Events
In Conversation
Rick Lowe
Dieter Roelstraete
Tuesday, April 30, 2024, 6pm
Seminary Co-op Bookstore, Chicago
www.semcoop.com
Rick Lowe and Dieter Roelstraete, curator of the Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society at the University of Chicago, will be in conversation at the Seminary Co-op Bookstore in Chicago, in partnership with the Neubauer Collegium. The pair will discuss the artist’s recent monograph—the first to present a comprehensive, career-spanning account of Lowe’s art and social practice. Copublished by Gagosian and the Neubauer Collegium, the book was coedited by Roelstraete and also features an essay by the curator. The event is free to attend and will include a question-and-answer session.
Rick Lowe (New York: Gagosian, 2023)
In Conversation
Rick Lowe, Dieter Roelstraete, Abigail Winograd
Friday, April 19, 2024, 3pm
Museo di Palazzo Grimani, Venice
polomusealeveneto.beniculturali.it
Join Gagosian and Museo di Palazzo Grimani for a conversation between Rick Lowe; Dieter Roelstraete, curator of the Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society at the University of Chicago; and Abigail Winograd, commissioner and curator of the United States Pavilion at the 60th Biennale di Venezia. The talk will take place inside The Arch within the Arc, featuring new paintings by Lowe inspired by the Palazzo’s historic chambers, the urban dynamics of Venice, and the arc as a visual motif. The group will discuss the exhibition in the context of Lowe’s overall practice, as well as Gagosian’s recently published monograph on the artist, which was coedited by Roelstraete and features essays by both curators. The event is free with museum admission; reservations are recommended.
Left: Rick Lowe. Photo: Brent Reaney. Middle: Dieter Roelstraete. Photo: Richard Pilnik. Right: Abigail Winograd. Photo: Cara Romero
In Conversation
Encore Presentations
Rick Lowe and Christopher Bedford
Wednesday, January 25, 2023, 7pm EST
As part of the Encore Presentations series at the Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts, a filmed discussion between Rick Lowe and former Rose Art Museum director Christopher Bedford will be available to view online. The conversation was originally recorded in 2016 as part of the series Art | Race | Activism. Encore Presentations highlights the museum’s long history of engaging both emerging and leading contemporary artists in critical conversations.
Rick Lowe, Project Row Houses, Houston, 1993–2018 © Rick Lowe Studio
In Conversation
Rick Lowe
Elyse A. Gonzales
Thursday, November 10, 2022, 7pm
Carver Community Cultural Center, San Antonio
www.rubycity.org
As part of Taller Talks, a series of public talks organized in collaboration by Ruby City and the Carver Community Cultural Center, both in San Antonio, Rick Lowe will discuss his work and process with Ruby City director Elyse A. Gonzales. In 2021 the contemporary art center acquired Lowe’s painting Untitled (2021) and it is currently on view for the first time in the exhibition Tangible/Nothing through July 30, 2023.
Rick Lowe, Untitled, 2021 © Rick Lowe Studio. Photo: Thomas DuBrock
In Conversation
Chicago Humanities Festival 2022
Rick Lowe and Amanda Williams on the Transformative Power of Public Art
Saturday, October 22, 2022, 12pm
Northwestern University, Chicago
www.chicagohumanities.org
As part of this year’s Chicago Humanities Festival, Rick Lowe and Amanda Williams—who were named MacArthur Fellows in 2014 and 2022, respectively—will reflect on community-based creative practices and the power of art to remake our public lives. The Chicago Humanities Festival connects people to the ideas that shape and define us and promotes the lifelong exploration of what it means to be human.
Left: Rick Lowe. Photo: Brent Reaney. Right: Amanda Williams. Photo: Jacob Hand
In Conversation
Rick Lowe, Tom Finkelpearl, Eugenie Tsai
Thursday, September 29, 2022, 6pm
Gagosian, 541 West 24th Street, New York
Join Gagosian for a conversation between Rick Lowe and his longtime friends Tom Finkelpearl, author and former commissioner of the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, and Eugenie Tsai, senior curator of contemporary art at the Brooklyn Museum, New York, inside Lowe’s exhibition Meditations on Social Sculpture, at Gagosian, 541 West 24th Street, New York. The trio will discuss how Lowe’s new paintings evolve from his ongoing community projects, moving beyond the conventions of visual practice, as well as their shared interest in transforming social structures and policies to effect change. The event has reached capacity.
