Rick Lowe

Artist and community organiser, founder of Project Row Houses

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Rick Lowe is a Houston-based artist and community organizer. He studied painting at Columbus College in Georgia, US before shifting his focus to social, economic, and cultural issues in the 1990s. He initiated several urban redevelopment projects, the first and most famous being the Project Row Houses in Huston’s long-neclected historical African American neighbourhood. Among his other projects are the Watts House Project in Los Angeles, a post-Katrina rebuilding effort in New Orleans, and, most recently, a community market in North Dallas. Because of the socially engaged nature of his work, Lowe is often defined as a public artist, activist-artist while his work can be best described as „social sculpture“, a concept invented by artist Joseph Beuys.

Lowe is a recipient of the McArthur Foundation scholarship, a member of the National Council on the Arts, US and a former Mel King Community Fellow at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In the fall of 2016 he will join the University of Houston College of the Arts where he will contribute to developing a course program focused on socially engaged art, and a College of the Arts-Third Ward Fellows program.

http://projectrowhouses.org