News / Rick Lowe

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Multiplicity
Blackness in Contemporary American Collage

Through 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 and Rick Lowe is included.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Rick Lowe
Notes on the Great Migration

October 25, 2022–February 10, 2023
Neubauer Collegium, 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.”

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Rick Lowe in
Toward Common Cause: Art, Social Change, and the MacArthur Fellows Program at 40

July 15–December 19, 2021
Various locations in Chicago
towardcommoncause.org

Organized by the Smart Museum of Art at the University of Chicago in collaboration with more than two dozen partner organizations across the city, Toward Common Cause is a multi-venue exhibition exploring the extent to which certain resources—air, land, water, and even culture—can be held in common. Raising questions about inclusion, exclusion, ownership, and rights of access, the exhibition considers art’s vital role in society as a call to vigilance, a way to bear witness, and a potential act of resistance. Presented on the fortieth anniversary of the MacArthur Fellows Program, Toward Common Cause employs the Fellows Program as an “intellectual commons” and features work by twenty-nine artists who have been named Fellows since the program’s founding in 1981, including Rick Lowe. For the exhibition, Lowe has created his first Chicago-based social sculpture, 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.

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Rick Lowe
New Paintings & Drawings

September 26, 2020–April 24, 2021
Art League Houston
www.artleaguehouston.org

New Paintings & Drawings is an exhibition of recent work by Rick Lowe, the Art League Houston 2020 Texas Artist of the Year. Created between 2017 and 2020, the works on view feature Lowe’s signature vivid explorations of color and complex visualizations of compositional space, and include his multilayered abstract paintings often depicting aerial views of domino games.

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Rick Lowe in
Documenta 14

April 8–September 17, 2017
Victoria Square, Athens
www.documenta14.de

As part of Documenta 14, Rick Lowe collaborated with Maria Papadimitriou on Victoria Square Project (2016–), a social sculpture that strives to empower the local community through creative experiences. By building artistic spaces of belonging and refuge for locals and immigrants alike, this ongoing project gives new life and a sense of familial space to a somewhat polarized and forgotten community, stricken by grief and displacement during the recent refugee crisis in Greece.

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Rick Lowe
Trans.lation

October 19, 2013–February 16, 2014
Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas
www.nashersculpturecenter.org

Rick Lowe’s community art project Trans.lation takes place in Vickery Meadow, a three-square-mile area that makes up one of the most culturally diverse sections of Dallas and is home to thirty thousand residents speaking as many as twenty-seven languages. The project helps facilitate a new vision of what public space and interaction can look like in the neighborhood, identifying residents’ creative strengths and connecting them with local artists for collaboration and mentorship to ultimately engender opportunity and entrepreneurship. Trans.lation culminates in a series of pop-up markets that enable the Vickery Meadow community to share their artistic talents and cultural traditions with one another and the greater Dallas community.