How can I buy a work by Cindy Tower?

Bruno David Gallery handles the sale of available works by Cindy Tower. For prices and availability, email info@brunodavidgallery.com or call +1 314 696 2377.

Where can I see work by Cindy Tower in person?

At Bruno David Gallery, 7513 Forsyth Boulevard, Saint Louis, Missouri 63105, during public hours or by appointment.

What does Cindy Tower make?

“Combine” paintings that join paint with old dresses, other discarded clothing and found materials, mostly landscape-based and often autobiographical, such as Cloak of Moon and Stars (2021) and Sunset Over Zuwalicks (2024).

Where is Cindy Tower based?

Cindy Tower works in studios in Branford, Connecticut, and San Antonio, Texas.

Has Cindy Tower had an exhibition at Bruno David Gallery?

Yes. Good Will Combines (26 March to 18 June 2022) is one of her exhibitions at the gallery. Catalogues can be read in the gallery’s Publications library at brunodavidgallery.com/publications.

Cindy Tower

Cindy Tower is a Branford- and San Antonio-based painter who makes “Combine” paintings, joining paint with old dresses and other discarded clothing and with materials gathered from landfills, thrift shops and sites damaged by natural disasters. The term comes from Robert Rauschenberg, who used it in the 1950s for paintings that incorporate three-dimensional objects; like his, her works sit between painting and sculpture. Their imagery is largely landscape-based and often autobiographical.

The work addresses consumption, waste, obsolescence and loss, and Tower presents the reuse of discarded goods as an optimistic act. Recycling has long been part of her practice: her 1998 exhibition Pirate Cindy, reviewed in Art in America, included a pirate ship built from the parts of her worn-out pickup truck. From 2005 she painted on location inside abandoned factories in and around St. Louis and East St. Louis. She has also made protest installations and community happenings supporting racial, gender and housing equality, animal rights and climate awareness.

Born in Alamogordo, New Mexico, Tower received a BFA from Cornell University in 1980 and an MFA from the University of California, San Diego, in 1988, where she studied with Eleanor Antin and Allan Kaprow. She was part of the early Williamsburg art scene in Brooklyn in the 1980s. She was a visiting assistant professor of painting at Washington University in St. Louis from 2005 to 2008 and has also taught at Hamilton College, the New York Studio School and the Savannah College of Art and Design.

Her solo exhibitions include Westward Expansion Inwards at the New Museum, New York (1994), and Riding the Rubble Down at the Sheldon Art Galleries, St. Louis (2009). Newcity critic Pedro Vélez named her 2013 exhibition Nest Egg, at Good Citizen Gallery in St. Louis, his top pick of the year for Chicago and the Midwest. In 2024 her work was included in No Bodies: Clothing as Disruptor at Real Art Ways, Hartford, and the Hudson River Museum, Yonkers. Bruno David Gallery, which represents Tower, has given her three solo exhibitions: Decadense (2010); Road Show (2014), the first exhibition at the gallery’s second space, Bruno David Projects; and Good Will Combines (2022).

→ Website

→ Read the Good Will Combines catalogue

→ Read the Road Show catalogue

→ Read the Decadense catalogue

→ Read the Riding the Rubble Down catalogue

→ Inquire