Truman Lowe

Early life

Lowe was born in Black River Falls, Wisconsin on the Ho-Chunk Nation of Wisconsin reservation to Mabel Davis and Martin Lowe. The youngest of six siblings, Truman was thirteen years younger than his sister, Irene. Mabel worked a variety of positions as a cook at the local Mission School and as a laundress. When at home in Black River Falls, Martin was a farmer as well as traveling as a seasonal worker, picking blueberries and cranberries throughout the state. Surrounded often by close family, Winnebago was the language spoken at home. As a child, Lowe attended school at the Black River Indian Mission until grade 6, switching in 1957 to the non-Native school in Black River Falls proper.

Starting in 1960 he worked during the summer at the Wisconsin Dells, "playing Indian" amongst other Native performers during an evening performance for tourists. Other summers he worked for the Dells Chamber of Commerce, dressing up in an "Indian costume" to greet tourists as they walked the streets, and serving as a tour guide on the Dell's excursion boats, again in "costume". Lowe's experience as a "stereotype" tour guide would later influence aspects of his work.

Higher Education

Graduating from New Lisbon High School in the early 1960s, he applied and was accepted by the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse. After switching majors, he settled on art education, studied all aspects of fine art media. Mid-way through his college experience he left in 1964 to work in a factory assembly line. In 1966 he married Nancy Knabe, whom he met when working in the Dells. A non-Native, of German and Norwegian descent, they were married at her family's church, Lyster Lutheran in Church Valley, Wisconsin. After their marriage, Nancy taught high school Home Economics while Lowe finished his undergraduate degree.

Upon graduation, the couple moved to Valders, Wisconsin where, while creating artwork on his spare time, he taught elementary and secondary art classes. After teaching for two years, Lowe was accepted to the University of Wisconsin-Madison for fine arts, sponsored by a Ford Foundation fellowship. On October 2, 1971, his daughter Tonia Alison was born.

Lowe on his reasons for returning to obtain his Masters:

I knew how to teach, but I wanted access to current information, and as much information as I could get my hands on, in order to be able to better help my students.

Teaching career and National Museum of the American Indian

After graduating in 1973, the Lowes moved to Emporia, Kansas where Truman was a visiting art lecturer at Emporia State University, teaching only for about two years before returning to Madison, serving as assistant dean of Multicultural Programming at University of Wisconsin. In 1975, Nancy gave birth to their second child, son Martin Howard ("Kunu"), and that same year Lowe was given a joint appointment at Madison in the Native American studies program, as well as assistant professor of sculpture, which he retained until 1988.

While exhibiting and working on his art work, Lowe becomes tenured at University of Wisconsin-Madison, also being promoted to associate professor of art in 1984. After being promoted to professor of art in 1989, Lowe was elected as chair of the art department from 1992–1995.

In 2000 Lowe was appointed the curator of contemporary art for the National Museum of the American Indian. Taking a leave of absence from the university, Lowe curated the inaugural exhibition featuring artists George Morrison (Ojibwe) and Allan Houser (Chiricahua), remaining as curator until 2008.

Family and Winnebago influence

As a child, Lowe would collect rocks along the Black River, scratching the river rocks together to create drawings by using the smaller rocks as pastels upon larger rocks. Eventually Lowe experimented with using rocks as pigment with substances such as motor oil and Vaseline. Disappointed with this process, he explored nature by creating drawings of "how snow sits on trees," and taking his study hall time in the high school art room.

While growing up, his family created "craft" objects, which provided minor supplemental income to the family. His mother made split-ash baskets while his father made the wooden handles for the baskets, and both of his parents created beadwork. Even the children learned the skills to create these family works, Lowe learning beadwork by kerosene lamp in the evening as a young man. These Lowe family creations were made for the tourist trade, delivering the freshly made creations by station wagon to the Wisconsin Dells, providing an offset from the seasonal farming positions the family participated in. During the summer, when the family was involved in seasonal work, they sold their crafts from a roadside stand they traveled with.

