Truman Lowe
Other summers he worked for the Dells Chamber of Commerce, dressing up in an "Indian costume" to greet tourists as they walked the streets.
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.
That year, Lowe was given a joint appointment at the university in the Native American studies program, and as assistant professor of sculpture.
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).
Eventually Lowe experimented with using rocks ground together as pigment, using substances such as motor oil and Vaseline to bind the color.
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.
Until he attended university, he was not aware of the relatively recent Western idea of a person making a living full-time by art.
Working in clay, Lowe created egg-shaped sculptures that sat on coiled stands, Collection of Eggs and Unmatched Halves (c. 1968), giving a fantasy yet comic feel to his early experiments in art.
[2] 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.
[2]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.
[2] 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.
The cosmology of the Winnebago 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.
[2] At the premier of Red Banks Lowe embraced the importance of the artist as a storyteller and archivist of culture: Since Winnebago history is largely oral, tribal artists have a particularly important role to play in preserving tradition as well as making non-Indians aware of Winnebago culture.
The Headdress Series formed out of his interest in traditional Plains Indian regalia and a collection of pedestal and large scale sculptures incorporated the architecture of early shelters from the Woodlands communities.
Many of his works have also incorporated other traditional Native objects frequently found within museum collections such as the work Cradle Board (1977–78) where Lowe used photographs found in the Wisconsin State Historical Society collections to serve as inspirations and putting his own twist on the concept of a cradle board.
[2] Primitive housing and structures served as a way for Lowe to reflect on the disappearance of cultures in time, memory and history by way of an aesthetic.
"[4] Small and large installations began to emerge in Lowe's work depicting higher conceptions influenced by his son's interest in astronomy.
The first of the series, shown in Atlanta, Georgia, explored anthropological theories about human migration and early North American settlement.
Lowe's work incorporated images of rock art, examining how cultures' migration paths crossed by way of unifying natural artistic venues.
[2] Both expansive installations include the use of natural materials such as saplings, as well as brown paper, providing a rock-like or textured look to selected mediums.
The canoe's vaginal design and transportation characteristics provide it both male and female aspects in Lowe's eyes, "vehicle and vessel".
He combines selected wood pieces and debris to reflect seasonal changes, the fragility of these natural environments, and the importance of the flow of water.
Rows of unfinished strips of line "flow" in gradation representing a fast moving stream or roller coaster.
Reflective of works by Sol LeWitt and Eva Hesse, he uses grids as representations of mapping systems—a way to describe environments and landscapes in a two-dimensional way.
An important part of the Manifest Destiny ideal, governments made use of the grid in new territories to divide and systematically distribute purportedly equal land to colonists and settlers.