Left: Rick Lowe. Photo: Brent Reaney. Middle: Tom Finkelpearl. Right: Eugenie Tsai
Announcements
Video
West to East
Mapping the Unknown: Rick Lowe
In episode two of the National Gallery of Art’s video series West to East, which launched in spring 2023, Rick Lowe guides the viewer through his home in the Third Ward neighborhood of Houston. West to East focuses on contemporary artists whose works actively explore connections to their distinct communities and the United States at large, looking in particular at those working outside well-known “art hubs.” Lowe has spent thirty years combining art and activism via his community platform, Project Row Houses, and more recently he has been creating paintings inspired by maps and dominoes, in a quest for aesthetic beauty. Lowe and his community partners work together to “map the unknown” future.
Still from “West to East: Mapping the Unknown: Rick Lowe”
Award
Rick Lowe
Posey Leader-In-Residence and Posey Leadership Award 2024
Rick Lowe has been named the Posey Leader-In-Residence and winner of the Posey Leadership Award. As the Posey Leader-In-Residence, Lowe will offer four sessions for students throughout the year touching on different aspects of his work. Formally launched in 2005 and made possible through the generosity of Sally and Lee Posey of Dallas, the Austin College award honors an outstanding individual who has shown great leadership with regard to a humanitarian or educational issue, worked to improve the quality of health, educational, or community services for young people, or created opportunities for the youth within education and social advancement.
Rick Lowe, Project Row Houses: If Artists Are Creative Why Can’t They Create Solutions, 2021 © Rick Lowe Studio
Honor
Rick Lowe
National Academy of Design
Rick Lowe will be inducted into the National Academy of Design on October 25, 2022, in a ceremony that will be viewable online. Founded in 1825, the organization advocates for the arts as a tool for education, celebrates the role of artists and architects in public life, and serves as a catalyst for cultural conversations that propel society forward. National Academicians are a community of artists and architects who are elected by their peers in recognition of their extraordinary contributions to art and architecture in America. The number of living Academicians is limited to 450, and more than 2,400 artists and architects have been elected since the organization’s inception.
Photo: Nate Palmer
New Representation
Rick Lowe
Gagosian is pleased to announce the representation of Rick Lowe. Lowe’s numerous collaborative projects, undertaken in the spirit and tradition of “social sculpture,” are paired with an extensive body of work in painting, drawing, and installation. Working closely with individuals and communities, he has identified myriad ways to exercise creativity in the context of everyday activities, harnessing it to explore concerns around equity and justice. Influenced by Joseph Beuys’s formulation of “social sculpture,” he has moved from figurative “anti-painting” to the making and maintenance of projects aimed at the transformation of social structures and sites, and to symbolic abstract painting.
Lowe will inaugurate the third season of Gagosian’s Artist Spotlight series on September 29. His first solo exhibition at the gallery is scheduled for fall 2022 at Gagosian New York.
Rick Lowe. Photo: Brent Reaney
Video
Black Reconstructions
Prosperity and Innovation with Walter Hood, Rick Lowe, and Amanda Williams
In this video, artists Walter Hood, Rick Lowe, and Amanda Williams discuss how histories of Black invention and affluence can inspire new conditions for the present and future. The conversation is moderated by Tracie Hall, executive director of the American Library Association, and was presented in conjunction with the exhibition Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 2021.
Still from “Black Reconstructions: Prosperity and Innovation”
Podcast
Museum Confidential
Rick Lowe
In this episode of Museum Confidential, hosted by Jeff Martin with Philbrook Museum of Art in Tulsa, Oklahoma, Rick Lowe discusses the Greenwood Art Project (2018–21) and the centennial of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre with Martin and project manager Jerica Wortham. To listen to the episode, visit www.publicradiotulsa.org.
Photo: Marlon Hall, courtesy Greenwood Art Project
Museum Exhibitions
Closing this Week
Multiplicity
Blackness in Contemporary American Collage
Through May 12, 2024
Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
www.mfah.org
Multiplicity presents over eighty major collage and collage-informed works by fifty-two living artists. The works reflect the breadth and complexity of Black identity, exploring diverse conceptual concerns such as cultural hybridity, notions of beauty, gender fluidity, and historical memory. From paper, photographs, fabric, and salvaged or repurposed materials, these artists create unified compositions that express the endless possibilities of Black-constructed narratives within our fragmented society. This exhibition originated at the Frist Art Museum, Nashville, Tennessee. Work by Derrick Adams, Lauren Halsey, and Rick Lowe is included.