Like many other Native artists Lowe was instilled with a degree of comfort regarding the creative practice of creation within the household. He wasn't aware of the Western idea of making a living full-time by art until he attended university. At university he fully delved into the concepts and creations revolving within Western art history; a social prestige regarding artistic creation, unlike his parents who would be considered "craftspeople."

Lowe's first artist interest was Michelangelo of whom he spoke:

Although my parents made a partial living weaving baskets, the two concepts of 'profession' and 'art' never came together in my mind until... college... [Then] I read everything I could get my hands on about Michelangelo....He was the first artist I'd met through my studies who went to work everyday and was paid by his patrons [and] employers for making art. Obviously, I learned encyclopedias from the work, but the practical lesson was that art could be a profession as well as a passion.

Early works during college

Lowe's early work was inspired heavily by the education he was receiving. Paintings showing exercises in abstraction and geometric patterns in the style of Frank Stella are seen in paintings like Suzy (1968) and color theory works such as Yellow Over Green and Yellow Over Red (1969), the latter two which have since been destroyed. Working in clay, Lowe created egg-shaped sculptures that sat on coiled stands, Collection of Eggs and Unmatched Halves (c. 1968), giving a fantasy yet comic feel to his early experiments in art.

Sculpture classes taught him about the power of the line in artworks and its placement in nature. Lowe studied the works of Brâncuși, where he familiarized himself with geometry in sculpture, and Henry Moore's works regarding scale in sculpture. And with the popularity of plastic in the 1960s Lowe expanded his mediums to complete 3-D works including a life-size toaster of sheet plastic made from a sandwich sealer, complete with pieces of toast in the slot, recalling the soft sculpture works of Claes Oldenburg at the time. His first undergraduate installation Laundry Bags (1969), showing a pile of clear plastic trash bags filled with colored rags piled in the corner of an exhibition space. This large-scale installation work would be a hallmark for Lowe's work in the future and throughout his career.

Continuing to experiment with plastics, "I looked at all kinds of plastic: clear, different thickness, some milky. I also liked it because it was so big, so flexible, so easy to store, and so cheap." Experimenting with layering, Lowe used plastic as his canvas, drawing with black and color markers to create a transparent yet uniformed design upon the plastic. His simple minimalistic works represented the concepts of transparency, pictorial depth, surface and illusion, reminiscent of works by Dorothea Rockburne.

His M.F.A. exhibition in spring of 1973 showcased these experimental installations. Long plastic sheets cut into fringe, draped around or sandwiched between sheets of Plexiglas that hung from the ceiling with raw fluorescent light behind the plastic. Influenced by Larry Bell's work to create a space where the work was indistinguishable from its surroundings, Lowe states about the exhibition:

I arranged the pieces haphazardly in that space. I wanted to create an environment where one just moved from piece to piece without having the chance to stand back and think about the piece as a real object. I wanted to eliminate all that.

Upon meeting George Morrison, Lowe found a role model. Morrison's Midwestern heritage and ability to blend in and out of Native and non-Native art communities provided a unique opportunity to explore involvement and separate from and within Native art worlds.

Red Power

During his return to obtain his Masters, the University of Wisconsin-Madison was a hotbed of activism regarding the Vietnam War, while in Indian Country the Red Power movement was taking shape. Aware of the energy brewing in Native America, Lowe focused on school:

I didn't have the luxury - and I consider it a luxury - of being a protester because my focus was concentrated on getting information. I knew I wasn't going to be in that position for very long. I wanted to participate in gathering whatever information I could in the time I had, and I wanted to bring it all together, really to see what would happen. I needed time to work by myself.

Despite lack of time to focus on protesting and involvement in political movements, Lowe made a six-hour trip to hear Native activist and writer Vine Deloria, Jr. speak. Speaking about the need for Native peoples to take advantage of educational and economic opportunities in order to widen Native opportunities, Lowe chose to make that his mantra for his life choices and career.

