Don't Gentrify the Image: Rick Lowe on Art, Data, and Community

What does it mean to gentrify a painting? And can a Wall Street ticker be reprogrammed to broadcast Black progress instead of stock prices?In this episode, host Hugh Leeman sits down with Rick Lowe — the MacArthur "Genius" Fellow, painter, and social sculptor who founded Project Row Houses in Houston's Third Ward — for a wide-ranging conversation about art, data, community, and the difference between empathy and empowerment.Lowe traces his own improbable path: from a sharecropping childhood in rural Alabama and a high school diploma he says was "basically just given," to a basketball scholarship, to the "easy" art class that redirected his entire life. He explains how a young person's question — why can't an artist create solutions? — set in motion a decades-long practice that turned twenty-two derelict shotgun houses into a landmark of socially engaged art, and why he insisted the housing be for young mothers in the neighborhood, not visiting artists.At the heart of the conversation is his current museum exhibition at the University of Michigan, built out of a multi-year residency inside the Institute for Social Research. Lowe unpacks the Black Wall Street Journey ticker, the "deficit model" that measures communities only in relation to others, and his conviction that data is a kind of sculpture — one that has shaped a distorted and illegitimate perception of Black life in America. Drawing on Joseph Beuys's idea of social sculpture, he makes the case that anything — politics, organizing, a game of dominoes — can be a work of art, and that real power is never given, only claimed.