Lowe joins UHfaculty
Activist is set to develop minor for socially engaged art
You can call the genius “professor” now.
Rick Lowe, the charismatic activist-artist who made Project Row Houses a national model for social sculpture, will join the University of Houston faculty this fall as a clinical associate professor of art in the newly organized College of the Arts. Lowe will help develop a minor focused on socially engaged art and a College of the Arts-Third Ward Fellows program.
Paula Myrick Short, UH senior vice president for academic affairs and provost, said Lowe’s hiring furthers the university’s ties to Houston’s arts community and strengthens its mission to provide the artists of tomorrow with core faculty who are leaders in their field.
“Rick Lowe’s social activism has transformed the city of Houston, and I hope that he has the same effect on our university,” Short said.
The hiring is a coup for the university, a dream come true for Lowe and a relief to friends of Project Row Houses who feared Lowe would be recruited away from the city where he made his mark after winning a MacArthur Award in 2014.
Since then, Lowe has been tempted by other opportunities, with teaching stints at Southern Methodist University and Stanford University.
Lowe told the Chronicle in 2014 he wanted to partner with a local university to create an institute, build a small museum on the Project Row Houses campus and incubate small businesses that could help the neighborhood retain its historical African-American character.
“There are points in time that allow you to see yourself differently,” he said. He wanted to stay in Houston, he added, “but I’ve got to be able to generate the kind of support that is on the same level that’s being offered from other places.”
Project Row Houses, which Lowe and a group of other Houston artists founded in 1993 near Texas Southern University and the University of Houston, has grown into a community hub with five art-installation spaces, a program for young mothers, affordable housing and artists’ residences.
The College of Arts, created last February, unites the university’s previously independent arts units — UH’s Moores School of Music, the School of Theater & Dance, the School of Art, the Blaffer Art Museum, the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Center for the Arts and the Center for Arts Leadership — into a center of higher learning led by artists, for artists.
Interim dean Andrew Davis, who also directs the Moores School, said Lowe’s hiring reflects the college’s emphasis on civic and social engagement through the arts.