Beck Lowry: First storm

Yossi Milo is pleased to announce Beck Lowry’s first solo presentation with the gallery, First storm, which opens on Thursday, June 26, 2025. The exhibition will be on view in the Qube through Friday, July 25, and is concurrent with solo exhibitions by J. Carino in the East Gallery and London Williams in the West Gallery.

Beck Lowry’s (b. 1980; New Haven, CT) wall-hung sculptures combine carved, woven, and painted elements in experimental, process-driven forms. The artist navigates their hybrid approach through intuition, taking visual cues from the natural world and improvising on techniques drawn from a global canon of craft. Lowry’s multimedia practice hinges on its relationship to the body, becoming charged with meaning through almost-ritualistic physical exertion and the highly laborious nature of craftsmanship itself.

Each of the artist’s painted weavings begins with a spine- or ladder-like armature, carved from plywood, that serves as the support for a woven plane of thread and fabric. The resulting irregular, undulating surface becomes a site for Lowry’s instinctive oil paintings, which take cues from proximate landscapes, the sublime aspects of nature, and humanity’s relationship to it. The artist enshrines each painting in an ornate frame, which is carved and shaped around it before the finishes are put on the entire work together. This concentric process further blurs the distinction between discrete traditions of painting and sculpture and gestures toward a nuanced third category of cross-medium making.

The titular “First storm” draws on Lowry’s recollections of squalls and tempests, alluding to the expansive sea and swirling winds in an abstracted landscape. Though the work draws on the artist’s specific memories of family and the Long Island Sound, its gyres rendered in blue and yellow allude to a universal relationship to the sky, a deference to nature’s awe-inspiring power. Without words, the artist conveys a narrative that is at once personal and primordial.

By working in distinct phases of highly physical creative labor — carving, weaving, painting — Lowry references a ceremonial dimension, wherein emotional significance is imbued through regimented time and effort. In the studio, the artist relishes each stage, making clear their fascination with technique and texture in the form of carved marks, recursive pattern, and tactile fibers. Descended from a family of makers, Lowry considers the act of creation a central aspect of their identity.

Lowry’s works imagine a global practice of craft freed from geography and function, where the artist navigates the ego and body as dual motivations to create. In this way, Lowry calls into question the anonymity of craftspeople whose artifacts persist as objects of study, yet whose identities are lost to posterity. By recognizing the ways objects wordlessly convey emotion and spiritual meaning, Lowry questions the positioning of craft as a product of the past and weaves threads of folk practices into new forms.

Lowry’s work has been exhibited at Morgan Lehman Gallery, New York, NY; Elijah Wheat Showroom, Newburgh, NY; Headstone Gallery, Kingston, NY; Lyman Allyn Art Museum, New Haven, CT; Ely Center for Contemporary Art, New Haven, CT; and Delaware Contemporary, Wilmington, DE. Lowry is a 2024-25 resident of the Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program, Brooklyn, NY; and has participated in residencies at Interlude, Kingston, NY; and Millay Arts, Austerlitz, NY. Their work has been covered in Artforum, New American Paintings, Maake Magazine, and Galerie. Works by Lowry are held in the public collections of Southern Connecticut State College, New Haven, CT, and Gateway Community College, New Haven, CT. Lowry holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Economics and a Certificate in African Studies from Smith College, Northampton, MA. The artist lives and works in Connecticut.