Karen Comer Lowe has spent more than two decades shaping how audiences experience Black art in and from the American South, and her curatorial path has taken her from the Smithsonian Institution’s National Portrait Gallery and the Whitney Museum of American Art to the Tubman African American Museum, before returning to her hometown of Atlanta. After completing her tenure as curator-in-residence at the Spelman Museum of Fine Arts, she now works independently, advising collectors and organizing exhibitions that reimagine the relationship between Southern history and contemporary art.
Lowe summarizes her curatorial practice as “elevating southern Black diaspora narratives.” But when asked to elaborate on the framework behind her approach, her answer is complex. “My past exhibitions are an example of my commitment to curating with audience activation in mind, not just audience presentation,” she tells Observer. “I aim to balance format research with intuitive spatial placement that feels welcoming and inclusive. Wall texts that invite questions, performance moments that animate installations and even participatory elements that let visitors shift the exhibition as they move through it. In this way, my curatorial approach elevates without distancing. It provides multiple entry points, while taking visitors on a path through sound, ritual and material philosophy.”
Selecting only five artists from a region as rich and varied (and geographically vast) as the South is a nearly impossible task, but Lowe’s curatorial philosophy made the choices clear. When asked about her selection process, she explains that all five artists emerged from Southern geographies and Black narrative frameworks, yet bring a distinct sensory mode. “Benjamin composes color as sound; Bright frames protest as portraiture; Barnes maps memory onto material; Harris archives gathering spaces through signs and people; German animates grief, hope, and resistance into ritual sculptures. What they share is a commitment to visibility, re-memory and generational transmission.”
These are the artists living and working in the American South she sees as key voices in the region:
Five artists to watch
Paul Stephen Benjamin
- b. 1966; based in Atlanta
Paul Stephen Benjamin creates installations, paintings, sound works and videos that respond to the question: how does “black” communicate? His work is intellectually stimulating yet remains approachable. The black-painted burlap fields in his Black Suns and the phrase-scored piece Black Flag (In Memory of Malcolm and Betty) encourage slow viewing, reflection and active engagement. In my curatorial practice, I have used Benjamin’s works as anchors for exhibition frameworks that integrate live readings and interactive sound pieces. This approach underscores my shared philosophy: the blending of scholarship with sensory resonance, allowing visitors to “listen” to the concept of blackness as they observe. The outcome is a space that feels both anchored and open, intellectual yet inviting.
Photo: Adam Reich, Courtesy Karen Comer Lowe
Sheila Pree Bright
- b. 1967; based in Atlanta
Sheila Pree Bright is widely recognized for her photography projects that reclaim and reframe Black Southern life, capturing everything from elegant households in suburban settings to large-scale public portraits in #1960Now and 1960Who. Bright’s portraits of protesters, children and elders are not mere spectacles; they serve as witness statements in visual form. In exhibitions I have curated, Bright’s installations acted as community entry points in seeing—images of familiar interiors as investigations of identity. Her tonal clarity and emotional immediacy offer both an invitation and a provocation.
Courtesy of the artist
taylor barnes
- b. 1993; from Houston, based in Austin
taylor barnes is a fiber and ceramics artist whose work draws on storytelling traditions and embodied memory. Her work often features charcoal figures on cloth and clay vessels that represent water, listening, or breath—each one invoking spirit forms grounded in Black feminist philosophy. In her installations, cloth pieces drape across architectural spaces as talismanic forms, while pottery vessels manifest and amplify threads of oral history and folktale archives. In the curatorial settings she has led, Barnes’s work fosters intimacy, featuring gallery corners with plush cloth shadows and low ceramic pedestals for visitors to engage with. In projects that explore themes of memory and belonging, her pieces serve as whispering companions, guiding viewers to slow down, observe and listen. Her artistic practice is tactile, material, soft and rigorous, making abstraction feel profoundly personal.
Courtesy of the artist
L. Kasimu Harris
- b. 1978; New Orleans
Lunar photographer and journalist L. Kasimu Harris combines his background in entrepreneurship (BBA, Middle Tennessee State) and journalism (MA, University of Mississippi, 2008) to create powerful visual essays that explore themes of place, closure and communal loss. His series Vanishing Black Bars & Lounges documents Black bars in New Orleans and beyond, presenting a blend of poetic and forensic storytelling. The New York Times photo essay A Shot Before Last Call humanizes these disappearing cultural spaces through portraits, neon signs, interior shots and stories from patrons. Harris’s photographs serve as architectural elegies. In exhibitions focused on disappearance and civic memory, his framed images often pair with auditory elements such as jazz recordings linked to specific establishments and oral-history booths where visitors can share their own stories of local gathering places. His visual sequences invite viewers to engage with place-based memory through slow observation and listening. My curatorial ideology aligns with Harris’s belief that spaces themselves carry memory and that exhibitions can amplify these memories through collective attention.
Courtesy of the artist
vanessa german
- b. 1976; based in Asheville, North Carolina
vanessa german is a self-taught artist known for her assemblage sculptures, spoken-word performances and community rituals, all of which embody a strong spiritual responsiveness. She grew up in Pittsburgh’s Homewood neighborhood, influenced by a family of textile artists, and experienced both violence and creativity as intertwined threads within her community. Her signature “power figures” combine beads, mirrors, toy guns, text and symbolic relics into resin-coated constructions inspired by Kongo nkisi practices. In 2023, her monumental installation Of Thee We Sing on the National Mall reimagined Marian Anderson’s iconic concert at the Lincoln Memorial through architectural and emotional elements, featuring mirrored cubes, archival crowd photographs and symbolic lilies. In exhibitions I have presented, German’s work bridges activism, poetry, and public ritual, extending art into shared spiritual engagement. Her art engages audiences in ceremony rather than mere observation: exhibition entrances often reflected altar-like spaces, tours included communal poetry sharing, and educational programs featured coauthored workshops for creating memory lanterns inspired by her tonal scripts.
Courtesy of the artist
Want more insights? Join Working Title - our career elevating newsletter and get the future of work delivered weekly.
