Dorothy Louise Bowman, painter and printmaker, was born in Hollywood, California on 20 January 1927. She studied at the Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles under Rico LeBrun and Jean Charlot. She furthered her studies at the Jepson Art Institute and the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles, the San Francisco Art Institute, and at Webster College in St Louis.

Dorothy met fellow artist Howard Bradford, also a painter and printmaker, while studying at Chouinard. They married and eventually settled in Big Sur, California where she painted with her friend and neighbor, the author, Henry Miller.

Bowman was a member of the Western Serigraphic Society and she received numerous awards for her serigraphs. Her work was shown at the Brooklyn Museum’s National Print Show between 1954 and 1962, and the Library of Congress National Print Shows and the Museum of Fine Arts Boston shows between the years 1954 and 1971. She was selected for Fifty American Printmakers, an exhibition that was circulated by American Federation of Arts to Japan and Moscow. Bowman also received commissions from the International Graphic Arts Society.

Former Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts Director, E. Gunter Troche, wrote of her work: “Dorothy Bowman specializes in serigraphs with a Californian flavor.  She has been able to give to this technique an intricacy of design and a luminescence of color seldom reached by others. The recent cityscapes of Dorothy Bowman are aglow with excitement in their moody yet stimulating contrasts”.

Bowman’s work is represented in the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston; the Brooklyn Museum, New York; the British Museum, London; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the New York Public Library; the Achenbach Foundation for Graphics Arts, San Francisco; the Library of Congress and the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.