Nicholas Lowe

Nicholas Lowe (IL) is an interdisciplinary artist, teacher, project manager, and curator. He is known for his photography, video, and installation works from the 1980s and ‘90s that focus on experiences of AIDS and HIV. Lowe has also worked in prisons and with farming communities in the UK to facilitate opportunities where the details and information from personal archives and first-voice accounts are offered as a commentary upon prevailing social conditions. Sometimes called a social practitioner and identified as a contextual artist, Lowe has facilitated exhibitions, publications, and archival collecting throughout the 1990s up to the present time. His current employment as Associate Professor in Arts Administration also positions him as curator of the Roger Brown Study Collection: La Conchita, California, a portion of the estate collection at the Roger Brown Study Collection of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Lowe’s current creative endeavors are responses to landscape, drawings and digital photographs, made both in the studio and plein air, that pay careful attention to the conditions of a place and to the subtle indicators of human activity. Other recent visual work takes the form of three-dimensional miniatures and dioramas that address content derived from archival and literary sources while taking on curatorial and museological concerns. Written accounts, drawings, etchings, and archival photographs are activated as sources for the dioramas which represent places that are now no longer in existence, and actions, incidents, and situations that have long since been passed into narrative.

Lowe joined the faculty at SAIC in 2003 in the Department of Arts Administration and Policy where he teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in studio, archival management, and material culture. He was born in England where he received the Higher Diploma in Fine Art from the Slade School of Art in 1989. He has lived and worked as an academic and visual artist in Berlin, Bethune, Bristol, Buxton, Culver City, Lille, London, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Luxembourg, Paris, and Santa Barbara.