Time in Kansas

Moving to Kansas in 1973 for a teaching position, the Lowe family lived on a farm. During this time Lowe realized "[he] was really a Woodland Indian," owing to the lack of diversity in the landscape - he missed Wisconsin. However, Lowe's time in Kansas would not be without its benefits. Departing from plastics, he began to experiment with wood, and found natural objects. Creating assemblage pieces, abandoning synthetic materials completely. Living away from Wisconsin allowed Lowe to become aware of his heritage and environment, allowing him to re-embrace the nature of the Upper Midwestern environment and bring his own unique contemporary spin on skills learned within his family - woodworking and basketry.

This move towards natural materials coincided with the popularity of the back-to-the-land movement. Lowe discovered the Foxfire books as popular culture discovered the concept of the "ecological Indian".

Return to Wisconsin

Upon returning to Wisconsin and joining faculty at the University, Lowe's work began to become embraced by viewers and critics as contemporary Indian art. Through interviews Lowe connected each work to unique techniques and traditions of Native concepts of craft and fine art. His work in the late 1970s embraced his own "analysis of traditional Indian techniques," depicting war shields heavily decorated with feathers and often simple in their look. Celebrating the Native symbolism behind the feather as a rewarding, powerful object seen within many communities, it became an important part of his works and installations.

Storytelling works

Like many contemporary Native American artists, Lowe chooses his medium to explore the stories and experiences of Native peoples, allowing his artwork to serve as a form of cultural survival. The cosmology of the Winnebago people is told through a massive wooden sculpture Red Banks (1991), consisting entirely of wood at 12 × 37 × 8 feet. Red Banks serves as a visual analogy for oral tradition and myth, as well showing the framework upon which survival rests.

At the premier of Red Banks Lowe embraced the importance of the artist as a storyteller and archivist of culture:

Since Winnebago history is largely oral, tribal artists have a particularly important role to play in preserving tradition as well as making non-Indians aware of Winnebago culture.

Other stories told through Lowe's work include the smallpox epidemic on the Black River Falls Indian Mission in 1901 (Wooden Pole Construction, 1983), serving as what has been described a "contemporary version of the mnemonic device," an idea that flows throughout his entire catalog of work. Personal stories are also reflected on through works like Feather Tree (1990), which honors his grandmother and the land she lived in. Lowe's work has also flowed into two dimensional drawings, where he has chosen to honor his mother's legacy.

Preserving historical Native aspects

Many of Lowe's works also embrace historically traditional works of Native peoples from the Winnebago, Woodland, and other Native American groups. The Headdress Series formed out of his interest in traditional Plains Indian regalia and a collection of pedestal and large scale sculptures incorporated the architecture of early shelters from the Woodlands communities. Many of his works have also incorporated other traditional Native objects frequently found within museum collections such as the work Cradle Board (1977–78) where Lowe used photographs found in the Wisconsin State Historical Society collections to serve as inspirations and putting his own twist on the concept of a cradle board. Many of the images from the historical society served as inspiration and research for his work, especially with housing and general community living in Winnebago communities and beyond.

Primitive housing and structures served as a way for Lowe to reflect on the disappearance of cultures in time, memory and history by way of an aesthetic. Their naked and simple—yet complexly built—designs reflect a "ghost like" presence of the past. In 1986 Lowe reflected on his sculpture work: "My real interest is structures, the sculptural aspect of primitive structures...what intrigues me is that something is very primitive yet at the same time, very universal."

Small and large installations began to emerge in Lowe's work depicting higher conceptions influenced by his son's interest in astronomy. Works such as the Solstice series and Skychart series depict abstract astrological charts and images inspired by the exploration of peoples to new areas and regions with guidance from the sky.

Red Ochre Series

In 1991 Lowe launched the first of site specific installations in a series called Red Ochre. The first of the series, shown in Atlanta, Georgia, examined anthropological theories about human migration and early North American settlement, inspired by ancient burial sites and death rites. Further examinations of his work reveal the ideas of blending cultures, rituals and migration through time.

