Beck Lowry is a Connecticut based artist whose work lives in a beautiful grey zone, floating somewhere between sculpture, textiles, and abstract painting without quite being any one of those things. Lowry just completed a year long residency at the Sharpe Walentas studios in Dumbo, NY and has a solo exhibition on view at Yosi Milo in Chelsea, New York. I visited Beck this summer, at Sharpe Walentas to talk about their work and how the opportunity in New York, in a new studio, has influenced their approach to art making. Viewing Lowry’s work is delightful, it is both rough and delicate, careful but not overworked, and contemporary, but feels deeply steeped in an unknown history. You can view the newest body of work, First Storm, at Yosi Milo until August 22, 2025.

Interview between Amy Boone-McCreesh and Beck Lowry

AMY: YOUR STUDIO THIS YEAR IS AT SHARPE WALENTAS IN DUMBO, NYC, HOW HAS THIS EXPERIENCE BEEN DIFFERENT FROM YOUR TYPICAL STUDIO PRACTICE / EXPERIENCE?

BECK: Oh it’s been so different in many important ways. Most significant has been a huge shift in my sense of community with other artists and connection to the art scene in NY.  Normally I am based in Connecticut but for this year at Sharpe-Walentas I’ve been spending half of each week living and working in Brooklyn, which has allowed me to connect with people in a way that is really hard to do when you live even just a couple hours outside of the city.  I’ve met so many great artists (you included) just by showing up at openings and being introduced or introducing myself around. And then I’ve been able to invite people over for studio visits and reciprocate those visits, and I think there’s an intimacy and depth of conversation that comes from really experiencing each other’s work and process in situ that can’t really be replicated outside of the studio. So being able to work and live in Brooklyn has been of enormous benefit. And, of course, my cohort at Sharpe Walentas has been fantastic. It’s been so rewarding to work alongside all these talented and incredibly hard-working artists – to see their rhythms and geek out together about technical problems we’re each trying to solve, to be able to celebrate each other’s successes, has been affirming and generative in ways I didn’t even know to expect. I think of it as a taste of the art school experience I didn’t have.  

In terms of studio habits, there have been some important shifts in my routine that I hope to maintain when I leave. In the past, I have generally split my work days in half, doing my paid work in the morning and shifting to the studio in the afternoon. For this year at SW, I’ve had to shift all of my studio hours to the three days I’m in NY so I’ve just been working really long hours – typically 8 to 8ish.  And then I do all my computer-based paid work when I’m home in CT.  I’ve found that the long days in the studio allow me to cycle through multiple rounds of working, getting stuck, solving a problem, and then moving forward again, and that has proven to be very satisfying and, I think, more productive. It also means that on my non-studio days I am more patient with my paid job and, most importantly, I have more energy and can be a bit more present with my son on the days that I’m home because I’m not trying to fit in two jobs and parenting in the same day.

And then on a more practical, day to day level, the SW studio has a lot more wall space than my garage studio at home, so I’ve been able to have a bunch of pieces up at once, including some finished work, which means it’s easy to look around and remind myself “yes I know how to do this”. It’s also facilitated my ability to work on a bunch of pieces at once, which I think is a more productive approach than working on one or two at a time.

A: BIG PICTURE, WHAT WOULD YOU SAY YOUR WORK IS ABOUT OR WHAT IS THE DRIVING FORCE BEHIND YOUR MOST RECENT WORK?

B: I think there are a number of ways I try to explain my work. Maybe most fundamentally it is the product of an exercise in construction, tactility, and meditation (or an internal quietude akin to meditation) – a way for me to literally build something with all of my anxiety about the world. This is why process and object-ness are so important to me – it’s actually in the physical exhaustion and sense of having spent extended time with the object, that I find satisfaction; the haptic experience (rather than any cerebral gymnastics) is what allows me to work through all the grief I have about how beautiful the world _could_ be.  I like to pretend that my job is to build a container for important emotions/memories/experiences, whether personal or universal.  Experiences like noticing the first storm of a season or the smell of rain, watching quietly as my kid discovers something new all on his own, the particular fury that comes from watching billionaires blast off in spaceships while the world is on fire, or the staggering grief of being a witness to genocide playing out, in real time in the palm of my hand – I think all of these feelings need a place to live. And I guess I believe that objects, if made carefully and with intention, can offer refuge to the intangible.

