Jean Lowe

Jean Lowe’s work is rooted in a “conceptual/decorative” artistic tradition. She engages with specific social and political subject matter—particularly our relationship with other species and the environment, and the role of gender within these dynamics—while employing a visual aesthetic that is generous, decoratively informed, painterly, and installation-oriented. This approach is a pragmatic choice: Lowe uses the visual language of the home to critique the behavior of its inhabitants. By hybridizing elements of installation, historical decoration (particularly from the 17th to 19th centuries), and political and social art traditions, she continues to produce contemporary artwork that is at once entertaining, seductive, and intellectually provocative.

Lowe has received numerous awards and grants including a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant; a California Arts Council grant; the Alberta duPont Bonsal Foundation Purchase Award; and the CalArts/Alpert Ucross Residency Prize. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Athenaeum Music & Arts Library, La Jolla; the California Center for the Arts Museum, Escondido; the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego; and University of California, San Francisco. Jean Lowe received her MFA from the University of California, San Diego, and was a lecturer there until 2008. Her works have been exhibited at museums including Madison Center for the Arts; Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati; Kohler Arts Center, Sheboygan, Wisconsin; List Visual Arts Center, MIT, Cambridge; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and the McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, Texas. She has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City; the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego; and the Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati. A survey of Lowe’s work, Your Place in the Multiverse, opened at the Nora Eccles Harrison Museum of Art, Utah State University in 2021 and traveled to the Laguna Art Museum, Laguna Beach, in March 2022. Lowe lives and works in Encinitas, CA.