As part of the fifth session of the RAW Académie, RAW Material Company invites you to a public lecture given by Rick Lowe on Wednesday 12th Secember 2018 at 5.30pm.
The objective of this seminar is to explore what is social and community engaged art and who is doing it. During this seminar, participants will explore various projects and artists to gain insight into what determines a social and community engaged art and what distinguish it from everyday social and community engaged work.
Embodied in all social and community engaged work is a desire to affect some practical outcome. Within all art there is a desire some symbolic or poetic meaning. This seminar will draw upon the experience and sensibilities of my practice as an artist and the participants to identify the most interesting social engaged work and critique it based on its practical and symbolic/poetic impact. Our objective will be to explore a framework of critique of social and community engaged art.
Because there is such similarity between social and community engaged art and social and community engaged work, we will explore the following questions: who has authority to determine when social and community engaged work is art or not. What does it mean for a social and community engaged work to be called art? What is the political significance of social and community engaged art?
About Rick Lowe
Rick Lowe is a Houston-based artist who has exhibited and worked with communities nationally and internationally. His work has appeared in: Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston; Museum of Contemporary Arts, Los Angeles; Neuberger Museum, Purchase, New York; Phoenix Art Museum; Gwangju Biennale, Gwangju, Korea; the Kumamoto State Museum, Kumamoto, Japan; the Venice Architecture Biennale; and Documenta 14, Kassel, Germany and Athens, Greece. He is best known for his Project Row Houses community-based art project that he started in Houston in 1993. Additional community projects include the Watts House Project, Los Angeles, CA; the Borough Project, Charleston, SC (with Suzanne Lacy and Mary Jane Jacobs); the Delray Beach Cultural Loop, Florida; Small Business/Big Change, Anyang, Korea; Trans.lation: Vickery Meadow, Dallas, TX; and Victoria Square Project, Athens, Greece. Among Rick’s honors are the Rudy Bruner Awards in Urban Excellence, the AIA Keystone Award, the Heinz Award in the arts and humanities, the Skowhegan Governor’s Award, the Skandalaris Award for Art/Architecture, and a U.S. Artists Booth Fellowship. He has served as a Loeb Fellow at Harvard University, a Mel King Fellow at MIT, an Auburn University Breedan Scholar, and a Stanford University Haas Center Distinguished Visitor. President Barack Obama appointed Rick to the National Council on the Arts in 2013; in 2014 he was named a MacArthur Fellow, and in 2016 he joined the University of Houston as a professor of art.