Dec 2022 20:38:56 GMT

Sandra Bowden’s Reformation Altarpiece speaks with quiet nuance and subtle affect.

“Sandra Bowden’s Reformation Altarpiece speaks with quiet nuance and subtle affect. Drawing inspiration from Lucas Cranach the Elder’s Reformation Altarpiece in the City Church in Wittenberg, she has created a five-panel grouping that references the form of Cranach’s work while using her own signature gold-leaf encaustic technique to interpret that form in a distinctly abstract way. The resulting patina of the installation’s surface speaks to the mystery of the God too wondrous to be fully named and too mysterious to be completely known.”

“Stripped of the dense imagery that characterizes Cranach’s work, the form of Bowden’s altarpiece lends itself to interpretation as the Divine Presence garbed in a sort of articulated mantle, whose fully extended arms express the broad inclusiveness of God’s love and grace. This impression becomes especially powerful and intimate in realizing that the image of each viewer’s presence is indistinctly reflected on the surface of the work. This connection, this awareness of the wondrous, mysterious relationship between God and humankind, invites not only consideration of who God has been, but also radical openness to who God yet will be.