The Power of Social Sculpture with Rick Lowe

the sculptures show what's happening in our communities. We don't need to be told what's happening. We know what's happening. If artists are created, why can't they create a solution? And I just went, whoa wait a minute. That's Rick low and artist MacArthur Genius fellow and community organizer who lives and works in Houston. His work engages and transforms

communities through social practice and collaboration. And nearly three decades ago, the question that student asks changed the course of Lowe's career. I mean, this student just pulled the rug from under me of like you know. I mean, by that time, I had been practicing as an artist for almost ten years.

You know, I'm like, it took me aback, and that's when I closed my studio down and started researching artists that actually did art that was both poetic and symbolic but also had a practical application, and so that led me to this journey. Lowe started out as a landscape painter, but soon took up the practice of social sculpture, using creativity to shape communities. He uses space, architecture, and opportunity as mediums like clay or paint to shape society itself.

For the past twenty five years, Lowe has crafted one particular social sculpture in Houston's Third Ward. It's called Project Row Houses, and it's an artist led community space that's dedicated to the creation of art, education and housing. In the initial stages, we thought maybe we were just gonna, you know, take these twenty two shotgun houses and we were going to do a few art shows in it and you know, bring artists in. We didn't have this idea that was going to be this thing, but then

it just kept growing. I'm Anita Hill. This is Getting Even my podcast about equality and what it takes to get there. On Getting Even, I speak with people who are improving are perfect world people who took risk and broke the rules. In this episode, Rick Lowe and I discuss how he views his art and the role it plays in his Houston community. Low is represented by the prestigious Cogosian Gallery and has won numerous awards for his paintings, sculptures,

and installations. Low and I speak about how he developed his social art practice, the importance of space to equality, and the impact that artistic investment can have on underserved communities. So you started out your career as a landscape painter. You went to a school that specialized in landscape painting, but also there was something else that drew you to it. Well, first of all, I went there to play basketball. That

was my main focus at the time. Where I grew up in rural Alabama, there were based five ways your life would go after high school. The big one was really people were joining the military. If you were lucky and talented enough of something, you could get some kind of sports scholarship or something like that, or you become a factory worker or a drug dealer, or you just

stayed at home. It was very limited options, and so I took the root of sports and went to school thinking that sports was going to be my way of elevating myself to a point that I could actually do things for other people, I could live a purposeful life. But it was there that I ended up taking art classes and made a shift. So it was so interesting for me because I had spent so much time just sucking in the red color of the soil, in the green pine trees and rural Alabama, even the white clay.

So this combination of red and white and green was always something that it had a huge imprint on my psyche. You know, that kind of earth. So you've seen spaces in a number of ways, I mean the physical sense, but also in the legal and cultural sense. You've seen segregated spaces, and Nope, what that feels like. Absolutely. I was trained as a painter, and I always had this mission of doing work that would contribute to transforming the

conditions of people that are in disadvantaged situations. And so as an early painter, I painted things about police brutality, about poverty and all those kinds of things. And then I end up switching over to something that was inspired by the German artist Joseph Boy's concept of social sculpture. Joseph Boy's definition of social sculpture was basically the way that we shape and mold the world around us, and

that everybody is participating as artists. I went from landscape paintings realizing that, Okay, the landscape's great and all that stuff, but I want to do stuff that talks about issues that people that come from backgrounds like I came from, are all about. I want to speak to those issues.

And so I switched from landscape to doing figurative work, and I went through this whole thing of trying to make sure that it wasn't work that would just fit in galleries and that kind of stuff, and wasn't just for sale, that it connected with things, and so I started doing these very clunky, large scale things in conjunction with political groups like anders international human rights weak or

activism and stuff. Let's talk about some of your very specific work project Rowhouses in Houston, which has been a big part of your artistic work for the last thirty years. This isn't I think nineteen ninety there were two people killed by the police here in the Third Ward neighborhood. Activists had been working on this thing for like a year, trying to call attention to the injustices and get get

the police charged. But after a year or so, the media got a little tired of it and kind of dissipate a little bit, and so I was just an artist around among the crew, right, passing out flyers and doing stuff for the community leaders. But then one day I at a meeting. They were trying to figure out how could they get media attention, and I said, oh, well, I could create an installation, you know, an art installation, and they kind of looked at me like, okay, whatever.