In 1993 the second installation was placed at the Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art in Indianapolis, Indiana. Lowe's work incorporated images of rock art, examining once again how cultures migration paths crossed by way of unifying natural artistic venues, with rock art serving as communication devices for cultures worldwide. In this work, Lowe invited the public to assist in the construction of the work to ensure the relevance of the piece.

Both expansive installations include the use of natural materials such as saplings, as well as brown paper, providing a rock like or textured look to selected mediums. However, both pieces were dramatically different, with the Eiteljorg work focusing heavily on murals and wall constructs, and the Atlanta work focusing on an exploratory forest-like environment.

Canoes

If I have a religion, it must be canoeing...I canoe wherever there's water. It puts me in a totally different state of mind and provides all I need to exist. - Truman Lowe

A classic symbol of Native America, the canoe has become a notable object scene throughout Lowe's work. A canoeist by recreation, Lowe attempts to reach beyond stereotypes and classic imagery by using the iconic canoe in his work. He also embraces his fascination with primitive structures, seeing the canoe both as a shelter and as a vehicle. Many of the canoes appear like wigwams; constructed wooden skeletons of various shapes and sizes, with curved aspects. The canoe is also represented mnemonically in selected works by way of highly constructed small sculptures.

The canoes are symbolic of journeys, from birth to death. The canoe's vaginal design and transportation characteristics provide it both male and female aspects in Lowe's eyes, "vehicle and vessel".

Water

Water is seen throughout many of Lowe's works, including the canoes. Again, Lowe works in large scale installations and smaller sculptures. In the Water Spirits, series, Lowe states "the Water Spirits pieces are really an effort to show some respect for natural forces as well as what we would call spiritual forces. Wood and debris combine to reflect seasonal changes, the fragility of these natural environments and the importance of the flow of water.

In 1992 Lowe was commissioned by the Minnesota Arts Commission for Cloquet Community College. The sculpture sits within a large grouping of pine trees, made of polished stainless steel it hovers a foot and a half above the ground, intertwining through the trees like a stream. Utilized as a bench, large rocks are also placed underneath from nearby riverbeds to be glimpsed at under thin slits cut into the steel to represent the flowing of the water.

Other notable works of the series include Ottawa (1992), which represents the steep slopes where water rapidly flows amongst the three rivers near the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, Canada. Rows of unfinished strips of line "flow" in gradation representing a fast moving stream or roller coaster. An open structure that reflects the relationship between the river and its surroundings, it has been described as a high modernist work.

Shorelines and streambeds are also found in his sculptures. Water Mound (1994), a massive installation of wood, it represents sandbars that form during the changes of river systems. The river's edge is shown in other large installations such as Maumee Reflection (1987), depicting Lowe's vision of when land meets water at the confluence of three rivers near Fort Wayne, Indiana, where the work was displayed.

Many of the water related works also depict aspects of basketry, with splints of wood which are usually used to form the shape of the basket. Again, Lowe shows another connection to his family and community creations, inspired by his mother's basketry work.

Grids

In the tradition of modernism, Lowe uses the grid in selected works. Reflective of works by Sol LeWitt and Eva Hesse, grids are used as representations of mapping systems—a way to describe environments and landscapes in a two-dimensional way. Native American communities were not traditionally map makers, unlike Europeans and the major land-surveying programs that would invade young America. An important part of the Manifest Destiny ideal, the grid was used systematically to distribute equal land to colonists. The grid is also symbolic of archeological digs and is seen in major landscape works by Lowe such as Effigy I (1984).

Wood

Many of Lowe's constructions are created from willow saplings, often the only material used in installations. Lowe collects the saplings from Wisconsin farms in the summertime, gathering a large amount, peeling off the bark, and sanding the resulting sticks to bring out the white in the sapling. Flexibility and strength are essential with willow, allowing Lowe to bend and manipulate the wood to his needs.

Collections

Major exhibitions

Awards