Naima Lowe

A lyrically raunchy, punk-blues, auto-mythographic performance using Black vernacular and experimental forms to exploit and critique the commodification of Black desire and ambition.

My name is a song composed by John Coltrane, and this is what I wrote about it. Music produced and arranged by Bill Lowe. I also made a ‘Zine based on the text for this video.

8:26, 2019

by Naima Lowe

The video series opens with two simple instructions: “1. Choose a song that you love by a Black artist. 2. Sing along to it as if no-one is listening.” A performer wearing headphones looks directly into the camera as they sing. We don’t hear their voice or the original song that they’re singing. Instead we hear music that is inspired by the original song and the on screen performance. This riff extends the central questions embedded in the initial instruction: What is Black music? What isn’t Black music? Who defines Black music? Who gets to play and enjoy Black music? How does this tell us about Black people and Black culture writ large? Formally, these pieces borrow heavily from the vernacular language of music videos through lip synching, direct address, and dramatized performance. The visual and audio performances are single takes that emphasize liveness and vulnerability. The result is a low budget visual concept album about the ubiquity and complexity of Black cultural expression.

(the full 16 introductory bars of Billie Holiday’s “Pennies From Heaven” feels self-consciously, even slyly, perfect. The air caught between the notes is just on the edge of sarcastic, but then again don’t we all just want to be loved?)

This project is a formal and conceptual exploration of labor, valuation, numeracy and the unbearable weight of living through late capitalism with self-awareness. The sculptural, sound and text works that I’ve created borrow aesthetic language and conceptual considerations from the retail design shop that I created during 2020 in my latest attempt to free myself from the stranglehold of institutions more interested in the appearance of Black inclusion than the actuality of Black freedom. I needed a means of economic support that wasn’t dependent on the whims of philanthropic or academic patronage, which led me down the often precarious path of entrepreneurship and self employment.

Ropes, Pinks asks whether and how loaded symbols (hanging ropes, the color pink) transform when they come into contact. It is part of a series exploring the possibility of abstract self-portraiture that includes rope sculptures, video, paintings and performance. The piece changes each time it is installed, according to a set of rules that remain consistent in all iterations.

1. This body changes in every new place, but is always made of the same stuff. 

2. This body must be able to swing. 

3. This body projects the illusion of floating freely, and lives the reality of stretching almost beyond its capacity. 

4. This body pulls itself up and coils itself into the ground.

2019, 200ft of hand dyed cotton and hemp rope

by Naima Lowe

97 Days Between

8:48, 2021

Naima Lowe - Vocals and Percussion
Bill Lowe - Tuba and Bass Trombone
Taylor Ho Bynum - Cornet, Flugelhorn, pBone

97 Days Between enumerates time, grief, and incalculable distance. The narrative is derived from Naima’s daily documentation of the emotional toll of living through the first ninety-seven days of the COVID-19 pandemic. The piece tracks a mix of mundane tasks under quarantine, challenging interpersonal transformations, and the myriad of watershed historical events that occurred during that time frame. “During those first several months of the pandemic,” Naima notes “I was hyper aware of the ways that time and space seemed to collapse on itself; fractured by the varying paces with which people came to accept and respond to the crisis. Every conversation about the pandemic seemed marked by utterly incomprehensible calculations as everyone was suddenly tasked with becoming an armchair epidemiologist. The comparisons made between data sets were (are) almost absurd to think about: 98% survival rate vs. 3 million dead. The cost to the economy of thousands dying vs. the cost to the economy of thousands not working. How does one “calculate” loss and gains during a time like this? It seemed only feasible by zooming into the hyper specific experience of day to day living.”

This trilogy of prints combines the dense storytelling of a well crafted love song and the hot pink long hand lettering of an imaginary queer woman growing into herself.

Father/Daughter Supergroup Bill and Naima Lowe have been improvising together since the day they met 42 years ago. They are steeped in the alchemic Black survival strategy known as improvisation, and see their individual creative outputs as indistinct from their commitments to teaching, learning and social justice. With individual careers spanning five decades, multiple universities, and a breadth of international performance and exhibition records, they’ve combined forces for the first time to create Naming The Nameless: A Traveling Black Music Workshop. Bill is a master teacher of African-American creative music capable of supporting musicians of all skill levels in embracing the tensions between individual expression and collective action. Naima, not a formally trained musician, is deeply embedded in the radical life-affirming pedagogy of improvisational praxis; imbuing all of her visual arts projects with a collaborative ethos. Together they are creating this workshop that is centered on Black Music as an encompassing, multi-disciplinary, cross generational methodology. Or to put it more simply, The Lowes know how to tell a good story and create music that swings. 

Short video combining 16mm film, direct animation, and audio from Sun Ra's "Space Is The Place."

1:47, 2019

by Naima Lowe

Forty-page, loose-leaf book, inked and type-set by hand. The emotional labor of talking to white people about racism transformed into a tangible object.

by Naima Lowe

What happens to a song when it is sung without anyone listening?

3:10, 2017

by Naima Lowe

A woman travels through space, time and sorrow to the tune of a Black spiritual sung as slowly as possible.

9:10, 2019

by Naima Lowe

This participatory performance attempts to destroy a Richard Simmons VHS tape by playing it over and over again. The piece has had several incarnations, most recently as part of The Missing Body in Lethbridge, AB.

2008-Present

Experimental Documentary about fathers and daughters, trauma and storytelling, Police violence and Black resistance, love and possibility.

28:55, 2007

by Naima Lowe