So I went out and I went to this little handball court in a park and I built this giant, giant, giant installation with all these big giant paintings and cutout sculptures and all this stuff dealing with police brutality and all. And they saw me out there doing it, and as it got closer to finish, they went like, whoa, we should have a press conference here, and so they did.

So they had this press conference with all the activists, you know, they were sitting in the table in the middle of this big installation, all the media from all over there, and I was like, that was so meaningful for me to be of service that way. After the press conference, it was on the cover of all the

local newspapers and all the television shows. So my work was out there and I was feeling like I'm really doing exactly it, you know, I'm being an artist and activist, until a friend of mine a year later brought some of their students by my studio where I had disassembled all this stuff, and it was just all, you know, sitting around, and this one kid was saying how he liked the work. But then before they left, he said, but do you know, miss Lowe, why you're painting The

sculptures show what's happening in our communities. We don't need to be told what's happening. We know what's happening. If artists are created, why can't they create a solution? And I just went, whoa wait a minute, I mean this hold,

are you right? I mean this student just pulled the rug from under me of like you know, I mean, by that time, I had been practicing as an artist for almost ten years, you know, I'm like yeah, So it was very shocking, and it just it took me aback, and that's when I closed my studio down and started researching artists that actually did art that was both poetic and symbolic but also had a practical application. And so that led me to this journey that started project to

Our Houses. Can you describe that project for us? I've found these little houses that reminded me of John Biggers. He was an artist that had come to Houston and he started the art department at Texas Southern University here in Houston, and he did a lot of paintings about

shotgun houses and stuff. And he had gone to West Africa and he saw the relationship between the shotgun houses in the West African villages that he visited, and he just he dove in and he did all this research and he came up with this whole kind of mythology around it about how the shotgun house was a product of the slave trade, slaves moving from West Africa and to the West Indies and having opportunities to build their own structures. Sometimes they were just built in the way

that they were accustomed to. And then from the West Indies into New Orleans was the kind of the first location of these little shotgun style houses that were expanded with a Western influence, a European influence, and so it was like a narrow, skinny little thing, and you walk into the middle of the house and you can look to the left and you'll see it goes straight out to a window there and you look to the right.

So there were things about it that spoke to the brilliance of people that brought that with them, and then it just kind of moved out. So he wroped all that history in that gave me a foundation through which I could actually pursue social sculpture to generate interests of people in sculpting with me a community that had such a rich history. And when you found those houses, they

were shattered right. Yes, yes, in fact I found the houses because at that time, after the student had pulled the rug from under me about my painting practice, I just was spending a lot of time volunteering in the community and working with the act of this that were

in this neighborhood. And one day they were organizing a tour of dangerous places within the community, and they had representatives from the city and the county on a bus and they were driving around saying, this is a place for harboring drug activities, this is a place for prostitution. They were asking them to be torn down. On the bus going back to the center, they stopped at this little block and a half of Shotgun House. This was twenty two of them, and they said, and this is

the absolute worst place in the entire neighborhood. And they said it just needed to go. And I was just sitting there on the bus with them. I had no thoughts about it until later going back looking at those houses and then thinking about John Bigger's glorification of the shotgun house or shotgun communities. Then it just kind of hit me. I was like, well, wait a minute, this could be an ideal place for social sculpture because it had a deep level of history and it could symbolically

mean something and also address some practical elements. You know. And where I'm from, when I've heard the term shotgun house, it's usually said disparagingly. And so it's amazing to me that with the right history, with the right amount of knowledge that you got from Professor Biggers, you were able to see the beauty and the worth and value in them. Oh yeah, absolutely, So now you take possession of these

twenty two houses, correct, That was the initial concepts. We're going to take these houses and then you have to figure out what you're going to do with this space. How was that process? Well, identifying those houses and saying these houses mean something and we should do something. Not a clue about really how to manage that and stuff, but it was just really taking that first step, knowing that there's meaning and there's value there, and with a

trust that somehow it will end fold. And I think that to me also became the point when I learned really and truly the value of social sculpture is that if you're sculpting in society, you can't do it alone. You must do it in a way that rely on the gifts and strengths of other people. And so for me, I didn't even know the first thing about real estate. I had never purchased any real estate anything in my life.

