Rick Lowe’s latest project — reclaiming his own art
Project Row Houses founder pulls from a passion for dominoes and color to create works that are built on layers of creative thought
Rick Lowe claims he’s not good at dominoes, although he’s played for more than two decades with Jesse Lott and anyone who wants to jump into their regular games at Project Row Houses, the landmark, art-based Third Ward community Lowe and others built as a catalyst for social change.
He says he tends to daydream, focused more on the shapes and patterns of the tiles than winning. He sees dominoes — like basketball and other games — as a metaphor for so much about life: It’s about strategy, chance, layering. “There’s the known and the unknown,” he says. “All those things that are at play.”
He can also see the poetry in scores scribbled on paper and the patterns in the movements of the 28 tiles. A traced game ends up looking like a busy street map.
That’s what’s underneath the first paintings and drawings Lowe has made in more than 25 years. These works, including drawings on view at Hiram Butler Gallery, have a very different intention than the purposefully ugly, unwieldy installations he painted as a politically charged young man in his 20s.
Lowe, who’s now 57, knew doors would open after his life’s work was recognized in 2014 with a MacArthur fellowship, catapulting him into a category of famous geniuses. “People look at you a little bit differently, a little bit deeper, than they did before. It’s been interesting,” he says, laughing.
But aside from the expected invitations to lead big, national conversations with other thought leaders, one of those doors has also led into a small, light-filled studio deep inside the Project Row campus. He was wearing a jacket there Monday — with the doors open, because
it was a beautiful day, but chilly, and the studio doesn’t have heat.
When I walked in he was drawing domino scores like calligraphic marks along the edges of a big sheet of creamy paper, around a drawing made from an aerial view of streets within the Emancipation Economic Development Council, a group Lowe helped create to preserve the neighborhood around Project Row from gentrification. That’s just the platform, as he calls it — a base for the piece that he will mostly, if not entirely, obscure with layers of more drawing, painting and possibly collage.
He had made up the scores. “I’ve played this many games in my head, but you can’t play them all,” he said.
Huge, busy and colorful hybrid drawing-paintings drenched in many layers of paint, paint marker and collage filled the walls behind him, demanding close inspection to discern myriad details poking through it all. When the light is right, a viewer can see the outlines of sheets of paper — offers from developers to buy neighborhood property. “Third Ward is Not for Sale” signs are also embedded.
“I can’t tell you how many different pieces are under there,” Lowe said. “A number. And it’s still evolving.”
Several of the works are topped with green or yellow painted, quiltlike designs, imagery that has itself acquired layers of meaning — adopted from paintings by John Biggers that helped feed Lowe’s vision for Project Row, and that now may be familiar to more people as the organization’s logo.
Lowe thought he had given up conventional art-making long ago.
He was already questioning his place in the commercial market when he came to Houston in the late 1980s. He’d gravitated to art after going to Alabama State University to play basketball, but he wanted to address issues that mattered to him, including income inequality and racism. The thought of making art for somebody’s living room was, “Like, ugh,” he says. “It didn’t sound right.”
In the late 1980s and early ’90s, after a spate of citizen killings by Houston police, he was making protest installations, using nonarchival materials like plywood and house paint —intentionally unsellable. His oft-told epiphany came when a boy challenged him, saying if he really wanted to change the world, he should create solutions instead.
Along with the example of Biggers at Texas Southern University, Lowe admired social sculpture theories developed in the 1970s by the avant-garde European artist Joseph Beuys, who believed anything in life, if approached creatively, could qualify as art. Compulsive by nature, Lowe jumped all in, losing the desire to paint because he was so consumed with building Project Row.
Although he never stopped making small things for himself, Lowe grudgingly agreed to create some visual art for public consumption a few years ago, after Lott convinced him to participate in an exhibition at Dan Allison’s gallery. It started with photographs of dominoes, “because they’re beautiful little objects, especially the black ones,” Lowe says. “Then I just started drawing every hand we would play. Then it was — ah, this turns into something. And it kept going and going.”
Decades ago, he wanted his paintings to feel intense and urgent. Now he’s freed himself from that kind of responsibility. “Viewers can dig around and try to make connections to whether it’s John Biggers or Project Row Houses or other projects I’m working on. But they can also just approach it from a purely formal standpoint,” he says.
He committed to a studio practice late last year, needing to test himself before he officially handed the reins of Project Row to a smart new generation of leaders, including Executive Director Eureka Gilkey and Curator/Programs Director Ryan Dennis earlier this year.
He also teaches a class each semester at the University of Houston, in conjunction with the Center for Socially Engaged Art, which he created there after winning the MacArthur grant. “The point is to get students off the campus into communities, to get a sense of what it’s like to allow your creativity to be in service of something beyond your own personal goals or needs,” he says.
Two of the works on his studio wall are early-stage renderings for a multiyear national project, “Black Wall Street Journey,” with community engagement elements beginning in Tulsa and Chicago. Those pieces also involve the game of dominoes.
“You have 28 spots, 28 dominoes. How you lay those, how you play those is so much about where you end up,” he says. “Certainly I know that to be the case in terms of community development, real estate development and political strategy: How do you deal with what’s known, what’s unknown; how do you respond to it and play it out?”
He began planning the “Black Wall Street Journey” project after officials from Tulsa asked him to help commemorate the city’s infamous 1921 Race Riot, which led to a massacre by white supremacists who burned down the most economically successful black neighborhood in the country and killed an untold number of people. Against all odds, some residents returned to the area quickly after the massacre and rebuilt. That resilience, not the horrors, intrigues Lowe now.
His project is evolving into programs that will consider ways to regenerate neighborhoods through economic improvement in Tulsa. It will also include policy-shaping work in Chicago, where he has a research fellowship and will participate in a 40th anniversary exhibition for the MacArthur fellows program in 2021.
He’s still relearning how to make art. For instance, the markers he uses come in limited colors. He wanted more, but he had to tinker a while before remembering he could manipulate colors by adding a thin layer of paint over white markers. Then there was the whole question of painting on canvas, which he knew should be primed on both sides but neglected to stretch — an error of sorts with a bright side: The loose canvas is easier to move back and forth from the wall to the floor, where he crawls around on it to work.
Was it intimidating to start over again, all these years later? Absolutely, he says. Most of his artist peers have been perfecting the craft underpinnings of their work for decades. And thinking about art shifted while he was busy building community. Hands-on object-making can feel passe, because there’s a huge emphasis on conceptual work.
Lowe probably needn’t worry about that. Museums quickly snapped up most of the drawings at Butler’s gallery. And in his studio, Lowe is creating work for a group show in San Francisco next summer and a one-person show in Los Angeles next November — finally feeling good about creating art that may go into fancy living rooms.
“The thing that shifts my perspective on the market, this work is meditative for me. It gives me a space to sit and listen to some music and allow my brain to move through all the other stuff,” he says. “It’s a privilege I think I can take now, because I’ve put in a lot of years on dealing with the issues. This is an opportunity for me to just go back and deal with color, shape, form.”
He’s also learning again when to stop — when enough is enough on a painting with so many layers only the artist knows what’s underneath. He points to a work on paper hanging in a corner, with a complex network of colored markings over a dark background. “I remember Jesse warning me about that one, ‘Better watch out, it’ll go black.’ And it did. Completely. Then it came back, with light.”
Perhaps there’s a metaphor in that, too.