Rick Lowe, a pioneering public artist, will speak at the Harvard Graduate School of Design Class Day on May 27. Lowe, a 2002 Loeb Fellow at the GSD, is best known for his two decades of work with Project Row Houses (PRH). He founded the community arts and culture nonprofit, located in Houston’s northern Third Ward, after he and a group of fellow artists purchased a group of rundown “shotgun” row houses in one of the city’s oldest African-American neighborhoods in 1993. In the decades since, PRH has put art at the center of a transformative community project that includes exhibition, studio, mentoring, and residential programs.
In recognition of his work, Lowe was named a 2014 MacArthur Fellow. He has put his model of arts-based community revitalization into practice in other cities across the country—including redevelopment projects in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles and post-Katrina New Orleans. Originally trained as a painter, Lowe has been an artist-in-residence at Dallas’s Nasher Sculpture Center and a Mel King Community Fellow at MIT.