So immediately, all of a sudden, it was like, oh, I had to find people that knew something about real estate. And then it was like, oh, well, the houses they were all falling down. I was like, okay, so now we have to find somebody it knows something about construction. It's interesting because the six other artists that I was working with, you know, they were all behind me. They were interested in this. They believed in it, I guess

because I had. When people have that energy and that thing in their eye, and people okay, well, you know, you might as well get with this person because you know you're gonna not gonna stop, right, That's right. Yeah, so you and once I was able to get a least purchase agreement on these twenty two houses, we just started cleaning up. In fact, there was an elder lady who had lived behind this particular property. She was the only person that was still living and basically a four

block area, and she had lived there. She had bought her house in nineteen forty nine, and in the midst of all that chaos around her, she still had her picket fence, white house flowers in her she you know, she was The community just died around her, but she didn't, and she was very tough to be there. She would walk outside with her pistol and ask us what we're doing and says, if you're not, you know, if you're playing around, I'm gonna shoot. You know. We're like, okay,

but we're not. We're gonna And then I remember her saying that she says, if you want to do something in this place, clean this mess up and that was our first Q. It's like, okay, we've got the houses, let's call people out and say, let's clean up this block. Let's clean up this block, these two blocks here, And so that's kind of how we started. Was just people with shovels and rakes and trash bags and it was almost like excavating because so much had overgrown. Yeah, we

were just having fun cleaning up a place. After the break. Rick low and I discussed the far reaching impact of his social sculpture work, particularly Project Rowhouses. You're listening to getting even. I'm Anita Hill. I'm speaking with artists Rick Lowe about Project Rowhouses, a social sculpture in Houston's Third

Ward that he started over two decades ago. Isaac Rowhouses currently includes thirty nine houses and covers five city blocks and provides transitional housing, gallery and residency spaces for artists and storefronts for entrepreneurs. I've seen photos of the houses, but for those who haven't, can you describe where they are now and who's in them? Yeah? Well, when we start cleaning them up, just a handful of us artists, all of a sudden, children from the neighborhood started coming.

They were curious about, you know, what are they doing over there? And little kids, the ones that are five to ten twelve years old, they would just come and hang out and we would buy lunch and stuff and hang out with them and kind of mentor them. And so that was our first unofficial program, was a youth program, just being older adults there to talk to children about what are you doing with your life and what do you want to do, what are you dreaming about it,

you know, and giving them meaningful things to do. And so what we decided at that point was that we needed an education program for young people because the thing that we observed was that yesteryear, the grandparents and aunts and uncles were the people that took care of and looked after children when their parents were at work or

so on and so forth. But after I guess the eighties, you know, I mean, we lost so many of those grandparents and uncles and aunts to drugs, and so they were not able to provide those good, wholesome places that we remember, you know, where there was always somebody on the block that looked after all, you know, made sure

everybody is okay. So we kind of called ourselves to uncles, the uncles and aunts of the community, because we were the place where the kids could come and be safe, and so we developed an education program that would work with them after school and during the summer so that they would have safe places to go that were productive. So that was our first programmatic thing. But then, of course then we said we wanted to make sure that artists were at the forefront. So instead of having an

education coordinator, we just said we will allow artists. We give artists stipends and let them do what they do and educate people in the process. So then we started this art program that at eight houses where artists could do art projects, and we had the five houses in the back like little school houses and stuff. That was like the first year or so, and I remember we were talking about the other houses. What should we do

with the other houses. The logical thinking was that, oh, we should, we should have artists and residents to live here. That was a logical thing, and then we ended up with those seven houses being used as a transitional housing for single mothers. Why did you choose the single mothers, Well, Deb Grolsfeldt, who was working with us at the time.

