Carlos Lowry
His work covers 50 years, and he keeps coming back to the same theme. Cops are a problem.
Gary Floyd, the front man of local punk band The Dicks, sought out Lowry to design the packaging around their first single,“Dicks Hate Police.”
“Gary at the time was kind of a Maoist, you know, so even though he was performing in drag it was more than that, and there was a desire that the album covers really reflect the politics of, if not the whole band, at least part of the band. The hammer and sickle, the stars, those were the sort of ideas that Gary had.”
Lowry’s unique style immediately turned heads —collages with jittery thick lines and blurred images, a style grown out of the punk scene’s DIY ethos.
“I used to go to the post office downtown because they had the best Xerox. You could do like eight generations of the Xerox to break down the photograph, and you’d get these incredible strong images. And so we did a lot of that with the early Dicks artwork.”
“After working with The Dicks, my artwork became clearer and more kind of defined. Plus I was also involved in a solidarity group with Chile, the country I’d grown up in. And so I did tons of posters and stufffor political organizations in the Austin left.”
Lowry married, had a child, and took a job as a web programmer for the Austin Public Library, where he worked for 28 years. About the time he retired, a police shooting in Ferguson Missouri exploded onto the news. Floyd felt moved to pick up his brush.
“The most amazing thing is how much more sophisticated the police were, they’re like soldiers now. In the eighties, they still looked like policemen, but now they look like a the Imperial Army from Star Wars or some-thing like that. So it made for a very powerful piece.”
Lowry created a triptych he titled “Disorder.Presence. Force.”
“The first one is disorder. So it’s students running around, just basically running away from the police. The second one is the kids. It’s a child’s face and it’s an immigrant child. At the time, you were starting to feel all the anti-immigration stuff, the presence of people that I guess society chooses to repress. And then there’s just the sheer force now of the police.They’re like soldiers. If you add to that the armed citizens, many of them with authoritarian tendencies, you just have a level of potential violence that barely existed back then.”
Carlos Lowry’s currently working on an exhibit that will premiere this summer at the La Pena gallery inAustin, just a few blocks from the state capitol. It’s an opportunity to speak forcefully without using words, simply letting images tell their story. And it can be visceral.
