[1][2][3][4] His architectural glass commissions cover some 20 years from St George's Episcopal Church, Durham, New Hampshire (1955) to Stephen Wise Free Synagogue, New York (1975) and the blue cross window for Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception (Burlington, Vermont) (1976 - decommissioned 2019).

He was an exceptional photographer documenting his own as well as other artist's glass work and spent many hours walking the streets and parks of Manhattan and Brooklyn with camera in hand.

On returning to the US he enrolled at the New School for Social Research, studied with the painter Stuart Davis, encountered the theories of Rudolf Arnheim, and graduated with a BA in 1948.

A Fulbright Award for the study of Medieval Stained Glass in the United Kingdom enabled him to attend the Central School of Arts & Crafts in London from 1950 to 1953.

Returning to Manhattan he and his wife, Terry Obermayr, at first lived in a large loft on the Lower East Side and subsequently moved to a corner brownstone on Congress Street, Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, NY.

[11] Architects whose buildings he did work on included Percival Goodman, Fritz Nathan, Eero Saarinen, Kahn & Jacobs, Edward Larrabee Barnes, Roger Ranuio, W. Brooke Fleck, Carter & Woodruff, Stanley Prowler, Henry Dreyfuss, Chloetheil Smith, William Garwood, and Philip Ives.

In the execution of projects he utilized traditional painted and leaded glass as well as more experimental processes of lamination with epoxy resins and Dalle de verre.

This marked the beginning of a period of small panel making including the incorporation of various cast glass shapes salvaged from the closing sale of Leo Popper's glass warehouse in lower Manhattan, and culminating in a series of panels exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Crafts of the American Craft Council in 1975.

Sowers developed personal relationships and enduring friendships with a number of them and, most importantly, brought awareness of their work to a younger generation of glass artists and designers around the world.

[13] In America these included David Wilson, Kenneth von Roenn, Peter Mollica, Ed Carpenter, and Robert Kehlmann.

He was antithetical to the prevalent system in the United States where the studios retained their own in-house designers to produce essentially commercial stained glass windows.

[14] It was composed partially of a German opaque glass that was quite unusual, consisting of both transparent blues and reds on a solid white base.

The idea of developing a reversible image was picked up and pursued by the architect, Percival Goodman, whose projects included many Synagogues.

The terminal project was fabricated and installed by the Rambusch Decorating Company in New York, a long established commercial studio where he executed a considerable number of commissions.

On one of his trips to Europe he spent time in Chartres Cathedral gauging the intensity of the blue glass and he was astonished by the variation of light value compared to the dilation of the human eye.

[19][20] He also spent time in Germany photographing the work of fellow glass artists primarily for illustrating his books but also for dissemination back home.

His photographic work expanded when he took his camera on long walking trips in different parts of the city shooting film in both B/W and 35mm Kodachrome slide format.

The first canvases were monochromatic in tones of black and white with an abstract expressionistic sensibility which on closer study reveal an architectural reference.

From this beginning he introduced color and began working directly from his series of 35mm slides, a result of his photographic exploration of the city in all its varied landscapes of streets, bridges, buildings, trash, junk, people, parks, and gardens.

The exploration of light, a common thread in these paintings executed in a photorealistic style, represent a clear departure from his work in glass.

His death in 1990 coincided with the sale of his first painting, "Stripes", through Ivan Karp's OK Harris Gallery in New York and the publication of his fourth book "Rethinking the Forms of Visual Expression".

Sowers would later liken the church, treated by William Rubin in high modernist fashion as a successful collaboration, as so many cadavres exquis.