Imagine sitting by the side of a gently rushing creek, hearing how the babbling of water over round smooth stones can mimic the dance and shimmer of light, noticing the way it spills like lace over the wheeling surface and around the grasses and reeds growing up along the muddy banks. Imagine trying to capture that ephemeral physical reality in materials that are hard and breakable, materials like wood and stones and metal. How would it feel to be fixated on capturing that un-capturable thing, on re-creating a fleeting moment you witnessed, or a subtle shift of feeling you noticed, or a particular angle of shine you glimpsed from the corner of your eye while sitting by the water, patiently observing the world change around you?
To do so would be to step into the life, mind, and artistic process of Truman Lowe, the renowned Ho-Chunk sculptor whose minimalist abstract style set him apart among his contemporaries, and whose passing in 2019 left a significant void in the landscape of visual artists—and in particular, Indigenous visual artists—in Wisconsin. Noted for his experimental uses of woodworking in combination with materials like metal and feathers, Lowe brought traditional Ho-Chunk cultural crafts and aesthetics into his modern minimalism and created pieces that evoked the feeling and beauty of water.
In fact, the opening moments of a recent short documentary are set over a recording of Lowe in which he discusses his love for water. In his deep, calm voice, he states, “I have an interest in trying to protect as much of the environment as possible. One can choose to be political about it, but I want to create enough interest in water through my work that others will begin to share the same beauty and the same understanding that I have of moving water.” The documentary, which was created by members of the Ho-Chunk nation in conjunction with the travel series TV program Discover Wisconsin, was titled “Exploring the Artistic Process of Truman Lowe: A Journey Through Native American Art & Education.” In November of 2023, the short film won a regional Emmy for outstanding achievement in the category of Arts/Entertainment Short Form Content at the 65th Chicago/Midwest Regional Emmy Awards.
The film highlights images and video clips of many of his sculptures and delves into the long-lasting impact he has had on the university and museum communities in which he worked for most of his career. It also features the 2022 unveiling of the new Truman T. Lowe Center for the Arts building on the University of Wisconsin—La Crosse campus, where Lowe was an undergraduate student and the place where his aspirations to be an artist in his adult life began to grow.
A simple search online is enough to confirm the magnitude of his portfolio and the legacy he leaves behind as a professor and mentor to countless Native students and art students at the University of Wisconsin—Madison for more than four decades, a curator of contemporary art at the National Museum of the American Indian, and former chair of both the UW—Madison Art Department and the Chancellor’s Scholarship Committee.
However, what intrigued me more than the titles and credentials was the fact that in the countless interviews, articles, and videos online that I explored when beginning my research, everything always came back to the idea of water. Some of Lowe’s best-known and well-regarded pieces take on the shapes of canoes or waterfalls, with many others being crafted from driftwood or willow, shaped while it was fresh-cut and then dried. It seemed an ongoing fascination for him, a deep wellspring of inspiration around which he built up the various elements of his life and work, and, as such, something I wanted to explore further.
“Well, he grew up near a creek where he would play with all the other kids all the time,” Truman’s wife, Nancy, told me while describing his childhood on Indian Mission near Black River Falls, Wisconsin. “He was drawing then, even as a kid, with chalky white stones on darker stones, though I don’t know that he ever thought about art as a career at that point,” she went on. “It wasn’t until he was in high school that he started drawing more seriously. His art teacher really saw potential in him and gave him free use of the art supplies during his free time. He often told a story about trying to draw snow piled on tree branches. He tried over and over again to get the image just right, and it took a long time, but he finally got it. That’s how he was with all of his art later, too. He just had an idea in his head and tried and tried things until he got it just right.”
Most often, the point of fascination for Lowe had to do specifically with the movements of water—a particular way water had of rushing around something, or the angle of water falling over an edge, or the texture of its surface. “He especially loved the edges of the water, like the banks where the stems grow or the rocks are poking through,” said Nancy Lowe. “Anywhere we went, he wanted to go find the water—always moving water—and stand and look at it for a while. And when we went out in the canoe, which we did with our kids a lot, he would point out a specific thing to look at or notice. He made me more observant of nature in that way.”
