Curator Karen Comer Lowe’s Five Artists to Watch
Karen Comer Lowe has spent more than two decades shaping how audiences experience Black art in and from the American South, and her curatorial path has taken her from the Smithsonian Institution’s National Portrait Gallery and the Whitney Museum of American Art to the Tubman African American Museum, before returning to her hometown of Atlanta. After completing her tenure as curator-in-residence at the Spelman Museum of Fine Arts, she now works independently, advising collectors and organizing exhibitions that reimagine the relationship between Southern history and contemporary art.
Lowe summarizes her curatorial practice as “elevating southern Black diaspora narratives.” But when asked to elaborate on the framework behind her approach, her answer is complex. “My past exhibitions are an example of my commitment to curating with audience activation in mind, not just audience presentation,” she tells Observer. “I aim to balance format research with intuitive spatial placement that feels welcoming and inclusive. Wall texts that invite questions, performance moments that animate installations and even participatory elements that let visitors shift the exhibition as they move through it. In this way, my curatorial approach elevates without distancing. It provides multiple entry points, while taking visitors on a path through sound, ritual and material philosophy.”
Selecting only five artists from a region as rich and varied (and geographically vast) as the South is a nearly impossible task, but Lowe’s curatorial philosophy made the choices clear. When asked about her selection process, she explains that all five artists emerged from Southern geographies and Black narrative frameworks, yet bring a distinct sensory mode. “Benjamin composes color as sound; Bright frames protest as portraiture; Barnes maps memory onto material; Harris archives gathering spaces through signs and people; German animates grief, hope, and resistance into ritual sculptures. What they share is a commitment to visibility, re-memory and generational transmission.”
These are the artists living and working in the American South she sees as key voices in the region:
