Resolution (Settlement)

Trained as a landscape painter, Rick Lowe is best known for cofounding Project Row Houses, a vibrant cultural center in Houston’s historically Black and culturally significant Third Ward. The German artist Joseph Beuys’s idea of social sculpture, the notion that every aspect of life can be approached artistically, inspired this detour from painting. Founded in 1993, Project Row Houses started with community conversations, political activism, fundraising, and eventual real estate negotiations where shotgun houses in disrepair were acquired, renovated, and redeployed as an artist residency, community center, and lodging for young mothers.


The grid-like form in this painting, even in its sprawling, disintegrating manner, comes from the game of dominoes. When starting Project Row Houses, Lowe found himself playing dominoes frequently; the game became an opportunity to learn, talk, and share. Photographs that Lowe took of these games from above the table became the starting points for drawings and paintings that evoke maps, territories, and landscapes. The basic outline of individual dominoes can be seen upon close looking, but the cutting method of collage allows these marks to shift and blur into others, creating an image where stability and precarity are held in balance. The color choices—where reds, pinks, mauves, and violets border blacks, blues, whites, and greens—create areas of clear demarcation as well as points of porosity and blending. Metaphors abound—from redlining in political terms, where government maps outlined areas where Black residents lived, marking them as risky investments; to demographic maps, where color is used to represent different population densities; to the idea of the melting pot, an American mythology of difference becoming one.