A new exhibit at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C., looks back on the career of the late Truman Lowe, a Ho-Chunk artist and educator known for his ability to make wood look like water.
“He has always been a big proponent of contemporary Native artwork being shown,” said Chloris Lowe, an artist based in central Wisconsin and a great-nephew of Lowe’s. “To have his work now be out at the Smithsonian is just an incredible thing.”
“Water’s Edge: The Art of Truman Lowe” is a collection of nearly 50 sculptures, drawings and paintings spanning Lowe’s career. Together, these artworks “evoke the rivers, streams and waterfalls of the Wisconsin woodlands” where Lowe grew up near Black River Falls, according to the exhibit website.
“He really felt that … as a Woodland Indian, that was very central to who he was and he spent a lot of time walking the woods out at the mission outside of Black River Falls,” said Jo Ortel, professor emerita of art history at Beloit College and author of a 2004 book about Lowe. “He was really embedded in this landscape.”
Lowe grew up with a “sense of artistic design,” Ortel said, because both of his parents were black ash basket makers. Watching his parents at work, Lowe gained an early appreciation for natural materials like wood. He was especially inspired by the transformation wood undergoes during the basket-making process, starting off as stiff or rigid and emerging as pliable — even fluid, reminiscent of the Wisconsin waterways he knew and loved.
“He developed this lifelong fascination with moving water and specifically rivers, streams, waterfalls,” said Rebecca Trautmann, who curated the Smithsonian exhibit.
“He was really interested in the movement of the water, the energy, the changing surface reflections. You really see that in both his sculptures, where he transformed solid wood into this fluid — sometimes turbulent, sometimes placid — water, as well as in his pastel and charcoal drawings,” Trautmann said.
That combination of wood and water created the foundation for some of Lowe’s most celebrated works, including “Ottawa,” a structure of pine and peeled willow saplings made to look like a flowing river.
“This is made with thin strips of wood that kind of recall the strips of wood that his parents used in making baskets,” Trautmann said. “He had an understanding of the fluidity, the flexibility, but also the strength of wood when it was cut into these thin strips. And he was able to use it to suggest these turbulent, dramatic waterfalls.”
In addition to his national reputation, Lowe, who passed away in 2019, left an indelible mark on the Wisconsin art scene. In 2022, the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse, his alma mater, dedicated the arts building on campus to Lowe. And his artwork can be viewed around the state at museums and outdoor installations such as his “Effigy: Bird Form” sculpture sited near an Indigenous mounds group in Madison.
For most of his career, Lowe taught at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he received his Master of Fine Arts in 1973. After more than two decades of teaching sculpture and American Indian studies, he moved to D.C. in 2000 to take a job as the first curator of contemporary Native art at the National Museum of the American Indian — the same museum now honoring his work.
Lowe spent eight years at the museum, spearheading initiatives that highlighted the works of living Native artists. “Native Modernism,” which he curated in 2004, was the first exhibit to include the contemporary work of George Morrison, an Ojibwe abstract painter from Minnesota. For Lowe, it was important to give visibility to contemporary Native art at museums and in the broader art world.
“During his lifetime, he was very active in raising awareness of Native arts of the Upper Midwest,” Ortel said. “So it’s really nice that it’s now coming back to him, and he’s gaining recognition from the nation.”
“Water’s Edge: The Art of Truman Lowe” is on display at the National Museum of the American Indian until January 2027. After that, the exhibit is slated to come to Wisconsin.
Truman Lowe is pictured in his woodworking studio in Middleton in 1992. (Jeff Miller | University of Wisconsin-Madison)
