Austin Lowrey was a career professor of graphic design at the University of Georgia, Indiana State University and, last and longest, at North Carolina State School of Design before retiring as a professor emeritus to Los Angeles where he maintained a 3,000 square-foot live-work space installed with early American art pottery, flea market objects, outsider art and design. While having made and shown installations at non-profit art venues when in NC (Davidson College, North Carolina Museum of Art Artists Annuals, Donald Judd’s Marfa, Texas Locker Plant, etc.), Austin only resumed painting proper (after thirty years) once he moved to San Miguel in 2011.

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The idiosyncrasies of Southern culture continue to influence him: Growing up in northeastern Alabama’s Lookout Mountain area, Austin accompanied his mother, a prolific art glass collector, around the South. He received his professional degrees at Auburn University, undergraduate in graphic design, and graduate in painting and printmaking under Modernist persuasion. His paintings are also very much informed by his earlier arrangements which drew affinities between contemporary, Modern and Postmodern visual art and design histories, as well as told stories, made puns and innuendos. Many of Austin’s paintings’ titles allow visual/verbal play from his long graphic design tenure and affection for southern literature; Faulkner, Williams, Capote, O’Conner, Welty, etc.

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