Abstract
This chapter examines Andrea Bowers's recent steps to combine her acts of artistic representation with participation as an activist herself. In 2003, while working on a series of drawings examining the pleasure, agency, and emotion individuals feel within crowds, she began to worry that she was failing to convey what was compelling about her subject. The United States v. Tim DeChristopher is Bowers's most selfconscious effort to expand drawing into video, as well as a work that asserts an organic connection between political action and artistic creation. Complementing her image bank of democratic actions, she has also created a pictorial archive of texts. She has transformed photorealism to make it an effective means to convey social content and model political action. The ambivalence at the core of photorealist practice is most acutely captured by the contradictory role played by its arduous artistic labor.