Lauren Halsey, Loda Land, 2020 © Lauren Halsey
On View
Effetto Notte
Nuovo Realismo Americano
Through July 14, 2024
Gallerie Nazionali di Arte Antica, Palazzo Barberini, Rome
barberinicorsini.org
This exhibition’s title was borrowed from a work by Lorna Simpson, Day for Night (2018), which translates to Effetto Notte in Italian. Curated by Massimiliano Gioni and Flaminia Gennari Santori in collaboration with the Aïshti Foundation, Beirut, the exhibition features more than 150 artworks from the collection of Tony and Elham Salamé that interrogate the meanings and functions of figuration in contemporary art and address questions around the notion of realism and the representation of truth in painting. Work by Derrick Adams, Louise Bonnet, Maurizio Cattelan, Urs Fischer, Theaster Gates, Duane Hanson, Rick Lowe, Richard Prince, Nathaniel Mary Quinn, Sterling Ruby, Anna Weyant, Stanley Whitney, and Christopher Wool is included.
Urs Fischer, Horse/Bed, 2013, installation view, Gallerie Nazionali di Arte Antica, Palazzo Barberini, Rome © Urs Fischer. Photo: Alberto Novelli, courtesy Gallerie Nazionali di Arte Antica
On View
Rick Lowe
The Arch within the Arc
Through November 24, 2024
Museo di Palazzo Grimani, Venice
polomusealeveneto.beniculturali.it
Inspired by the architecture of the Museo di Palazzo Grimani and the urban dynamics of Venice, The Arch within the Arc features new paintings by Rick Lowe that emerged from his consideration of the arch in architecture. Composed with acrylic paint and paper collage on canvas, the vibrant works balance geometric motifs and improvisational techniques. Radiating outward and turning in on themselves, Lowe’s images materialize via a process of painterly construction and deconstruction that evokes infrastructure, mapping, and the experience of moving through the city. The paintings meditate on spatial, temporal, and social relationships, in keeping with the artist’s interest in linking civic practice and visual expression. Presented in collaboration with Gagosian, the exhibition opens immediately prior to the commencement of the 60th Biennale di Venezia.
Installation view, Rick Lowe: The Arch within the Arc, Museo di Palazzo Grimani, Venice, April 17–November 24, 2024. Artwork © Rick Lowe Studio. Photo: Matteo D'Eletto, M3 Studio
On View
Revolutions
Art from the Hirshhorn Collection, 1860–1960
Through April 20, 2025
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC
hirshhorn.si.edu
Revolutions is a major survey of 270 artworks by 126 artists from the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden’s permanent collection. Celebrating the museum’s fiftieth anniversary, the exhibition aims to capture the shifting cultural landscapes of a century defined by new currents in science and philosophy and ever-increasing mechanization. Shown alongside these historic works are contributions from nineteen contemporary artists whose practices demonstrate how many revolutionary ideas from a hundred years ago remain critical today. Work by Francis Bacon, Amoako Boafo, Alexander Calder, Willem de Kooning, Helen Frankenthaler, Rick Lowe, Sally Mann, Man Ray, Henry Moore, Pablo Picasso, Nathaniel Mary Quinn, and Cy Twombly is included.
Rick Lowe, Fire #4: This Time Athens, 2023, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC © Rick Lowe Studio
Closed
Multiplicity
Blackness in Contemporary American Collage
September 15–December 31, 2023
Frist Art Museum, Nashville, Tennessee
fristartmuseum.org
Multiplicity presents over eighty major collage and collage-informed works by fifty-two living artists. The works reflect the breadth and complexity of Black identity, exploring diverse conceptual concerns such as cultural hybridity, notions of beauty, gender fluidity, and historical memory. From paper, photographs, fabric, and salvaged or repurposed materials, these artists create unified compositions that express the endless possibilities of Black-constructed narratives within our fragmented society. Work by Derrick Adams, Lauren Halsey, and Rick Lowe is included.
Rick Lowe, Black Wall Street Journey #2, 2020, installation view, Frist Art Museum, Nashville, Tennessee © Rick Lowe Studio. Photo: John Schweikert
Closed
Hic Sunt Dracones (Here Lay Dragons)
Mapping the Unknown: A Project by Rick Lowe
June 1–July 30, 2023
Benaki Museum / Pireos 138, Athens
www.benaki.org
This exhibition features works by Rick Lowe related to two of his public community projects—Victoria Square Project (2016–), an ongoing initiative in an Athens neighborhood, and Project Row Houses (1993–2018), based in Houston. In collaged paintings and works on paper, the artist emphasizes the links between his social practice and its visual aspects, combining interpretations of the realization of these collaborative initiatives with variations in mark making, palette, and surface texture. Historical materials from the museum’s collection, selected by Lowe with curators Yorgos Tzirtzilakis and Polina Kosmadak, will also be displayed alongside the artist’s work.
