page_title: Truman Lowe
section_title: Storytelling works
hierarchical_section_title: Truman Lowe / Fine art career / Storytelling works
caption_attribution_description: Four Winnebago women sitting in a chipoteke, a wigwam-like traditional structure.
context_page_description: Truman Tennis Lowe was an American sculptor and installation artist. A professor of fine art at the University of Wisconsin, Lowe also served as a curator of contemporary art at the National Museum of the American Indian. He is known for large site-specific installation pieces using natural materials.
context_section_description: Like many contemporary Native American artists, Lowe chooses his medium to explore the stories and experiences of Native peoples, allowing his artwork to serve as a form of cultural survival.  The cosmology of the Winnebago people is told through a massive wooden sculpture Red Banks (1991), consisting entirely of wood at 12 × 37 × 8 feet. Red Banks serves as a visual analogy for oral tradition and myth, as well showing the framework upon which survival rests.
  At the premier of Red Banks Lowe embraced the importance of the artist as a storyteller and archivist of culture:
  Since Winnebago history is largely oral, tribal artists have a particularly important role to play in preserving tradition as well as making non-Indians aware of Winnebago culture.
  Other stories told through Lowe's work include the smallpox epidemic on the Black River Falls Indian Mission in 1901 (Wooden Pole Construction, 1983), serving as what has been described a "contemporary version of the mnemonic device," an idea that flows throughout his entire catalog of work. Personal stories are also reflected on through works like Feather Tree (1990), which honors his grandmother and the land she lived in. Lowe's work has also flowed into two dimensional drawings, where he has chosen to honor his mother's legacy.
caption: Four Winnebago women under a structure commonly seen as an influence in Lowe's work, from the Wisconsin Historical Society
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