Rick Lowe - "Rick Lowe" - Dieter Roelstraete

Rick Lowe will discuss his work and Rick Lowe from the Neubauer Collegium focused on his painting. He will be joined in conversation by the Neubauer Collegium's curator, Dieter Roelstraete.

Presented in partnership with The Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society

At the Co-op

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About the Book: Houston-based artist Rick Lowe is widely known for his pioneering contributions to the development of “social practice art,” work that landed him a MacArthur fellowship in 2014. What few people realize is that he was originally trained as a landscape painter. In recent years, Lowe has increasingly turned back to painting, producing complex multi-panel and quasi-abstract images that are deeply rooted in thirty years of work creating “social sculptures,” recalling the urban fabric of cities around the world that have formed the backdrop of many of his community-based art projects. This book, which brilliantly reproduces Lowe’s paintings, is the first dedicated to the work of this important American artist, focusing on his painterly practice and its origins in his work in the public sphere.

About  Rick Lowe (Professor of Art, University of Houston) is an artist whose approach to community revitalization is path-breaking: Lowe has initiated arts-driven redevelopment projects in Houston – the renowned Project Row Houses – and other cities, including the Watts House Project in Los Angeles and post­-Katrina rebuild in New Orleans. Lowe's pioneering "social sculptures" have inspired a generation of artists to explore more socially engaged forms of art-making in communities across the country and internationally. His work has been exhibited at Houston's Contemporary Arts Museum and Museum of Fine Arts; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Gwangju Biennale in South Korea; and the Venice Architecture Biennale. Lowe was in residence as a Neubauer Collegium Visiting Fellow from 2018 to 2021, during which time he collaborated on the Black Wall Street Journey project. His second residency (2023–24) extends the project into new areas of exploration.

About the author: Dieter Roelstraete is the Curator for the Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society at the University of Chicago, where he has organized exhibitions of Gelitin, Rick Lowe, Pope.L, Martha Rosler, and, most recently, Christopher Williams. He previously served on the curatorial team that organized documenta 14, the international art exhibition that ran in the spring and summer of 2017 in Kassel, Germany, and Athens, Greece. Prior to that, he served as the Manilow Senior Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago from 2012 to 2015. During his time there, he organized and co-organized a number of highly regarded shows, including The Way of the Shovel: Art as Archaeology (2015); The Freedom Principle: Experiments in Art and Music 1965 to Now (2015); and Kerry James Marshall: Mastry (2016), a retrospective of the acclaimed Chicago-based artist that traveled to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. From 2003 to 2011 Roelstraete was a curator at the Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst Antwerpen. Roelstraete, who was trained as a philosopher at the University of Ghent, has published extensively on contemporary art and related philosophical issues.