Kristen Lowe Featured by Twin Cities Public Television

Kristen Lowe, Assistant Professor of Art and Art History at Gustavus Adolphus College, was recently featured on MN Original, Twin Cities Public Television’s award-winning weekly arts series celebrating Minnesota’s creative community, across all disciplines and all cultures.

The show featured several of Lowe’s past and current projects including her large scale charcoal drawings of sheep. Lowe explains to MN Original how she first became interested in drawing sheep.

“My interest in creating large-scale drawings of sheep began when I was teaching a comparative anatomy course. I took students on location to the sheep barn on the campus of the University of Minnesota,” Lowe said. “As I began to visit this location more frequently, my interest in the metaphorical and mythical potential of the relationship between the domestic flock and their keepers grew, and I’ve raised these questions in this suite of drawings.”

On the MN Original program, Lowe also shares with viewers her creative storyboards for the feature length documentary project Painting the Place Between, which she is the executive producer and director of. Painting the Place Between is a documentary about four contemporary painters working from the one subject that we all have in common – the land. It takes place in various locations throughout Minnesota, on land and around water, that have been cultivated or unaltered by man. The film operates from the simple premise that we all desire to make meaningful connections to the world around us. Through the self-willed constraint of the painting process, the four artists unlock a question: Have we shaped the land or has the land shaped us?

The MN Original program featuring Lowe can be viewed online on MN Original’s website.

Lowe joined the Gustavus faculty in 2007. She holds a bachelor of fine arts degree from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design and a master’s of fine arts degree from Tufts University/The School of the Museum of Fine Arts. Her drawings have been exhibited nationally, including solo shows at Bradford Gallery in San Francisco, Harvard University and Kingston Gallery in Boston, and in Minneapolis at Thompson Gallery and Flanders Contemporary Art. Her work is in private and public collections, including the Louvre Museum in Paris where videos she co-directed are in their visual education permanent collection.