Houston-based artist Rick Lowe is recognised for socially involved projects that entail working closely with artists, individuals, and communities to examine the contemporary issues of social and economic inequity. Lowe also creates paintings and works on paper inspired by aerial views of domino games.
Read MoreAfter his studies at Columbus College, Georgia between 1979 and 1982, Rick Lowe moved to Houston, Texas, later attending Texas Southern University.
Originally trained as a painter, his early works borrowed motifs from protest signage to create politically charged paintings concerned with homelessness, environmental problems, and police brutality. Lowe's emphasis on collaboration also started in the early years of his career, when he would organise protest rallies and conferences with social justice groups.
Joseph Beuys' utopian notion of 'social sculpture' has been influential on Rick Lowe, who initiated his first urban renewal project in 1993. Completed in 2018, Project Row Houses involved transforming derelict houses situated in the Third Ward, a historical African-American suburb, into communal spaces for sharing creativity and resources. Lowe worked on the project with other artists including James Bettison, Floyd Newsom, and George Smith.
Lowe has led several redevelopment projects, both in and outside the United States. In 1996, he initiated the Watts House Project, working closely with then-student Edgar Arceneaux to organise efforts around the Watts Towers neighbourhood and its community in Los Angeles. Victorian Square Project, ongoing since 2016, saw the artist travel to Athens for Documenta 14. Collaborating with Maria Papadimitriou, Lowe examined the relationships between the city's native residents to immigrants and refugees while helping them to forge ties.
While most known for his social projects, Rick Lowe also makes abstract paintings depicting domino games, sparked by their resemblance to aerial views of urban landscapes. The artist was first drawn to the patterns created by the dominos during Project Row Houses, when he would play the game with Third Ward residents. As Lowe writes, the paintings and drawings of domino games reflect what he describes as 'domino culture': just as the game recalls various other board games, any community's culture is generated by diverse cultural and everyday input from different groups of people.
In his solo exhibition Meditations on Social Sculpture at Gagosian, New York, in 2022, Lowe showed new paintings that derived from his earlier social sculptures Project Row Houses and Victoria Square Project alongside abstract works. The artist has described playing dominoes and creating his paintings as having a 'dominology,' which involves 'creating this language that is about the surface, the environment, the place' as he told Ocula Magazine in August 2022.
Rick Lowe received a MacArthur 'Genius' Fellowship in 2014 and was A Blade of Grass Fellow for Socially Engaged Art in 2017.
In addition to social projects, Rick Lowe has held solo and group exhibitions internationally.
Solo exhibitions include Meditations on Social Sculpture, Gagosian, New York (2022); Rick Low: The Humility Table, Louise Alexander, Los Angeles (2019); Toward Social Sculpture, Glassell School, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (2005).
Group exhibitions include Abstract Dissonance, Gagosian, Paris, (2022); Storage, Storage Projects, New York (2020); Victoria Square Project, Documenta 14, Athens (2017); ExChange, Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas, Texas (2013).
Rick Lowe's website can be found here.
Sherry Paik | Ocula | 2021
