Marie Hines Cowan (b. 1967, Brooklyn, NY) is a figurative oil painter who marries mythology with colloquial culture. Her work is narrative, centering around the retelling of ancient stories to be more inclusive of ethnicity, race, gender, and sexuality.
Hines Cowan received her art degree from the Fashion Institute of Technology and her academic degree at New York University, where she studied ancient Greek Literature. She has been exhibited in the US and Europe since 1979 and exhibited work in the 2024 Venice Biennial with the European Cultural Centre. Hines Cowan has served as exhibition chair and President of the National Association of Women Artists. She has spoken about art on The Artist Forum TV, on Tipsy Podcast with Theresa Leghorn, on WNAE with Mark Silva, on 1460 WVOX’s Arts and Culture Round Table, on NAWA’s Arts in Conversation with Farrin, and at Yale’s 2014 Women in Leadership Conference. In the fall of 2023, she was the Artist-in-Residence at the New Rochelle Museum of Arts and Culture during the symposium, Musing, Metamorphoses and Medea, Hines Cowan created with two other scholars, Claire E. Scott and Valentina Motta.
Hines Cowan’s artwork has also been published in Icarus 1998 and 1999. Studio Visit: Volume 37, CreativePaper Issue 8, 2 Bridges 2018, Curating Alexandra Summer Issue 2018, and The Quarterly Winter Edition 2023. Motta and Scott have used Hines Cowan’s work in their recent books, Medea Illustra and Murderous Mothers: Later Twentieth-Century Medea Figures and Feminism, on Greek mythology.
With Scott and Motta, she received the Ancient Worlds, Modern Communities Grant from the Society for Classical Studies for the Musing, Metamorphoses, and Medea symposium. She has also won several prizes from the National Association of Women Artists, 1st Prize for the Out of the Box category from the Portrait Society of America, and Artist of the Year by the Barron Art Center.
Recently, Hines Cowan has taken her work beyond the canvas’s flatness and begun creating three-dimensional installations of her paintings, extending artwork and the sculptural text off the walls. In these installations, she combines the qualities of graphic novels with traditional painting, creating a collision between the flatness of Pop Art and the modeling of atelier painting.
Marie Hines Cowan lives and works in New Rochelle, NY.