Jean Lowe

Many of Lowe's installations have quoted 18th and 19th century French decoration, rife with romanticized images of animals and nature and imbued with a sense of class and privilege. Into this fabric she substitutes or integrate corresponding contemporary attitudes--both about our treatment of the land and its other inhabitants and our attitudes regarding decoration: the wrestling match between high and low art.

Lowe's work frequently employs satire. In a review of her 2014 exhibition at Rosamund Felsen Gallery, Leah Ollman of the Los Angeles Times wrote that she "stabs satirically at broad-scale practices of deception, as well as personal patterns of self-deception."

Lowe's 2012 exhibition Hey Sexy! blended foregrounds depicting imagery from consumer culture with baroque decor backgrounds of the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries. The exhibition incorporated sculptural objects such as tissue boxes, cases of beer, and a store where sculptural recreations of commodities are sold.

Lowe has twice received fellowships from the Western States Arts Federation/NEA and has received a grant from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation. She was also awarded the CalArts Alpert/Ucross Residency Prize. She won the Alberta duPont Bonsal Foundation Art Prize in 2000. She was also the recipient of the 2006/2007 San Diego Art Prize.

Jean Lowe, Accomplishments of Man, The California Center for the Arts, Escondido, CA, 1995.

Lowe has exhibited in both New York and Los Angeles. She participated in the 1994 exhibition Bad Girls West. In 1995 she collaborated on the installation Bull Story with artist Kim MacConnel.

She was a lecturer at UC San Diego from 1992 to 2008.

Lowe earned a B.A. from UC Berkeley in 1983. She earned her MFA from UC San Diego in 1988.