Rick Lowe: Living Among the Rules
Even when it feels like the cards are stacked against him — at the outset of a big, daunting community project or upon returning to painting after 25 years — Rick Lowe gets started the same way: slowly but surely looking for what’s already there.
Rather than assuming the role of an artist who parachutes in with a new piece to ostensibly better a neighborhood, Lowe believes in a community’s capacity to endure and grow by making its own art. Rather than focusing on the outcome, he lets the remembered layout of a past game of dominoes guide his paintings. The two ways of making are connected. For as Lowe is layering and fracturing color, outlining dominoes and scumbling the negative space in between, he is thinking about Greenwood, Tulsa’s Black Wall Street — firebombed, razed and willfully forgotten nearly 100 years ago. Working with the 1921 Tulsa Massacre Centennial Commission, he is developing two joint projects in Tulsa and Chicago that remember the history of this tragedy to teach it, commemorating the Black community’s resilience in rebuilding right when the smoke cleared. […]
Originally published by Art League Houston in the catalogue Rick Lowe: Paintings & Drawings 2017–2020, accompanying an exhibition on view from 26 September 2020 to 24 April 2021
