News
New Book Charts the Career of Trailblazing Artist Rick Lowe
Detail from Rick Lowe, @ Rick Lowe Studio, courtesy Gagosian.
News Summary
A new monograph jointly published by the Neubauer Collegium and Gagosian, Rick Lowe is the first book to present a comprehensive account of the Houston-based artist’s career. Edited by Neubauer Collegium Curator Dieter Roelstraete and Gagosian Director Antwaun Sargent, the book is lushly illustrated with paintings and documentation of projects from the past three decades, charting a trajectory that includes early-career political interventions, pioneering works of community-based “social sculpture,” and recent experiments with abstraction. The book includes several essays that touch on work Lowe conducted as a member of the research team on the Black Wall Street Journey project at the Neubauer Collegium (2020–21) while he was in residence as a Visiting Fellow. That project, in turn, informed Lowe’s solo exhibition Notes on the Great Migration (October 25, 2022 – February 10, 2023), which is featured prominently in these pages.
A foreword by Neubauer Collegium Faculty Director Tara Zahra introduces the project, and Roelstraete writes about Lowe’s paintings, describing their conception and relationships to his community-based projects. Allison Glenn discusses initiatives including Project Row Houses in Houston (1993–2018) and Transforma Projects in New Orleans (2005), and Fani Paraforou introduces the Victoria Square Project in Athens (2016–2023). A conversation between the artist and Valerie Cassel Oliver offers insight into his practice as an activist-artist. Abigail Winograd, a Neubauer Collegium Visiting Fellow (2023–2024) and member of the Black Wall Street Journey research team, analyzes Greenwood Art Project (2020) and looks at Black Wall Street Journey in relation to the 1921 Tulsa Massacre and the movement of Black people from Oklahoma to Chicago. Sydney Stutterheim considers pivotal shifts in Lowe’s turn to social practice and also contributes a selected chronology of his career.
“Art’s power to illuminate, interrogate, and propose new ideas should matter to universities and institutions of higher learning, as we increasingly recognize the importance of extending beyond the standard parameters of scholarly research and expertise to meet today’s most pressing needs,” Zahra writes in the foreword. “Lowe’s investments in deep and sustained collaboration, relationships fostered over decades, undergird his pioneering work in social sculpture. It is a value that animates our work at the Collegium, and it is fundamental to the success of any critically important domain of inquiry.”