Chickasaw Visitor Center Featured Artist: Lee Bowers

Learn more about Chickasaw and other First American artists at the Chickasaw Visitor Center in Sulphur, Oklahoma. 

Chickasaw artist Lee Bowers is a painter whose work blends keen observation with imaginative interpretation, shaped by a lifelong connection to nature. After a twenty-year career as an animation and special effects director, she returned to painting and drawing—her earliest passion.

Bowers creates much of her work in the English Cotswolds, the Kansas Flint Hills and Northern New Mexico. She begins outdoors with quick sketches and photographs, then develops her paintings in her studios, allowing each piece to evolve into a blend of reality and imagination.

Her artistic roots trace back to her childhood in Topeka, Kansas, where she grew up exploring creeks and wooded areas filled with oaks, sycamores and elms. The changing seasons and luminous light of those landscapes sparked her creativity early on, and with her parents’ support she began drawing classes at age six.

For more than fifty years, nature has remained her guiding muse. Whether standing in rolling hills, lush countryside or desert light, Bowers listens to the spirit of each place. “The land speaks to me,” she says, “and then I create the sounds with visuals.” Her work captures not strict realism, but the color, beauty and emotion of the landscapes that inspire her. The exhibition will be displayed through July 10, 2026. Artworks are available for sale.