Clynton Lowry
March 5, 2023
Complete playlist below; tracks in yellow were cut for time.
- Back To Life (However Do You Want Me), Soul II Soul, Caron Wheeler
- Set Adrift on Memory Bliss, P.M. Dawn
- Come Into My Life, Joyce Sims
- Into The Groove - Edit, Madonna
- Spring Love, Stevie B
- What’s My Name, DMX
- It’s Mine (feat. Nas), Mobb Deep
- It Takes Two, Rob Base & DJ EZ Rock
- New N3on, Playboi Carti
- My Own Summer (Shove It), Deftones
- Cheenaroka, Alan Vega
- Falling and Laughing, Orange Juice
- Waiting on a Friend, The Rolling Stones
- The Secret Life of Arabia, David Bowie
- Massacre, Thin Lizzy
- Shallow Water, The Flesh Eaters
- Drugs Drugs Drugs, Tonetta
- Strutter, KISS
- Doggies, Bernard Herman
- Casual Eye-to-Eye Affair, Mimi Vett
- Speak English, Mimi Vett
- Art Handler Theme Song, Phil Cote
Artist and writer Clynton Lowry brings a particularly smooth and sweet mixtape to the show—a tribute in part to his musical family and his youth in LA and Philly. We talk about his life after getting an MFA from Yale and his day job working as an art handler. Trying to figure out ways to survive creatively and financially, Lowry began to think about strategies for making art outside of the gallery system in which he was already working every day. The result was “studio gear”, including sleeping bags, jackets, and sweat suits made out of the ubiquitous moving blankets that are a fundamental component of art shipping (this work is currently on view in the show Local Objects at International Objects in Brooklyn). Both authentic and chic, these objects helped inspire the creation of Art Handler, an art journal from/about the people who work behind the scenes in galleries, museums, and private collections. This work fueled Lowry’s friendships with fashion icons like Virgil Abloh and Heron Preston (and the subsequent appearance in Louis Vuitton, Off-White, and Burberry of Art Handler aesthetics on the runway). We talk about the role fashion has played in Lowry’s thinking and find out what would be his intro/theme music: "What’s My Name" by DMX.
More recently, Clynton’s work has explored the obverse of fashion: the disappearing of the labor/laborer from art spaces. His work The Invisible Art Handler was featured in the exhibition “In Support” at The Kitchen, New York, NY (2021-22). This included a series of six site-specific, augmented-reality videos which portrayed ordinary maintenance tasks being performed by a person who has been digitally removed from the image. Recalling the willful abnegation of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, the work is both funny and devastating.
Finally, we talk about Clynton and Art Handler’s excellent instagram account, his latest show at Soldes in LA, and the incredible resource that he created for art workers, jobs.art. This is a great show with great music—thank you, Clynton!