After three years of daring exhibitions, drunk critiques, and videogrammes, the Old Fourth Ward’s Low Museum has announced that it will close later this month. Co-founded by Pastiche Lumumba, Theodore McLee, and Jordan Stubbs in 2013, the Low Museum has consistently provided a space in Atlanta for emerging artists, especially young artists making work that deals with issues related to race, sexuality, and Internet culture. The Low’s final exhibition, “Kissing Post 92,” is the first solo show by Alessandra Hoshor, one of the museum’s longtime friends and collaborators, and will open on Monday, May 23, at 7 pm.
When BURNAWAY spoke with the founders of the Low for our second print issue in 2014, Lumumba said the museum’s goal was “to bridge the gap between the house show crowd and the museum crowd,” and true to this vision, the Low’s closing party on Friday, May 27, will feature performances and music by Vague Babies, Kayla Steen, and DJ Bitchcraft, among others.
Though the closing of the Low Museum ends this three-year collaboration between the artists and curators involved, it also demonstrates how much the museum’s founding staff have established themselves as solo artists since 2013. Lumumba, who plans to leave Atlanta soon, was named winner of the Art Chopped program hosted by New York’s Bruce High Quality Foundation University in December 2015, and was also at the center of a recent controversy about critique and cultural appropriation since his performance #StealNathanSharratt in March, in which he stole a piece from Sharratt’s MFA exhibition at Georgia State as “a silent act of institutional critique.” Stubbs is a 2015/2016 Mint Leap Year Resident preparing for a solo show in the new Mint space this fall, and both he and Lumumba have recently participated in group shows in Atlanta and elsewhere. McLee recently took part in a panel about Religion and Sexuality as part of the Love/d & Sex/ed conversations at the Mammal Gallery last month.
For more information about the history of the Low Museum, you can read Meredith Kooi’s conversation with Pastiche Lumumba about “art [as] a context sport” here, as well as our review of “Sext,” a show curated last fall by Lumumba, Hira Mahmood, and Sesali Bowen.
Logan Lockner is Assistant Editor of BURNAWAY.