Installation view, Hic Sunt Dracones (Here Lay Dragons): Mapping the Unknown: A Project by Rick Lowe, Benaki Museum / Pireos 138, Athens, June 1–July 30, 2023. Artwork © Rick Lowe Studio. Photo: Stathis Mamalakis
Closed
Tangible/Nothing
September 8, 2022–July 30, 2023
Ruby City, San Antonio
www.rubycity.org
Tangible/Nothing presents a new installation from Ruby City’s permanent collection galleries and features approximately forty works by national and international artists, including those with ties to San Antonio and to Texas. The exhibition explores how the invisible or the seemingly mundane can reveal greater meaning, and it aims to tap into our collective experience of absence and presence over the past two years, when the physical separation from family and friends necessitated finding all manner of ways to connect with them in absentia. Work by Rick Lowe and Adam McEwen is included.
Rick Lowe, Untitled, 2021, installation view, Ruby City, San Antonio © Rick Lowe Studio. Photo: Ansen Seale
Closed
Rick Lowe in
Exercises in Imagination
May 18–June 28, 2023
National Academy of Design, New York
nationalacademy.org
Exercises in Imagination is the induction exhibition of recent work by seventeen National Academicians, elected to the National Academy of Design in the fall of 2022. The exhibition frames a dialogue between art, architecture, and emerging disciplines—the founding concerns of the academy. The works collectively envision realms that move between shared histories and speculative futures, challenging accepted notions of US history. Work by Rick Lowe is included.
Rick Lowe, Untitled #061821, 2021 © Rick Lowe Studio
Closed
Rick Lowe
Notes on the Great Migration
October 25, 2022–February 10, 2023
Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society, University of Chicago
neubauercollegium.uchicago.edu
The exhibition features new paintings by Rick Lowe who was a visiting fellow at the Neubauer Collegium from 2019 to 2021. Lowe’s “notes” on the Great Migration took shape in the wake of his Black Wall Street Journey, a three-part citywide project that pays tribute to the building of Black wealth, using public art to tell stories from the journeys of Black communities in Chicago and beyond. The centerpiece of this exhibition is a new mode of presenting Lowe’s two-dimensional work—in a manner that befits the artist’s critical contribution to the development of a properly American brand of “social sculpture.”
Installation view, Rick Lowe: Notes on the Great Migration, Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society, University of Chicago, October 25, 2022–February 10, 2023. Artwork © Rick Lowe Studio. Photo: Robert Heishman
Closed
Rick Lowe in
Urban Impressions: Experiencing the Global Contemporary Metropolis
September 16–December 17, 2022
Moody Center for the Arts, Rice University, Houston
moody.rice.edu
Urban Impressions considers the complexities of the modern metropole through a broad and diverse selection of artists from around the globe. Starting with the question “What makes the metropolis?” the exhibition examines our sensorial and physical engagement with urban landscapes and the experiential impact of the built environment. Ranging from sculpture and painting to video and installation, the works on view question defining features of a city—from population density to sensory overload—and thus foreground the central role that the arts and humanities play in the critical conversation about how urban centers affect the mind and bodies of its inhabitants. Work by Rick Lowe is included.
Rick Lowe, Project Row Houses: Hindsight, 2022 (detail) © Rick Lowe Studio
Closed
Whitney Biennial 2022
Quiet as It’s Kept
April 6–October 16, 2022
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
whitney.org
The Whitney Biennial was established in 1932 by the museum’s founder, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, to chart developments in art in the United States. The 2022 Biennial presents dynamic selections that take different forms over the course of the exhibition: artworks—even walls—change, and performance animates the galleries and objects. With an intergenerational and interdisciplinary roster of sixty-three artists and collectives at all points in their careers, many of whom work with an interdisciplinary perspective, the Biennial surveys and presents the art and ideas of our time. Work by Harold Ancart, Ellen Gallagher, Cy Gavin, and Rick Lowe is included.
Harold Ancart, The Guiding Light, 2021, installation view, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York © Harold Ancart. Photo: Ryan Lowry
Closed
The Slipstream
Reflection, Resilience, and Resistance in the Art of Our Time
May 14, 2021–April 10, 2022
Brooklyn Museum, New York
www.brooklynmuseum.org
The Slipstream draws examples from Brooklyn Museum’s contemporary art collection to contemplate the profound disruption that occurred in 2020. Borrowing its title from an aeronautical term that refers to the pull of the current that is left in the wake of a large and powerful object, the exhibition examines the placement and displacement of power that runs through American history and continues today. The show features more than sixty works by multiple generations of artists from the 1960s to the present day, including Titus Kaphar, Rick Lowe, Nathaniel Mary Quinn, and Taryn Simon.
Taryn Simon, Press XL, from the series Paperwork and the Will of Capital, 2015, Brooklyn Museum, New York © Taryn Simon