National Prize winner Margaret Bowland, a graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, lives and for more than 20 years has maintained her studio in Brooklyn, New York. Bowland has had a vital career, as a painter in oils and pastels, delving personal and societal issues through portraiture and figurative compositions. Her work has been exhibited throughout the United States, including two shows with Peter Tatistcheff Gallery in New York, and in Germany at Art Fair 21. In 2009 she received major recognition as the Peoples Choice Award Winner in the Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition at the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. She is also represented in many important private collections including those of writer/critics Thomas Bolt and Kathryn and Colin Harrison. She is an adjunct faculty member at the New York Academy of Art where she has taught painting for over ten years. Following participation in important museum exhibitions, including those at the Orange County Center for Contemporary Art and the National Portrait Gallery, her work has been reviewed in print and online publications including The New York Daily News, WashingtonPost.com, HuffingtonPost.com and American Contemporary Art magazine.

 

Bowland is a brilliant painter whose work explores the subtle and nuanced edges between strength and vulnerability, certainty and doubt, faith and disbelief. A masterful observer of life’s unpredictable nature, her work conveys universal themes through her unusually specific insights. The Greenville County Museum of Art, South Carolina mounted a major exhibition of Bowland’s work in May 2010, accompanied by a full color catalogue. Bowland is represented exclusively by Driscoll Babcock Galleries, New York.