"In 1992, the Alabama-born artist Rick Lowe, then 31, had been living in Houston for seven years when a handful of high school students visited him at his studio. At the time, he was making large-scale paintings and sculptures inspired by the poverty and inequality he saw around him in the city’s Third Ward, but then one of the kids asked him a question he could not answer: If you’re an artist, why don’t you come up with a creative solution to the problem? That encounter sparked Project Row Houses, a now almost 30-year-long nonprofit enterprise that vividly examines the porosity between art and activism. Influenced by the German artist and agitator Joseph Beuys, the progenitor of “social sculpture,” and the work of John T. Biggers, who painted haunting, impressionistic scenes, Lowe and a group of collaborators raised money to buy 22 shotgun houses, and renovated them for artists’ residencies and community use. Maintaining their pier-and-beam structures was not cost effective, but Lowe felt it was important to celebrate the African-American vernacular, first erected in West Africa and brought eventually to New Orleans. Behind eight houses that to this day are occupied for up to five months by artists, Lowe and his collaborators renovated others for single mothers to use for up to two years. And over the decades, the project has expanded to include a series of low-to-moderate-income duplex residences and created almost a dozen local social programs. “We can approach our lives as artists, each and every one of us,” Lowe told The New York Times in 2006. “If you choose to, you can make every action a creative act.” — N.H.

About the artist:

Rick Lowe is an artist who resides in Houston, Texas. His formal training is in the visual arts. Over the past thirty years he has worked both inside and outside of art world institutions by participating in exhibitions and developing community based art projects.
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Source: https://www.ricklowe.com/