Opening social media one morning last week I saw two posts, one above the other. Two deaths. One was the artist, and a friend, Heather Lowe. The other was Richard Lloyd, a rock guitarist most notable for playing lead in the band Television.
First the heart feels, then the brain analyzes. When I thought about it, I encountered both of these artistic geniuses in the house of mystery. Richard Lloyd created the impossible sonic solos on “Marquee Moon”. I had read so much about the album, seen it cited as an influence in just about every interview with bands I liked, and yet, it was never played anywhere. Back then you just had to gamble and buy the vinyl. And so one day I did. And that album was like being let into an amazing, unsolvable puzzle of what beauty was, of things beyond the verbal, the cognitive, the routine. I played it at least twice a day for a month and rarely a month goes by to this day forty years later that I don’t squeeze in a listen to it. And it is still a mystery, a familiar one but no less magic.
Heather Lowe was, on first encounter back in the 1990s, a mysterious pixie. She made the rounds in the art world here with her life partner, a painfully talented poet named C. Mulrooney. This man left quips dressed up as verse in my mailbox at the regular, lambasting institutions and reveling in art when it satisfied his brutally impossible standards. This is all pre-internet, when he wasn’t mailing meticulously-typed screeds, he literally phoned at odd hours and recited diatribes as poems on my answering machine and I discovered he did it to many publications (I was publishing an art magazine at the time and was on his list). Event organizers too received his answering machine blurts. On top of this he was intensely private. He would hang up rather than chat, he was calling to be recorded. Nobody knew what he looked like. I agreed to publish his writing and, merely to satisfy my own curiosity, insisted on an author photo. He responded with a picture of a reflection of a man standing twenty feet away from a door with a small window at eye level with a reflection of a silhouette of a man (twenty more feet away) taking a photo.
I bring him up in such details because Heather Lowe was in love with him. She would say hello to me when crossing paths at a gallery opening, always full of joy and quick compliments. Meanwhile he would have already been on his way to the car. I never met him but was cognizant of his pleasant, friendly companion. They collaborated on a zine, LOS, with her doing the cover art and he writing nine-word poems with ten-word titles, just idiosyncratic genius while her art was always concerned with stereoscopic possibilities, two things together to be seen (by lenses or some other technology) as one floating 3-D image.
Well he sadly passed, too young of course. But she continued on a creative path, speaking of him often. It was her time now. She had the space to invest in other relationships and made many friends in the art scene around Los Angeles. Her passion for the reality of making illusions found a great outlet in lenticulars, those plastic structures that change a scene based on the slightest motion of the object or viewer. She had many new acquaintances but whenever we talked, Mulrooney was always near. She still loved him. Those Lenticulars and stereoscopes were her meditations on two impossibly distinct existences being one, inseparable, a quagmire simultaneously hopelessly unanswered yet the greatest manifestation of hope for all that could be possible – true art giving endlessly because there is no final resolution. The mutability of Richard’s string-plucking, of Christopher’s minimalist screeds, of Heather’s lenticulars is the manifestation of what art is at its eternal best… Infinity.
Without knowing if Heather even knew about this still obscure New York Band of Richard Lloyd’s, I know she now knows the mystery of what is beyond the material world, is reunited with C and they surely are being serenaded in the fog of what comes next by the best.
JUST THE FACTS:
Artist Heather Lowe passed away at her home in L.A.’s Koreatown from a heart attack on November 4, 2026. She was born in Santa Monica on May 13, 1955. She exhibited widely and prolifically over the past thirty years and curated eight group exhibitions around Southern California in the past twelve years. Her work emphasized concepts of stereoscopic imagery and lenticular constructions, standing out in an era where every artist strove to be seen as unique. Her painting practice was marked by an involved, majestic painterly discipline that transformed her small scale into giant portals of imagery. She didn’t have a bad word to say about anyone and was held in fond regards by all who knew her.
