Rick Lowe: Black Wall Street Journey / Holly Bass: We Hold These Truths

This fall, as the University of Michigan Museum of Art (UMMA) marks its 80th anniversary, the museum presents ambitious new projects by Rick Lowe and Holly Bass in its historic wing, following a year-long restoration of the original marble floor. Both exhibitions explore how artists reframe history and challenge conventional ideas of progress, prosperity, and civic belonging.

MacArthur Fellow Rick Lowe’s Black Wall Street Journey: Re and De Imagining Black Progress marks his largest solo exhibition at a U.S. art museum. Guest curated by Abigail Winograd and developed during Lowe’s three-year residency with U-M’s Institute for Social Research (ISR), it brings together more than 20 new works and a major public installation celebrating Black resilience and creativity.

Black Wall Street Journey extends Lowe’s engagement with Tulsa’s Greenwood District— known as Black Wall Street—and investigates how Black self-determination is represented, measured, and understood. His U-M collaborators include ISR Director Kathleen Cagney, the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) team, Stamps professor Nicole Marroquin, and political scientist Christian Davenport.

In the gallery, a decade of artistic and social research takes abstract form, revealing relationships data alone cannot convey. The painting Kinship Networks layers Black economic data onto a family tree, connecting statistical patterns to lived experience. Rising 18 feet, Pyramid (Unbroken Obelisk) stacks domino-like forms into a towering geometric sculpture that recalls Egyptian pyramids, Barnett Newman’s Broken Obelisk, and the shotgun houses of Houston’s Third Ward.

The Black Wall Street Journey Ticker is a 40-foot LED installation on UMMA’s rooftop, with versions in the exhibition and ISR atrium. Using PSID and Anti-Black Index data, it reimagines the stock ticker to make information about Black well-being public and question conventional measures of wealth and progress.

Opening October 3 in UMMA's Lizzie and Jonathan Tisch Apse, Holly Bass’s We Hold These Truths, her largest exhibition to date, focuses on three U.S. anniversary years—1876, 1976, and 2026. Marking the 250th anniversary of the U.S., it considers how American ideals are staged in public, preserved in private, and passed between generations.

Through domestic installations recalling a historic house museum, Bass weaves together American history, personal memories, and an imagined ancestral lineage to consider how national narratives enter everyday life. Suspended above the Apse, steel-wire outlines of roof trusses suggest an attic and the invisible architecture of empire. Parlor and Den environments recall the U.S. Centennial and Bicentennial while drawing on her childhood. Videos, artifacts, and archival materials trace the Pen Woman, a fictional writer born in 1876, offering shifting glimpses of how history is observed, recorded, and rewritten.

Presented in partnership with the U-M Stamps School of Art & Design’s Roman J. Witt Residency Program, We Hold These Truths renews UMMA’s Apse Commissions, begun by Sol LeWitt in 1996 and continued by Annette Lawrence in 2000, and Kara Walker and Pat Steir in 2002.

UMMA’s Fall Reopening Celebration takes place Saturday, October 10, from noon to 5:00 p.m. The program includes Black Wall Street Journey: In Conversation with Rick Lowe from 1-2:15pm, artmaking with Holly Bass from 2:30-4pm, curator conversations and architecture tours throughout the Museum. Admission to UMMA and all opening events is free.