Truman Tennis Lowe (January 19, 1944 – March 30, 2019) (Ho-Chunk) was an American sculptor and installation artist. A professor of fine art at the University of Wisconsin, Lowe also served as a curator of contemporary art at the National Museum of the American Indian. He is known for large site-specific installation pieces using natural materials. His work is the subject of a retrospective at the National Museum of the American Indian, Water's Edge: The Art of Truman Lowe, on view in Washington, DC through January 2027.
Background Early life Lowe was born on January 1, 1944, in Black River Falls, Wisconsin, on the Ho-Chunk Nation of Wisconsin reservation to Mabel Davis and Martin Lowe.Truman T. Lowe-obituary The youngest of six children, Truman was thirteen years younger than his sister, Irene. Their mother 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, their father Martin was a farmer. He also traveled as a seasonal worker, picking blueberries and cranberries throughout the state. Surrounded often by close family, Lowe grew up speaking Ho-Chunk at home. As a child, he attended school at the Black River Indian Mission until grade 6. In 1957 he transferred to the public, non-Native school in Black River Falls proper.Ortel, Jo Woodland Reflections: The Art of Truman Lowe. The University of Wisconsin Press, 2003
Starting in 1960 Lowe worked during the summer at the Wisconsin Dells, "playing Indian" with 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. He also served as a tour guide on the Dells' 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, Lowe applied and was accepted by the University of Wisconsin–La Crosse. After switching majors, he settled on art education, and studied all aspects of fine art media. Midway through college, he left in 1964 to work in a factory assembly line.
In 1966 he married Nancy Knabe, whom he had met when working in the Dells. She was European-American, of German and Norwegian descent. The couple 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. Lowe taught elementary and secondary art classes in the public schools and worked at his own art in his spare time. After teaching for two years, Lowe was accepted to the University of Wisconsin–Madison for a master's fine arts, after receiving a Ford Foundation fellowship. On October 2, 1971, their daughter Tonia Alison was born.
Lowe said about 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 Lowe was awarded his master's degree in 1973, the couple moved to Emporia, Kansas. Lowe worked as a visiting art lecturer at Emporia State University. After two years, he returned to Madison, where he had been hired as assistant dean of Multicultural Programming at the University of Wisconsin. In 1975, Nancy gave birth to their second child, son Martin Howard (Kunu). That year, Lowe was given a joint appointment at the university in the Native American studies program, and as assistant professor of sculpture. He kept this until 1988.
While exhibiting and working on his art, Lowe became tenured at University of Wisconsin–Madison, where he was promoted to associate professor of art in 1984. After being promoted to full professor of art in 1989, Lowe was elected as chair of the art department, serving from 1992 to 1995.
In 2000 Lowe was appointed as 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 of the new museum in Washington, DC, featuring artists George Morrison (Ojibwe) and Allan Houser (Chiricahua). He served as curator until 2008.
Fine art career Family and Ho-Chunk 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 ground together as pigment, using substances such as motor oil and Vaseline to bind the color. Disappointed with this process, he explored nature by creating drawings of "how snow sits on trees." He was allowed to take his study hall in high school in the art room, where he continued to experiment.
While he was growing up, his parents created "craft" objects to supplement their family income. His mother made split-ash baskets and his father made the wooden handles for the baskets. Both parents created beadwork. The children gradually also learned the skills to create these family works. Lowe crafted beadwork by a kerosene lamp in the evening as a young man. These Lowe family crafts were produced to sell in the tourist trade. They delivered the items 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 portable roadside stand which they brought with them on their travels.
Like many other Native artists, Lowe had grown up with having created items within the household, as part of everyday practice. Until he attended university, he was not aware of the relatively recent Western idea of a person making a living full-time by art. There he fully delved into the concepts and creations within Western art history. He recognized the more recent social prestige related to the artist and artistic creation. His parents, as craftspeople, would have been ranked lower in status.
Lowe's first artist interest was Michelangelo, of whom he said:
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 (), 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. 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:
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 master's degree, 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:
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 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. 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 Ho-Chunk 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:
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