That level of detailed analysis is evident when you sit down and actually look at any of Lowe’s work. Take, for instance, the series of waterfall pieces he created out of long, thin slats of unfinished and bendable lumber. Anchored on one end to a vertical wall or structure, these strips cascade down to the ground at particular angles, each slightly different from the next, and each overlapping the other, to create the overall effect of water falling over a jagged edge, how it doesn’t flow in a neat glassy surface, but rather weaves in and around itself, through itself. The art re-creates the mechanisms of turbulence that physicists have puzzled over for ages, even as it depicts the flow of water moving together as one current.
The strips also recall those of ash fibers Lowe watched his parents cut, process, boil, and then expertly weave into traditional baskets during his childhood, a narrative that Jo Ortel, art historian and author of Woodland Reflections: The Art of Truman Lowe, suggests was formative in Lowe’s early years and later influenced his art. She writes, “Although he was allowed to do some of the basket weaving, Truman Lowe did not help directly or regularly with basket preparations as a child. Nevertheless, he has stated, ‘The process is most vivid to me, because it involved a lot of activity!’ Through his exposure, he gained a familiarity with wood’s properties, limits, and possibilities. Surrounded by craftspeople who regularly worked with the material, he gained a sensitivity to its physical structure, to the circumstances under which its flexibility could be exploited, and to what extent.”
“As he always said, ‘Wood is liquid, ultimately,’” Ortel said while describing his working process. “It is made from liquid, carries liquid, and bends with liquid.” And indeed, one could look to Lowe’s many, many pieces that feature peeled willow sticks, connected to each other like sparse structures set in different angles and configurations and rising out of bases sometimes teeming with stones or other pieces of wood to see what he means. These extremely minimalist sculptures recall errant twigs floating downstream, woody stalks growing out of the shallows, and cross-sections of creek beds, but they also serve as a nod to the cross-woven structures of traditional Native American buildings that also fascinated Lowe. “He used to pore over books like this one and mark the pages where he saw something that interested him,” Nancy told me before handing me a copy of Native American Architecture by Peter Nabakov, which still has his sticky notes marking particular pages.
Despite the complex images and ideas that his pieces evoke, Lowe’s art is unmistakably minimalist, which is particularly significant when considering that he began creating work seriously during the 1970s, a time defined by loud art, loud music, loud literature, and loud politics. At the height of the Red Power movement, subtle nods to Indigenous culture and subversions of the expectations of “loudness”—which were often part of the political strategy of minority groups striving to be seen, heard, and acknowledged as equal—were very uncommon and avant-garde. But regardless of whether Lowe’s work fit the mold during that time, the aesthetic of his art is unmistakably Indigenous, and Great Lakes Indigenous at that.
For example, another of Lowe’s commonly used figures, the canoe, appears in many different forms throughout his body of work. In one of the most iconic, Feather Canoe, branches are woven and trussed together into the familiar canoe shape, with white feathers lining the inside of the structure. Ortel quotes Lowe in her book as saying, “Once when I stood by the Wisconsin River watching its movements, watching people pass by, I suddenly realized why I loved being in a canoe. First, its marvelous architecture is wonderful to be within. More important, I understood that canoeing gave me the feeling of being on the earth while being suspended above it.” And, indeed, the piece, inspired by something he saw while eating lunch along the shore of Lake Mendota on the UW—Madison campus, evokes the feeling of weightlessly floating across the surface of water. But further, the image of the canoe is a well-known image associated with the stereotypical “Vanishing Indian” in American culture. As Ortel writes, “In this saturated visual climate, using the canoe as a motif carries risks as well as challenges for the visual artist—particularly if the artist is Native American. Its meanings and associations over-determined, can it be used in any way but paradoxically, ironically?”
On the Indian Mission, Truman grew up among a family that still spoke Ho-Chunk as their first language. Their community was still traditional in ways that most communities aren’t anymore. If one of them hunted a deer, they shared with other families that needed the food, and they looked after each other’s kids if the parents were otherwise occupied. That kind of upbringing instilled in Lowe a particularly Ho-Chunk worldview and sense of humor, which both his wife and daughter described to me as “clever” and “punny.”
