Making the intangible tangible again: Yannick Lowery dreams of another world.

I remember Yannick’s dad came to pick him up one evening, recalls Larry Patterson, a close family friend. “He was wearing this amazing full length tan, suede, shearling overcoat and my jaw dropped.” The men looked at each other wearily; the coat was expensive. Calvin raised his eyebrow, says Larry, and with a smirk said, “Rent will have to wait this month, fashion knows no comfort.”

You can’t tell the story of Yannick Lowery without Calvin. Both men have a reverence for craft, an eye for beautiful moments and beautiful things. Yannick, an interdisciplinary collagist overlays paper to understand time, Calvin the first black art director for La Face Records, canonized images of the culture that have withstood the test of time.

“Ironically after Calvin passed, somehow I ended up with the coat,” says Larry. “I tried to wear it because you know the coat was that fly but Calvin was taller and he was broader than me. So I knew then that basically what I was doing was holding the coat for Yannick.”

***

Yannick Lowery was born in the midst of the Black Bohemia. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Fort Greene, Brooklyn was a hotbed for creatives. Artists from across the African diaspora lived in the neighborhood, most notably American filmmaker Spike Lee. Everyone was working on something, the painters, the musicians, the poets and the filmmakers. The area was buzzing.

“It was almost like being in the midst of the Renaissance,” says Patterson. “That was the environment we were raising our kids [in].”

The Lowery family was buzzing too. Calvin John Lowery was working at Essence Magazine. Lisa Bradley, daughter of the abstractionist painter Peter Bradley, was an artist and sculptor. Together, the two 25-year-old parents of one navigated the scene. Calvin often brought work home, shooting album covers in the basement. As a result, the pair had to be scrappy. They were always running for more clothes, for more fabric or for more time. In came Heavy-D and the Boyz, Damian Dame, Dionne Warwick and members of the preeminent girl group, TLC. Yannick, strapped to his parents' back or in the hands of guests tending and cooing at the delight of having a baby in the room, was always home.

“Before he could even talk or was even conscious of the fact of what he was around, there were all kinds of people around him, there were all kinds of different music from all over the world around him,” explains Lisa. “When I look at his work, I see a very specific moment in time. I see a very specific culture. It’s music culture, it’s art culture, fashion culture but it’s a very specific black culture.”

***

“I feel like a lot of the time a good song can say something that I’ve wanted to say but I couldn’t find the words to say it,” Yannick Lowery explains. Sitting in his studio in Philly he makes sure to choose his words carefully. The 32-year-old artist is dressed casually in a black t-shirt and khaki pants. His hands rest gently under his chin as he mulls over each question. “I think that’s my goal, illustrating an intangible feeling, a feeling that everybody knows but can’t say.”

Looking at Lowery’s work, one is struck instantly by his sense of color. The images leap across the screen in sacrosanct harmony. Soon you begin to notice the layers in the work, the figurines straddling the edge, or demarcating a line, the movement of time and space.

In “002 for Mr. Mayfield” Lowery centers a black and white image of a young Curtis Mayfield. Tenderly gazing straight ahead, Mayfield is enveloped in waves of cerulean blue, of paper upon paper layered and cut carefully. At first glance, it feels like Mayfield is floating. Held within a liminal space, within waves, or clouds, or a song, you feel a sense of home.

***

Calvin Lowery died from HIV/AIDs when Yannick was seven-years-old. Lisa and Calvin had divorced a few years prior, and Yannick would go on to live in a world that was peculiarly and inordinately strange.

Transience became a normal part of his life. Lisa and Yannick would move to Virginia so Lisa could complete a Masters and then PhD program at Virginia Commonwealth University. Richmond, Virginia was a starkly different city than the buzzing and bubbling movements of Fort Greene. Lowery would go on to move to Detroit to live with his grandmother, Mississippi for boarding school, Atlanta for art school and then Chicago for college.

Often alone, Lowery observed the world around him. He made note of the changing landscapes, the changes in food, music and culture. Beauty was all around him. In the process, he always looked for color.

“There's a street called Puritan, in Detroit.” Lowery recalls. “It was a long, long road to get to the Dairy Queen in the summertime. It would be 100 degrees, just blazing, and you would see mirages. Everything always looked yellow, beige, orange and flat, almost like a desert, like a concrete desert.”

Lowery’s attentiveness to color is a trait he shares with his grandfather, Peter Bradley, who at 81 years-old continues to capture the limelight. In a recent profile in the New York Times, Bradley proclaimed, “Look outside. Look how abstract it is out here. Before you see any plants, you see the color. What’s important is the color. Nothing else.”

The statement conjures memories of a passage from Lowery’s favorite book, Toni Morrison’s The Song of Solomon, which he says he returns to again and again and again as a way to inspire his work. Morrison writes, “Saying something is pitch black is like saying something is green. What kind of green? Green like my bottles? Green like a grasshopper? Green like a cucumber, lettuce, or green like the sky is just before it breaks loose to storm? Well, night black is the same way. May as well be a rainbow.”

***

Collage is a time map, it works to bring together various modalities, colors and images to tell a larger story.“There’s a visual aesthetics that you’re working within. It’s about the balance of colors and about focalization,” explains Brent Hayes Edwards, a professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University. Edwards focuses on Romare Bearden, the godfather of the afro-diasporic collage tradition. “But Bearden is also interested in the ways that you can create productive frictions between things that seem to go together.”

Playing around with the harmony, with chords that don’t necessarily go together but sound beautifully in the end is the heart of a larger diasporic tradition. As Duke Ellington said, “That's the Negro's way of life. Dissonance is our way of life in America.”

