Heather Lowe
By Kristine Schomaker
A dear friend, Heather Lowe, died last week.
I have been losing friends, and every time I think I have figured out how to do this, I haven't. I'm writing this to put her somewhere that isn't only in my head. I found out Heather had passed away right before going into an appointment. How did I get through it? I have no idea. I reached out to a friend who had no idea. We were both in disbelief. How do you understand what it means for someone so vibrant and beautiful to be gone all of a sudden? You don't.
Facebook tells me we've been friends since November 2015. My earliest memories of Heather are from Art Basil, John Kilduff's art fair in his backyard in Van Nuys (yes, Mr. Let's Paint), where we were both in the show. A backyard fair as the green, low-key answer to the big ticket art fairs. Of course Heather was part of it. And Memory in Forms, the show she curated at the Neutra Institute in Silver Lake in 2016.
Then there was Keystone Art Space. Before the pandemic a group of us from Keystone would get coffee at Chimney, right by Keystone, and talk about art and the art world and the world. (Connie Rohman, Lea Feinstein, Lorraine Heitzman, Yemisi Oyeniyi, Heather, and me) We (ok maybe I) envisioned artists in Paris of the 20s meeting up to talk art and life. Then everything shut down and we moved to Zoom. Every week at first, then every couple of weeks. We needed the company. We needed the support. We organized an exhibition together at 643 Project Space in Ventura and spent the whole weekend up there. During the pandemic, Heather and I would meet up at the Cornfield (the state park by Chinatown) and walk, just the two of us.
She was punk. Critical. A rebel, an activist, an advocate. She went to artist talks, poetry readings, dance performances. She did tai chi. She saw tons of art in galleries and museums and open studios. She had a curious imagination. She was generous and thoughtful and she was there for her friends.
Magnetic
She gathered people. The Chimney coffee group. The weekly Zoom that got us through the shutdown. The walks at the Cornfield. A whole weekend in Ventura. She was inclusive. Her work changes when you move past it, and so did the people around her. You came away looking a little longer, a little closer, a little more curious. To be around Heather was to feel warmth and joy, surprise and awe. She held so much within her that she shared freely with those around.
When you walk, her things move
Heather was a leading figure in lenticular fine art. If you haven't stood in front of one of her pieces, you walk past it and it changes. Flowers flip and morph. Figures dance. Depth opens up where there was a flat surface a second ago. The work happens in your eye and in your body moving through the room. In a 2020 interview for Projecting Possibilities she put it simply: "When you walk, my things move." I don't pretend to understand how a lenticular is made or works, but the magic of it is what I hold on to.
She came to it through optical painting. Born in Santa Monica, grew up in Malibu, studied at Santa Monica College, UC Santa Cruz and City College of San Francisco, picking up etching, Chinese brush painting, figure drawing and sculpture along the way. She showed her optical paintings through L.A. Artcore for fifteen years. Stereo paintings you cross your eyes to see, sections popping out and receding. (I always have a hard time with these because my eyes are already crossed.) Painting on mirrored glass. Then stereo photography, which led her to lenticulars, which she worked with for more than fifteen years: flip, morph, animation, 3-D.
She loved Bridget Riley. Riley bending the whole surface with nothing but line, the picture plane caving in while you look at it. Heather thought Riley was one of the most important women artists of the century and was frustrated that people in America don't talk about her enough. She studied Albers and Interaction of Color. Form and color and light. Mostly abstract, sometimes recognizable.
And she knew why art mattered, because she'd needed it. In that same interview she talked about the years right after college, when her father was very ill and she was depressed and floundering. She went to a series of samurai films at the Monica in Santa Monica, every day, sank into the seat and let them flow over her. She said she started finding survival tools in those films. "Art literally saved my life."
The work
Movement and energy were at the heart of everything. Her figure drawing lenticulars were studies of human movement, that in-between relationship of movement, shape and color. Labor intensive. Sometimes eighteen drawings to arrive at one lenticular animation.
Alcoves (2017 to 2018) started with a theatrical maquette made with painting and assemblage, then many layers of photographs combined on a lenticular lens so the forms seem to breathe and shift. Ego, vanity, loss, the conditions of being human.
HOST began with ink drawings of flowers in Griffith Park, interlaced so the shapes morph and flip, shown at Altadena Library and bG Gallery in Santa Monica, and grew into bas relief sculptures. She picked that title for all of its meanings at once: one who entertains guests, a place that holds an event, a plant or animal a parasite lives on, a large number of something, the bread eaten at Communion. That is SO Heather.
The nests. During lockdown she started feeling guilty that her material is plastic based, and there's a lot of scrap, because when you make a mistake on a lenticular you basically have to cut it up. So she cut it up and wove the pieces with a 3D pen loaded with bamboo filament into little nests. Stuck inside, making nests, like a bird.
Most recently, small abstract sculptures from her love of the seaside. Hand drawings, then AI digital embossed prints, then formed lenticulars on clear acrylic bases. Too fragile. So she moved to molded resin, which also gave her more freedom with the 3-D shapes. "Art is an ongoing process," she wrote.
She never got comfortable in a material. When a material stopped working, she changed it. When a mistake meant cutting up her work, she wove the scraps into nests. I am sure we inspired each other.
ID, in The Closet
In 2019 Heather had an installation called ID in The Closet at Shoebox Projects. It began with the missing persons ads in the coupon booklets stuffed in her mailbox every week. She tore them out. She looked at the faces and wondered where these people came from and why they might have run away. The computer-generated images guessing what they'd look like in the future disturbed her. If that's who someone wanted them to become, maybe that's why they left. She collected more than 200 of these snippets of human lives. Later she found an old magazine ad asking "Has your identity already been stolen?" and it belonged with all those lost faces. Lenticular flips, made from the original clippings, mixed some of those faces with people she knew and tucked them into the grid.
She took part in Call and Response several times. During the pandemic, when everything she loved about showing art (the interaction, the conversation, people moving in front of the work) had stopped, she figured out how to collaborate on Zoom. For CAGES she made three 4" x 7" templates based on the Golden Section and other ratios and sent them to three groups of artists. Everyone met at a set time and held their cards right up to the camera eye, rotating them every seven seconds, counting silently, moving by being aware of one another. The movement and spatial proportions came from John Cage's Music of Changes. Human imperfection was part of the point. "I love to show, discuss and experience art with others," she wrote. The videos were projected on the windows of the Helms Design Center on Washington Blvd. for Projecting Possibilities.
Coffee, and criticism
She started a coffee map, @cafekeaton, and asked everyone for their must-visit shops (no chains, please). She was learning about pour-overs and frothing and flavor notes, while being, in her words, "a simple 'love a latte' person." She'd done the research. More than 1000 coffee shops in L.A., about 200 of them single owned and worth supporting. Ktown as the epicenter of specialty coffee. Sixteen coffee shops in one mile of Ventura Blvd. Her next idea was a walking tour. Or a Waymo, because you shouldn't drink and drive. LOL.
She also launched b_criticus on Instagram, art reviews for Los Angeles, having a little fun with AI. "I love writing about art," she said. It's good to research and write things up, she said, whether it's a blog or a review or a journal.
She paid attention
Heather noticed things. She tore missing persons ads out of the coupon booklets and looked at every face. She researched the coffee shops of Los Angeles until she knew which two hundred or so were worth supporting. She made, sometimes, eighteen drawings to arrive at one animation. And she asked a Zoom full of artists to hold cards to the camera and rotate them every seven seconds, moving by being aware of one another. I think that is how she treated her friends, too. She noticed.
Everywhere
Her work showed in Los Angeles, New York, France, Japan and Spain. A solo show at Vitrine Gallery in Monaco. Spectrum Miami with bG Gallery during Art Basel. OCCCA, the Annenberg Community Beach House, the Neutra Institute, the LAX Tom Bradley Terminal, a solo booth at Superfine. Solo shows at Keystone (It's All L.A. to Me) and Seis Gallery. Art Basil in Van Nuys, which made the L.A. Times. In October 2025 she was at the Brewery Artwalk. Last year she received the El Greco Fine Arts Award.
Her curatorial practice
Heather curated the way she made art. Curious, generous, a little punk about it.