She was doing research and she just she went to the local high school and she just thought, oh my god, she was at a They had like a whole special class for pregnant girls at the school, and she was like, there's so many. It was just a Yeah. It was an eye opening thing for all of us that that was such an issue in the community. But then it

became pretty obvious once we started a program. There are lots of young girls that are out here in this community and they're preyed upon and all kinds of things, and they're ending up being parents of babies that they don't really know how to manage and deal with. So maybe we could help with that. What did you expect

these young mothers to get from the project? Well, first of all, we were really trying to figure out how we could root this project deeply in the community, and so selecting single mothers at that time, the majority were from this neighborhood that we thought that would be a real way for us to show that we're really serious about connecting with this community. So that was our initial thinking. Because I mean, as as an art project, I mean,

we didn't say that we were social service providers. We didn't know what we were doing, but we just we had our heart and our intention was to do something that was going to be meaningful for people. You know, we didn't know the rules, and sometimes not knowing the rules and limitations of things that open things up for you. And with these young mothers, you could actually influence two generations. I mean, you were really looking into the future. Absolutely.

I have to tell you this one. I talk about her all the time because she was one of the first young mothers in the program. But this one I love to tell her story because she was amazing. But I remember when we were first talking about the program, they brought together a group of people that had applied and they said, you know, so this is our list

of women that are interested. And I saw this woman's name, her name as Asada Richards, and I went, no, no way, because I knew her from this community center that I had been doing volunteer work with. And Asado was just she was a handful. I mean, she was so she was so angry, you know, and she was a part of the black nationalist movement that all white people of the devil and all this stuff, and the reason it was it was odd for me and I was just saying, I don't know if we can do this because a

lot of our supporters were not black. We made sure that we centered all of our programming and everything we were doing around this community. But our support network was very broad. And I was like, she's not gonna make it here because we have people on committees that she's going to be, you know. And it was interesting that the person who was coordinating said, well, we're going to

take a chance on her. When she signed up for the program, I saw her and I spoke to her, and it was the first time I had seen her like in a position was a little bit reserved, because she was always on the proactive, you know, and always aggressively challenging everything, but she was observing. And then I just noticed for the next year how she was just

she was just a calm person. She had been on academic probation at University of Houston, but while she was there, and she had this support network of basically she had a home that was secure for her, all of her utilities were paid, We had the childcare situation taken care of. They had group counseling, individual counseling, and all these different things right, and all of a sudden, like she was in her junior year that year, and all of a

sudden she was doing really good. And then she ended up doing so well that by the time she graduated, one of her professors basically recommended that she applied to graduate school. We encouraged her. She applied to Penn State and she got in, and she was like, it was the hardest thing in the world to get her mind

around the fact that she was gonna leave. I remember she and her little son, you know, we all packed stuff up and like a family, you know, we sent her on away and she went there and she worked, and it was it was a struggle for her, though, And I mean, she's just she's become amazing and she's a major leader here in this community, and I'm just one of those stories. And she also helped me understand

the social sculpture aspect of it. I remember her saying at some point doing that program, she was like, you know, I finally figured out why I'm here and why this is valuable. And I was like, what do you mean. She goes, we are you always talking about social sculpture? And she said, I understand it now. Our lives as young mothers, we're already and we're sculpting ourselves, and you're all helping us, you know, you're helping us figure out

how to sculpt ourselves. I have a question about the community, and I wondered if you could tell me how the community responded to the project once it got out, once it going and they saw what she were doing. I'm sure there were probably some skeptics initially, And I'm going to ask you to answer that question through the eyes of the woman who had been there all along. Was she there to see the project developed to fruition. Yes. Her name was Ernestine Courtney, and she was She became

a big champion of ours in the process. I mean early on it was so interesting, like I said, when we were first kind of milling around looking at the site and trying to assess what could be done. And she came out in a very protective way of her homestead, right, and she watched this and I think it was like after the first month or so of her seeing us showing up every weekend with people out there just cleaning up, then all of a sudden she started like fixing iced tea.