Dissonance pervades Lowery’s work. It is found through his manipulation of time, taking history, through photos of the past, and situating them within the sounds of the present. Within varying colors and signified imagery, Lowery bends the contours of reality to produce a space that defies the cadence of time all together.

Lowery describes this space in a variety of ways. It is an interpretation of the future or a premonition. In some ways it is an alternate past and in other ways it's a completely new world. But in all ways, he says, it is a collective memory. “There is just something there,” says Teri Henderson, author of the upcoming book Black Collagists,

“There is just something there in Yannick’s work.”

Take for example, “fire works.” The piece, which is slated to debut in Henderson’s book, depicts a group of young African-American protesters in the late 1960s. The black and white image is viscerally juxtaposed by shades of orange and yellow that bloom across the page. The picket signs held by protestors are images of flames, renderings of police officers standing in the line of fire. “fire works,” 2021

“I think his vision is getting more and more terrified as the years go by,” says Adrian Buckmaster, a British-born photographer who worked with his father at Essence.

Yannick is deploying color and beauty to depict a world that is unbeautiful. Onlookers are initially gripped by the colors on the canvas, by the composition of images that makeup a scene but upon further glance, they begin to notice the dissonance.

“[His work] has lots of signifiers of what we see as beautiful,” Lisa explains. “You'll see diamonds, you'll see flowers, a woman's hair, lips, but on closer inspection, you see the sociological aspects of it. And so then it becomes a sort of terrible beauty, a horrible beauty, a horrifying beauty.”

***

Lisa is an artist’s artist. Often collecting odd ends and trinkets, she would recruit her only son to carry home stalks of bamboo that they had found on the side of the street together. When Yannick was younger she would dye her hair blue one day and show up in orange the next. She was working three jobs, she was applying for fellowships and she was debuting her work. Movement was and continues to be an integral part of her practice.

“He was just shrinking from embarrassment,” Lisa explains. “I didn't look like the nuclear family that he thought that he wanted to have or thought that he should have and I think that maybe art is connected to that. Art is messy. It’s chaotic and it throws the artist's life to and fro. You're not getting the kind of linear existence that you might want to have as a child. And you know, Yannick likes stability.”

The impact of Lisa’s influence on Yannick’s work is immeasurable. Amidst the movement and amidst the precarity, the two artists grew up together, often navigating the world side by side as friends. “The most stable years of my life were when he was a child and that was stability I forced on myself with an iron fist because that’s not who I am,” says Lisa.

Women are central figures in Yannick’s work, femininity anchors his understanding of the past and hopes for the future. Looking at Yannick’s work now, Lisa sees remnants of her younger self. “There is a certain type of feminine beauty that I’ve noticed in his work,” she says. “When I see men and women together [in his work], there's always this sort of care that maybe he was trying to imagine for me at the time, a sort of protection or a sort of joy or safety that I see in those figures. And I mean, that’s what artists do, we recreate the world the way we want to see it.”

***

When you begin to think of Yannick’s work as an archive you begin to understand the sheer magnanimity of the documentation process.

“These are archives that are being reimagined,” he says.

It requires sifting through hours of material at any given moment, consuming and understanding media, reading up on literature and traveling through time. And like any good archive, it requires a reticent audience.

“I’m not interested much in gallery space,” he explains.

Yannick wants to be outside. He wants his art on the sidewalk when you’re walking back home from a long day, on the neighborhood walls at dusk till dawn, on the rails to the train and on the lampposts that line the street.

“Public work knocks down all the barriers that are prevalent in museums and galleries. They knock down all the walls that make art seem pretentious, all the barriers that are set up for people as a distraction from enjoying the work,” he says.His eyes light up as he explains, these collages are just sketches, “a preliminary idea for something much bigger.”

*** It makes sense then that Yannick lives in Philadelphia. The city has more murals than any other city in the United States. Ginger Rudolph,the lead curator of Mural Arts Philadelphia, the nation's largest public arts program, has mentored Yannick for the past year and has commissioned him for a number of projects including an upcoming mural for the Black Paradise Project.

“If I'm being quite honest, I think from a curatorial standpoint, I could see that Yannick was still very young as a visual artist,” Rudolph says. “But he mindfully was taking his work in places and activating conversations that seemed older. What I loved about his work is that while he was cementing himself in a historical place, the youth seemed to come to him imagining new futures for us.”

Yannick is still trying to find his voice. It’s difficult when the world has served as a backdrop, when his family is composed of artists and when his medium requires collaboration. In working with an active archive, the artist yields a sense of control, pages and images offer varying references, inhabit various connotations and welcome an external gaze. In many ways, Yannick is searching for a language to express himself, he always has. “There is a point [in the work] where I'm like what would my mom think about this, but lately I've been trying to steer away from that.” Away from the familial tradition, away from the expectations and criticisms, away from the galleries and fine-art and away from time.

“It was Miles Davis, right?” It was Miles Davis who said, “Man, sometimes it takes you a long time to sound like yourself.”

***

Without computers, Calvin John Lowery would have to cut and trace most of his photographs by hand. “They had the long t-square, the metal t-square. They had the triangles. They had all of these things that would give them straight lines or perfect circles and it took a lot of skill and handwork,” Lisa explains. She thinks for a minute before continuing, “And that is exactly what Yannick's work is.”

Before every collage, Lowery places his headphones over his head and transports through time. He carefully cuts each image, traces and outlines a sketch. He inhabits a different world.

“He was quite close to his dad, but I don't know how much he consciously remembers about him,” Lisa says. “I think that it's more of going back to what you call intangible. There's a certain feeling that his father gave him and I think that maybe when he works and creates his work and goes into this kind of trance-like state, I think that's where he is at that time.

Hopefully,” she says, “that's very healing for him.”