Biography

John E. Dowell (1941 - ) was born in Philadelphia and grew up in a housing project. As a child, he explored art with his brother by copying the work in Lone Ranger comics. He studied at the Tyler School of Art at Temple University, where he was mentored by ceramist Rudolf Staffel. And he mastered his printmaking skills at the Tamarind Institute in Los Angeles, CA, where he worked as a senior printer. His work is influenced by abstract expressionists Willem de Kooning, Philip Guston, and Jackson Pollock and jazz musicians such as Miles Davis, Archie Shepp, and Cecil Taylor.

He often focuses on abstract visual representations of poetry and music, notably jazz. While visiting Bahia, Brazil in 1988, Dowell explored interest in traditional African religions and began making works inspired by voodoo forces and spirits. Many know Dowell as a photographer—though he would aptly amend that statement to “an artist with a camera”—but over the course of his impressive artistic career, Dowell has explored a wide variety of mediums ranging from painting to ceramics to musical composition. Dowell’s expansive body of work, housed in his studio in North Philadelphia, is one of great dimension. Though diverse in medium, his works reflect a continuity of formal concerns and a unified goal: to provide the viewer with a transportive, real experience that “leads them to themselves.”

Dowell has been Professor Emeritus of Printmaking at the Tyler School of Art at Temple University since 1971. Dowell’s prints, paintings and photographs have been featured in more than fifty solo exhibitions and represented in the permanent collections of seventy museum and public collections. Among them are the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, France. Dowell’s photographs are in the Houston Museum of Fine Arts and have been added to his work in the collections of the Fogg Museum of Harvard University, the Museum of the Rhode Island School of Design and the Lehigh University Museum.