She'd just lemonade. I mean she'd just bring it out and like sit it around, you know, and she would see us like doing things like we would have to get bucket it's of water to clean. She unraveled her hosepipe and extended across the street so we could actually you know, have running water. And yeah, so she lived into her nineties and so she got a chance to see all of these things happening. I mean, she was there to speak to the young mothers, you know, about

how it was in the old days. And many of the people in the community knew her because they knew her as with her maiden name, Miss Davis, and they go, oh, yes, miss Davis. She used to keep she used to keep street clean, you know, because you know, everybody knew Miss Davis. You didn't want to cross her. So she was a living example of the big Mama, the grandmothers and grandfathers and uncles and aunts you know that looked after people.

Every community had him. And once you had her approval, I'm sure you knew you were in Oh yeah, but then of course, yes, there were people that that were skeptics, you know, and there were people that are you know, when they say, oh, it's art thing, you know, they don't know what to do. You know, they're like, I don't,

we don't. I don't do art, you know, whatever, and so they would just watch and one day we had some kind of even maybe it was I think it was at the time when Destiny's Child was performing at our little festival. That was Beyonce's group. Yeah, in the early days, and so of course they all came over to experience that. And that's when he got connected with us, and I started talking to him. He was like, oh, well, you know, we should see all over there cleaning up.

And I said, there's some crazy people over there. We don't know what they're doing, but they're they're completely crazy. They're just they weren't accustomed to that kind of stuff happening. And I'm sure they were skeptical too, because they were thinking, with a bunch of artists, Yeah, that's right, what do they know about housing? What do they know about construction?

It's at urban planning, Yep, that's right, that's right. And actually we had a local politician who was you know, in the early days, he was he felt like we were stepping on his turf. He had tough challenges with us, until finally, after eight years he realized, well, you know, these these kinds, you know, they're they're doing stuff, and then all of a sudden he became the biggest supporter from a government standpoint. You know, he's been huge supporter.

So now, other than the revitalization of these houses that you bought over the years, have you seen the neighborhood change in other ways? Well, that's that's a big talent because artists generally look for places that are affordable. You know, the best way to maintain your freedom as an artist is to be able to control your spending, right, so you have to be able to situate yourself in a place where you're not having to work two jobs and stuff. You have time to do your second job, which is

your art. But in general, when places are affordable, particularly if they're located in areas as close to the center

of town, at some point those places will change. And so very early on, probably as early as nineteen ninety seven ninety eight, just working on that block and a half the twenty two little shotgun how this and paying attention to what was happening in neighborhoods around, I just kind of realized this neighborhood is going to change, and we could either work toward being the force that's moving the change, or we could have change kind of change around us and force us to adapt to that. And

we just intuitively started buying land. And land was very, very inexpensive at that time, so we just kept buying plots and plots, and then all of a sudden, we start we start doing planning, you know, land planning. What's going to happen with this land and how can we influence that? And as we would talk to people about it and people would come and visit us, folks would just volunteer to donate land because they liked what we

were doing. They liked the idea of this preservation, historic preservation and trying to hold some aspect of the culture of this community together. And so we just started accumulating more and more land and started a community development corporation that could actually focus on housing development. It seems to me that being out of this guardian of history and culture in this neighborhood would be kind of scary and pretty daunting. You seem to really have flourished, though, and

