Yannick Lowery paints Philly’s electric boxes, creates collages, and dreams in color

If you’ve seen electric boxes like the one on Second and South Streets draped in a blooming field of fuchsia, indigo, and red flowers, you know collage artist Yannick Lowery’s work. Lowery, a Philly-based artist, has been attracting increasing attention, and he recently created the cover art for poet Mahogany Browne’s newest collection Chrome Valley.

“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,” said Lowery, 36, sitting in his North Philly studio. “I think that’s my goal [with my art], illustrating an intangible feeling, a feeling that everybody knows but can’t say.”

Beyond electric boxes, Lowery creates paper collage pieces: images overlaid with layer upon layer of color, figurines straddling the edge, or demarcating time and space. Within varying degrees of color and through layers of images, Lowery bends reality in a way that sometimes defies time altogether.

As a child, Lowery was often moving from place to place: Brooklyn to Virginia, Mississippi to Detroit. He made note of the changing landscape, the changes in food, music, and culture. He always looked for color.

“There’s a street called Puritan, in Detroit,” Lowery recalled. “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.”

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 — if not eternally suspended — amid waves, or clouds, or a song.

There’s a line from Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon, Lowery’s favorite book, that continues to inspire him. “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.”

Before every collage, Lowery puts on his headphones and sifts through material for hours. He collects and gathers old magazines, reads voraciously, and constantly keeps his eyes on the news. “These are archives that are being reimagined,” he explains. He carefully cuts each image, traces and outlines a sketch, and begins to layer the pieces until they fit to create a composite story. His recent explorations with animation and collage have led him to teach a class at Fleisher Art Memorial where he asks students: What does it mean for art to move?

Lowery wants his art on the sidewalk when you’re walking home from a long day, on the neighborhood walls, 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 said. His work on the electric boxes was a part of HAHA x Paradigm, a public art initiative spearheaded by HAHA magazine and Paradigm gallery.

It makes sense that Lowery lives in Philadelphia, a city that has more murals than any other city in the United States and where art fundamentally transforms space. Ginger Rudolph, lead curator of Mural Arts Philadelphia, the nation’s largest public arts program, has mentored him for the past year and has commissioned him for a number of projects including a 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 said in reference to first meeting Lowery in 2020 when he was selected as a Mural Arts fellow. “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 Lowery’s father, Calvin John Lowery was a creative director at Essence magazine, and his mother, Lisa Bradley, daughter of artist Peter Bradley, is an artist and sculptor. When Lowery was 7, his father died.

“He was quite close to his dad, but I don’t know how much he consciously remembers about him,” Lisa Bradley said. “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 trancelike state.

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

Lowery is still trying to find his voice, he admits. 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.

“It was Miles Davis, right?” Lowery asked, “Who said, ‘Man, sometimes it takes a long time to sound like yourself.’ ”