The Menil Collection The Menil Collection

Houston-based artist Rick Lowe joins the Menil’s Senior Curator Michelle White for a conversation on the occasion of the museum’s recent acquisition of Lowe’s 2020 work, Untitled. The artwork belongs to an ongoing group of paintings and drawings based on aerial views resembling maps of neighborhood communities made by urban planners along with domino games superimposed. Lowe and White discuss these compositions, poised between abstraction and topographic depictions and their relation to Lowe’s broader work anchored in community engagement.

This program is organized as part of Texas Talks Art, a multi-institutional initiative intended to introduce the work of artists across the state of Texas to a wider audience. Taking the form of virtual 30-minute lunchtime talks, the series features 50 Texas artists and artist collectives in conversation with 50 Texas curators beginning in January 2021. The talks are free and take place every Tuesday at noon. For a list of upcoming programs and more information, please visit texastalksart.org.

Rick Lowe is a Houston-based artist and Professor of Art at the University of Houston. His work has been exhibited at museums and biennials nationally and internationally. He is best known for his Project Row Houses community-based art project that he started in Houston in 1993. Additional community projects include the Watts House Project in Los Angeles; the Borough Project in Charleston, SC (with Suzanne Lacy and Mary Jane Jacobs); the Anyang Public Art Program 2010 in Anyang, Korea; Trans.lation: Vickery Meadow in Dallas, TX; and the Victoria Square Project in Athens, Greece. Among Lowe’s honors are the Rudy Bruner Awards in Urban Excellence, the AIA Keystone Award, the Heinz Award in the arts and humanities, the Skowhegan Governor’s Award, the Skandalaris Award for Art/Architecture, and a USA Artists Booth Fellowship. He has served as a Loeb Fellow at Harvard University, a Mel King Fellow at MIT, an Auburn University Breedan Scholar, and as the Stanford University Haas Center Distinguished Visitor. President Barack Obama appointed Lowe to the National Council on the Arts in 2013; in 2014 he was named a MacArthur Fellow.