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Global Neighborhoods: Rick Lowe and Kyong Park in Conversation

Two portraits side-by-side. On the left, an Asian man in a white collared shirt and black pullover looks directly into the camera. On the right, an African-American man stands behind and between two houses, his hands in his pockets.

About

How are cities and neighborhoods reconstituted, and how do the poetics of art and ritual both propel and complicate urban rebirth? In a conversation moderated by artist Theaster Gates, experimental architect and activist Kyong Park, and artist and community organizer Rick Lowe engage in dialogue about urban transformation, contemporary art and the global ramifications of highly localized and conflicted processes of change.

About the Artists

In 1993, artist Rick Lowe founded Project Row Houses in Houston's Third Ward on the principle that art and the community that creates it can revitalize even the most depressed of inner-city neighborhoods. Lowe has received the American Institute of Architecture Keystone Award (2000), the Heinz Award (2002), and the Brandywine Lifetime Achievement Award (2006). Lowe was a Loeb Fellow at Harvard University from 2001-2002\. As an artist, Lowe has participated in exhibitions and programs internationally, and has worked as a guest artist on a number of community projects across the United States.

Kyong Park founded the Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York 1982 and directed it until 1998\. Over the last ten years, he has embarked on a series of nomadic investigations that have taken him from Detroit to the Balkans to Asia's cities. He was the founding director of Centrala Foundation for Future Cities in Rotterdam (2005), a co-curator of "Europe Lost and Found," the editor of Urban Ecology: Detroit and Beyond(2005), a co-curator of the project "Shrinking Cities" in Berlin (2002-2004), founding director of the International Center for Urban Ecology in Detroit (1999-2001), a curator of the Kwangju Biennale in South Korea (1997) and a Loeb Fellow at Harvard University (1996). His current project is titled "The New Silk Roads."

Theaster Gates is a Chicago-based artist and community organizer whose project Temple Exercises is on view at the MCA through January 31.