I also enjoy playing with duality/complexity/contradictions – I like the challenge of making something that is neither strictly craft nor art with a capital A, but maybe something in between and, in the process, interrogating (as many other artists do) the impulse to differentiate contemporary art from decorative art from craft. I like questioning where painting ends and sculpture or textile begins, blurring the line between the “painting” and the “frame”, confusing cast shadow with the illusion of shadow, and so on.  I also get a kick out of challenging the assumptions around who makes patterned work; people are often trying to discern where, geographically, my work comes from, and I think this query reflects an association of pattern, and perhaps blocky use of color, with indigenous art, when I think in fact pattern-making and decoration are just universally human instincts.  I do though think there’s a very important conversation to be had around appropriation that I am still working through.  I am thinking a lot about how I can affirm my external aesthetic influences in a way that honors that influence without overstating its impact on my work – about how I can bring these varied influences into conversation with one another and with my more primordial/formative influences, without being appropriative or melting-pot-ish. I don’t have an easy answer and I welcome the sometimes-uncomfortable conversations that my trying instigates/invites.

A: YOUR WORK LIVES IN THIS UNIVERSE BETWEEN SCULPTURE, TEXTILES, AND ABSTRACT PAINTING, IS THERE A HIERARCHY IN THE WAY YOU CATEGORIZE THIS WORK, YOUR INFLUENCES, OR IN THE CONTEXT YOU FEEL IT OPERATES?

B: Colloquially I distinguish between my two bodies of work by referring to the more free-form sculptural work as “sculptures” and the rectangular-ish pieces as “paintings” or “painted weavings”. But I see them all as objects, first and foremost. In terms of influences, sculpture and textile dominate.  I do enjoy looking at paintings but the stuff that makes me want to run back to the studio and get to work is generally work that has volume and texture, particularly texture.

A: HOW DO YOU THINK ABOUT AND ASSIGN COLOR?

B: I usually start out with an idea of the palette I want to use. It might be based on a textile that I think has an interesting combination of colors or a particular moment in a landscape (like a daffodil against a grey sky) or, not infrequently, someone else’s painting that has an exquisite palette that I want to try to copy.  And inevitably it ends up morphing as I work.  I’m not aware of thinking much about the decisions I’m making around color after that, but I’m sure I’m making them. One thing I am aware of is pushing myself to try new things, because I can easily revert to what I think is a sort of simplistic use of color – like I have one kind of red, painted in the same way, next to one kind of yellow, etc (what I described earlier as blocky use of color -I’m sure there’s an art term for this).  I think that comes from my love of textiles and my orientation toward craft maybe? Sometimes that simplicity is nice, but I’d like to be able to be more versatile, so I push myself to experiment with different ways of applying and removing paint and pushing the colors to be more varied chromatically and in terms of value. Color is something I feel I’m still on a steep learning curve about.

A: DO YOU HAVE ANY TRICKS FOR YOURSELF IN THE STUDIO WHEN THINGS AREN’T WORKING, OR YOU ARE JUST GENERALLY FEELING DOWN ABOUT ART MAKING?

B: When things aren’t working in the studio, I rarely take a break, even though I know I probably should. Sometimes I can get myself to put something aside for a bit, but usually when something’s not working it’s going to distract me until it is. One trick I have in my “paintings” is to insert a piece, or a few pieces of fabric with some design or color scheme that really alters the painting. I scrape off an area of the painting and then glue on an interesting cut of fabric.  I think this is a way of introducing new ideas, new movement or quality of line, or just getting me to let go of whatever idea I had of where the piece was going, and often that’s enough to get things moving again.

Getting through a bout of more existential doubt is harder. It’s usually the fact of the world being on fire that gets me down about art-making. I think I have two distinct voices in my head that tell me very different things about the role of art in an age of grief: the cynical voice chastises me for navel-gazing when there’s so much of importance going on out in the world. And the other, maybe kinder, voice assures me that art-making is one of the few sane responses to a broken world.  So, I guess in these moments of doubt I try to invite the kinder voice, sometimes by talking to the people in my life that have supported me all along, sometimes with other artists, and often by turning to other forms of art -music, writing, dance. Sometimes it’s easier to see the value in other people’s work than to see it in my own, and then once I’m reminded that art really does have power, I’m able to settle back in to doing what I love.

A: FAVORITE STUDIO SNACKS, DRINKS, MUSIC? 

B: : I’m weirdly private about what music I listen to, so I always avoid this question. But this year actually my studio has had so much ambient noise that I can’t really listen to anything on a speaker.  I don’t like listening to music on headphones because I find it too distracting, so I’ve just been listening to the train passing by and the hum of the hvac system.  There are many things I will miss about my Sharpe-Walentas studio (the company, the view, the high ceilings) but I am looking forward to listening to music again while I’m working. As far as snacks go, it’s gum and Altoids throughout and often an NA beer in the late afternoon.

A: WHERE CAN PEOPLE SEE YOUR WORK IN THE NEAR FUTURE? 

B:I have a show up now at Yossi Milo through Aug 22^nd.  Or @becklowry on the socials or at becklowry.com