We were lucky to catch up with Allison Bowman recently and have shared our conversation below.

Allison, appreciate you joining us today. What’s been the most meaningful project you’ve worked on?

The most meaningful project I have worked on was Art In the Loop: Resilient in Kansas City, MO in 2021. Art In The Loop is an organization that works with the Kansas City Streetcar to bring art to downtown Kansas City’s transit. Artists apply with designs to either be installed on streetcar shelters or they can be wrapped on the streetcar itself. I applied with a design called Sacred Spaces that is a digital collage of some of my paintings and it was chosen to be installed temporarily on the streetcar shelter at 9th and Main streets in front of the Kansas City Library. This project is meaningful to me because it brings art to everyday people. I believe in making art accessible for everyone. You don’t have to go to a fancy gallery and feel out of place to enjoy the benefits of art. An added component of my design was a QR code on the streetcar stop that when scanned, takes people to a 5 minute meditation exercise that they can do right there at the stop or take with them for later.

I call my paintings Sacred Spaces because I started creating them as spaces of healing for myself after dealing with mental health issues and then they became spaces for everyone. They are environments of calm and reprieve. The goal of this project was to provide the community with the opportunity to reflect and self-discover, just like the therapy of painting does for me. This project was for everyday people walking down the street or waiting for the streetcar; for the people who are afraid to admit that they struggle with mental illness as well as those that have stress or anxiety due to the pandemic but don’t necessarily know how to cope. With this project, I hope community had the opportunity to relive some of their stress and hopefully the practice of meditation is something they took with them.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I am a practicing multidisciplinary artist and advocate who creates experiences for everyday people using paintings, collage, and wearable media. After graduating with a BFA in Fine Art from Kansas State University in 2017 I moved to the Kansas City area with my husband to pursue my art career. My artwork explores the line between the creative and subconscious mind and I study human connections to nature and how it relates to mental health and wellbeing.

My artwork creates imagined environments using abstracted botanical forms. The improvisational quality of my artwork stems from responses to organic compounds found in nature and my exploration between the conscious and subconscious mind. These forms are derived from overgrown, uncultivated areas of the forest floor. Gestural shapes and lush color promote analysis over time in these richly dense compositions.

Creating these abstracted environments began as a meditative act to cope with trauma in my past. By creating these environments, I allowed myself to explore spaces of escape; mental and physical. My work persuades myself and my viewers to self-reflect in a time of isolation. During this isolation I started to wonder, how do these environments even come to be?

Creating art is a very intuitive process to me. I let the media lead, and then allow response. As I create, I make conscious and sub-conscious decisions on how to proceed with my layers. Painting is a process of letting go and escaping. These spaces become sacred because of their intimacy. Each mark and layer of color is a reaction to the world around me. Adding, subtracting, covering, revealing… the process is one of discovery. These imagined worlds speak to the journey of their own making and to the power and mystery of nature.

In your view, what can society to do to best support artists, creatives and a thriving creative ecosystem?

This is a fantastic and timely question! Not only am I a practicing artist, my day job is serving as the Administrative Assistant of the Arts Council of Johnson County. We are a small arts nonprofit in Johnson County, KS that advocates for and serves the artists and creative workers in our community.

The first thing that society can do for artists is to realize that we are small, non-employer businesses and we deserve to have benefits and get paid fair wages. As soon as people understand what the arts can do for our community and economic development, then artists can thrive. To give some perspective, the economic value that the arts and culture sector brings is an $876.7 billion industry and represents 4.2% of the nation’s GDP. I mean, that’s a lot of money. If you’re curious where I’m getting these numbers from, check out Americans for the Arts and the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis.

Unfortunately during the pandemic the nation’s arts economy diminished by almost twice the rate of the economy as a whole (6.4% as opposed to the overall decline of 3.7%). Along with many other industries in the nation, creative workers lost work. Venues and galleries closed and gigs were cancelled, putting a lot of artists out of jobs. The other important thing to know about artists during the pandemic is how disproportionately artists of color have been impacted. BIPOC artists had higher rates of unemployment during the pandemic than white artists and lost a larger percentage of their creative income.
I could talk numbers all day, but the bottom line is when the world shut down we all turned to arts and entertainment to get us through. This is really a testament to how essential the arts are.

Obviously changing society’s views on the arts isn’t going to happen overnight, but here are a few things you can do right now to support artists and creatives:
-Show up for artists! Go to performances, exhibition openings, and community events and be a voice of support for artists.
-Learn more about the arts organizations in your community and support them by volunteering or donating if you can.
-Before you vote, read candidate surveys to see who does and doesn’t support funding the arts (a lot of public art and community events are funded by public dollars to benefit the community as a whole).
-Follow artists on social media and share what they are working on.

Any resources you can share with us that might be helpful to other creatives?

There are so many resources that I wish I knew about earlier in my creative journey and many that I’m sure are still out there for me to explore. A big one for me right now is podcasts for artists and creatives. I like podcasts because I can listen to them while I’m painting or working on a project. My favorite one to listen to is Art For Your Ear by The Jealous Curator where she interviews working artists all over the world and they share their stories. There is a lot to learn from other artists and that’s a great place to start. I also enjoy listening to Creative Pep Talk by Andy J. Pizza. He has some really great insight to re-charging your creative career and how to achieve your goals. Another podcast that has been helpful recently is called Sunlight by Hannah Cole. She is a practicing artist as well as a tax professional and she helps artists how to understand their finances, taxes, and investing.

A great resource for artists in the Midwest is Mid-America Arts Alliance and their ArtistINC program. I went through this program twice and learned so much about setting attainable goals, marketing, branding, about being a creative business, and what opportunities are out there. For artists in the Kansas City area, Kansas City Artist Coalition and InterUrban ArtHouse are great organizations that artists can be members of and receive a lot of opportunities, resources, and a sense of community. Look up your state advocacy and state arts agencies to see what kind of opportunities and resources they have for artists as well. The greatest resource I think and artist or creative can have is a community of like-minded people. Finding others in our area that you can learn from and they can learn from you is the most valuable thing we can have. If you can’t find a group in your area, then maybe you can start one!

Contact Info:

• Website: www.allisonbowman.com
• Instagram: @amaranthineartist
• Facebook: Amaranthine Artist
• Linkedin: Allison Bowman