Nicholas C Lowe

Nicholas Lowe is an interdisciplinary artist, teacher, project manager, and curator. He is known for his photography, video and installation works from the 1980’s and 90’s that focus on experiences of AIDS and HIV. Lowe has also worked in prisons and with farming communities in the UK. Lowe has worked with people in these specific social situations to facilitate opportunities where the details and information from personal archives and from 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 90’s into the early 2000’s and up to the present time. His current employment as Associate Professor in Arts Administration positions him also as curator of the Roger Brown, La Conchita, CA collection, a portion of the estate collection at the Roger Brown Study Collection, a special collection of the School of The Art Institute of Chicago.  His 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 diorama's 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. Strongly calling to mind considerations expressed by Michel Foucault where "fictions function as fact", the nature of truth in the museum is examined and its mechanisms are openly presented.  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.