I hear you talk about it. It doesn't sound like you're easily challenged. But is there anything at all that sort of wakes you up in the middle of the night that you worry about with in terms of this project, how it could possibly go wrong. Yes, there are actually as an artist and one who aspires his social sculpture and understanding that things like the civil rights movement could be described as a social sculpture. Right, so the scale

could be huge. But for me, as the scale of project row Houses started to shift, I started to feel less comfortable because, you know, the stakes are high, the stakes are much higher. I mean, I've had to kind of watch this baby that I've birth and grew, you know, to a certain point, take on a personality that's separate

than mine. And it's been really interesting. It's been very very interesting, and I'm having nightmares and other times I'm looking at it and I'm looking objectively and thinking about it in the context of social sculpture in that you have to have faith, confidence and belief in everybody's ability to contribute, and it may not be exactly like you want,

you know. I think at one point when we were doing planning, we were saying, you know, we should be able to do like at least ten thousand affordable housing, you know in this area. You know, I can't do that, you know, it has to be someone else, you know, that's gonna do that. So it's been interesting watching how

watching this transform. And I'm still here in the community and I'm one of the people that watch it and try not to step in too much, but to be supportive because what I found was that doing socially engaged work, social sculpture work is so demanding of your person. And I started realizing how much I enjoyed time reflective, reflective time and being alone. And so now it's it's the

way that I balance things out, you know. I mean, I can go out and do the work that's working with communities, but then I also have a place that I can go inward and just kind of work on myself. And as it turns out, yes, I started painting again based on a practice that kind of carried me through

the whole Project Rowhouses experience, which was playing dominoes. I mean, that was my way of being a part of the community and connecting with community and educating myself about community was all there at the domino table, and so I you know, I just kind of devised this way after looking out so many domino games and playing so many domino games and start drawing patterns and they turn out it look like maps and all that stuff. And then just last year things kind of like took off in

that direction. And so would have never been my dream that I would be a part of the Cogosian Gallery group of artists, which I'm doing that now and they're placing work in collections and museums around the country. So it's been really it's been a real interesting kind of journey to go from studio painting kinds of things into social sculpture and then back into painting with a sense that painting is part of the process for me, it's a necessary part of the process of me to continue

to do social sculpture. And you know, it's so funny. I always feel like everything that I have done has been to help me get to the next thing, and this is the next thing for me to hear from other people, because all of this work, whether we're doing art or whether we're doing law, or whether we're doing policy or advocacy, all of this work really comes together. It's connected, it should be connected. It really is a part of the social sculpture. I mean, we don't have

to call it that. But that's what it is. We're weaving. I'm weaving from one side, you're weaving from another. Rick Lowe is breaking the rules of the art world and looking at creativity differently. It's work embodies Joseph Boy's idea of social sculpture, inviting community members to develop the world around and shows us that organizing can be a creative endeavor.

Rick Low's project Rowhouses is a direct investment in his community's future that demonstrates the impact and collaborative nature of social sculpture. Art and community can be connected in a way that improves and uplifts both. His work connects past and future generations through a shared sense of place, history,

and cooperation, and creates space for a better tomorrow. In the next episode, I speak with venture capitalists Arlin Hamilton, who is pushing for greater inclusion in Silicon Valley and democratizing it. I was also revealing it because they had worked so hard to make it opaque and mysterious and like nobody, only a few select people could get in.

And I was over here given the blueprint, you know, with the with the flashlight in between my teeth and showing people like here, okay, let me open up the blueprint for you. This is where you go, this is who you talk to, this is what this means. And if I'm able to do that without a college education, without any money, without any connections, homeless coming from nowhere, it must mean that they they're not as special as

they've made themselves out to be. Getting Even is a production of Pushkin Industries and it's written and hosted by me Anita Hill. It is produced by Mola Board and Brittany Brown. Our editor is Sarah Kramer, our engineer is Amanda kay Wang, and our showrunner is Sasha Matthias. Luis Gara composed original music for the show. Our executive producers are Mia Lobell and Lee Taal Malaud. Our director of

Development is Justine Lane. At Pushkin thanks to Heather Fane, Carly Migliori, Jason Gambrel, Julia Barton, John Schnars, and Jacob Weisberg. You can find me on Twitter at Anita Hill and on Facebook at Anita Hill. You can find Pushkin on all social platforms at pushkin Pods, and you can sign up for our newsletter at pushkin dot fm. If you love this show and others from Pushkin industries, consider subscribing

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