“It’s part of why he used Ho-Chunk words for the titles of his pieces,” Ortel told me while we sat down for coffee together. “There are just some ideas that didn’t translate to English. Sometimes, he would call up his siblings to help figure out the exact wording for the idea he was trying to convey. I remember sometimes I would go to his studio and I would just find him sitting there reading through a dictionary looking for interesting things.” And indeed, in the introduction of her book, Ortel writes, “Just as it is not always possible to interpret the intensity or direction of a stream’s current from its surface, the artist’s seeming simplicity conceals subtle layers of meaning. Philosophical musings, personal history, and tribal legend are woven into abstract, minimal sculptures. He once described how he conceives the creative process: “I believe each artist invents a personal language,” he wrote. “You assemble elements of a visual language shaped by your own perceptions and interpretations. Then you begin to tell a story...”
His deep interest in words, in moving water, and in those abstract and intangible things speaks more deeply to the inner mechanisms of Lowe’s mind and personality, to the cerebral and quiet man whom people often described as gentle, soft-spoken, and gently encouraging. “He had a real interest in and fascination with language,” recalls Dr. Patricia Marroquin Norby, associate curator of Native American Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and former mentee of Truman Lowe at UW—Madison. “I remember he would suddenly say out of nowhere, ‘Hey, did you know that there’s an Ojibwe word for the exact moment that a fish’s fin emerges out of water?’ And things like that that were very visual and poetic and beautiful.”
Dr. Norby’s words, which came from a recorded stage conversation titled Honoring Truman Lowe: Celebrating Indigenous Perspectives in Art (in which he sat down with UW—Madison Professor of Printmaking-Relief and Serigraphy and Associate Dean for the Arts John Hitchcock) highlighted another important aspect of Lowe’s teaching style. Said Norby, “He had a way of giving advice that wasn’t like pushing it onto you but rather encouraging you to relax and open up in a way that let you know that you didn’t always have to be perfect, that things could happen and unfold naturally, with the understanding that your creative process was always growing and changing.”
And indeed, it seems that that perspective and philosophy—of gently shaping the world while letting things unfold naturally—informed not only his teaching, but also the way in which he lived. “He had this kind of striking contrast to him,” said his daughter, Tonia Lowe, in a Zoom conversation from her California home. “He was really not an extrovert, and he didn’t talk excessively, but he was a really good listener. Then, when he did talk, it was super impactful, like he had been paying attention the whole time and said exactly what you needed to hear. And sometimes, you were surprised or blown away by what he said because it was like, ‘Where did that come from?’ But most of the time it was rooted in an idea that he was ruminating on. There was always something going on in his head, and he was very empathetic.”
Much like water himself in that way, Truman Lowe was always working to further the steady progression of much larger ideas. For instance, during his years as Assistant Dean and Coordinator of Multicultural Programming, or as Native American Studies coordinator back when the program was in its inception stages, or as a professor of art, it wasn’t uncommon to see him seeking out and making time to meet with Native students on campus. He would check in on them and encourage their educational goals, all in the pursuit of furthering higher education for Native American communities, a motivation that was particularly personal because, as a child, he had always been told he would go to college, even though he was the first in his family to do so.
Or similarly, as Tonia said, “Because he was an idea guy, always trying to manifest all the ideas he had in his head into the world and supporting other peoples’ ideas, he felt the need to take advantage of being at the university, which is the home of the ‘Wisconsin Idea.’ He would go to different administrators or Deans and ask them who the Nobel Prize laureates were at the university, and make appointments to go meet them because he just wanted to know what they were thinking about.”
In many ways, the art was both the goal and the byproduct of Lowe’s thoughtful processing of the world around him. He would often finish a sculpture and then take it apart to use its various pieces in other works, something art collectors would be horrified to know. But like water, the art itself was transient for him, an accomplishment that, once finished, was no longer relevant to the next idea his mind had already moved onto. His motivation was less about selling his work, Nancy told me, and more about the process of creation itself. He was always concerned with getting his ideas out, operating out of concern that he wouldn’t be able to get through all the ideas in his head before he wasn’t able to do it anymore. And in so many ways, in the art he left behind, in the memories his loved ones cherish of him, in the careers of the countless students he mentored and artists he showcased, his legacy is just that: the slow working out of meaning and form, the flow of creativity, and, as such, the understanding of what it is to be a human interacting with nature in this world.