In July 2018 she put together Left Out/Right Out, a fast and furious pop-up on Fairfax, because she felt LACMA wasn't going far enough in showing 3-D artists. LACMA had 3D: Double Vision up, and Heather answered with the artists who live and breathe this stuff: 3-D photographs, phantograms, lenticulars, holograms, comics, sculpture. She'd been going to the Stereo Club of Los Angeles and had met so many stereo artists there. The show had work by Ray Zone, Eric Kurland, Claudia Kunin, Takashi Sekitani, Abe Perlstein and more than a dozen others, plus her own. Franklin Londin helped her put it together and made stereo images of the reception.
She'd been doing this for years by then. Playtime at the Annenberg Community Beach House in 2015 brought together four artists using time as their material, about fifty years apart in age, and she gave a lenticular presentation during the run. Memory in Forms at the Neutra Institute in November 2016 was with Dion Neutra, Janet Stafford and Lynn Robb. Exquisite Pittoresco at Keystone in 2017 turned the surrealist Exquisite Corpse game into seventeen artist collaborations.
Then Stay On It at Keystone in 2022, all kinetic art: flight, water, light, mechanical movement, lenticulars, textiles, film, and a flamenco performance. She took the title from Julius Eastman's composition, process mattering more than the result. Asemic Notations at IDOLWILD in 2023 asked when a mark becomes language. Divination at Keystone came with tarot readings and astrology with Mat Gleason. Of course it did.
Over the last year or so, Heather didn't know where her art career would go, or where she wanted it to go. So she left her studio at Keystone. She used to laugh about what happened next: she got busier than ever, and the ideas flowed. She was in inspiration.
She believed invention and play are paramount to living well. You could see it in every show she put together.
Christopher
Her longtime partner, the poet and translator Christopher Mulrooney, died in 2015. They first met at Santa Monica High School. They walked Griffith Park and Echo Lake Park and Silver Lake Reservoir, and she wrote that he'd stop every five minutes or so to show her something beautiful. HOST, those Griffith Park flowers, opens with a line of Baudelaire in Christopher's translation. After he died she worked on cataloging everything he'd written and published. She held on to his work the way she held on to her friends.
In my kitchen, on my desk
One day I saw three sketches of lenticular hula hoopers lined up next to each other on her studio table. I loved them. I commissioned a piece with all three hula hoopers side by side, each one moving at a different time as you look. It hangs in my kitchen.
Heather had a great sense of humor. I can still hear her laughing. I can still see her smiling face. For an event at Keystone there was banana bread, and she made a lenticular of a banana with duct tape (hello, Cattelan) juxtaposed with bananas fresh off the trees. I wanted to buy it. She gave it to me. It sits on my desk.
I am afraid of forgetting. My father died more than twenty years ago and I can barely remember his voice. There are no recordings. When my friend Scott died, I went through old emails and posts looking for something that sounded like him. So I am saying it here, where it can't get lost: Heather's laugh was infectious.
Last weekend at Brewery Artwalk I put a coffin in my studio with roses at its feet and asked people to bring flowers for the friends we have lost. Heather's name was on my list. A friend brought a bouquet with a vase the color of Heather.
Selfies with friends
For years I have been taking selfies with my friends. I call them selfies because of the hashtag, but they are self-portraits: me, by my own hand, with the people in my life. I started them to show that I am not invisible because of my size, and I keep going because every frame is proof that I was there, and that I was not alone.
More than twenty-five of them have Heather in them. Many with our friends at Chimney.
When someone dies, I go looking for them in old photos, and the ones I keep going back to are the ones where we are in the same frame. Those are proof that we were in the same place at the same time. Heather's work moves when you walk past it. These hold still. Right now I am grateful for that, because I can stand in front of one as long as I want.
Most of friendship is ordinary afternoons that nobody writes down. A selfie is how I write them down. That is why I keep taking them.
Drip coffee
Heather wrote that a friend named Jordan taught her how to pour drip coffee when she was very young, back when it was just called drip coffee. "But I always think of him when I pour my own."
That is how Heather held on to people: through something small she did with her own hands.
To the Chimney group
Connie, Lea, Lorraine, Yemisi: we sat at that table before the pandemic, we held each other up on Zoom through the shutdown, and we went back to Chimney as soon as we could. We are going to keep going back. Heather would want us at the table, talking about art and the art world and the world, with something good to drink. We'll save her seat.
I'll see you at ChiOur Chimpmney.
