Water's Edge brings Truman Lowe's sculpture to Washington

Peeled willow, feathers and copper wiring give Truman Lowe’s Feather Canoe an open structure, with space visible inside its outline. Water’s Edge: The Art of Truman Lowe places works like this within the Ho-Chunk artist’s wider practice.

The National Museum of the American Indian scheduled the Washington exhibition through January 18, 2027, making it an available choice during October 2026. In its account of the retrospective, the museum identifies Lowe as a Ho-Chunk artist and frames the exhibition as his first major retrospective.

Willow, water and the artist’s life

The museum's dedicated exhibition record describes nearly 50 sculptures, drawings and paintings, including 28 works from its own collection. The scope is wider than a room of sculpture. A drawing can help you follow a concern with water or space into a medium where physical openings have to be represented on a surface.

The dedicated exhibition record catalogs Feather Canoe as a work from about 1993, made from peeled willow saplings, feathers and copper wire. It also illustrates Ottawa, a 1992 sculpture of pine and peeled willow saplings. The branches establish outlines without filling the volume inside them, giving the sculptures a different presence from a solid carved form.

Lowe grew up near Black River Falls, Wisconsin, in a Ho-Chunk-speaking community. The museum describes his parents' basketmaking and the family's sale of crafts in Wisconsin Dells. That history gives the materials a particular context. Willow or wood is not a generic shortcut for an Indigenous identity; the artist's choices belong to a specific life, education and practice.

The exhibition record lists the Washington run through January 18, 2027, and a later Milwaukee Art Museum presentation from April 9 through August 1, 2027. A Wisconsin connection therefore has a future museum destination as well as a place in the artist's biography. Check that venue's own information before building a later trip around a particular object, since a traveling exhibition record does not guarantee an identical installation.

The museum has sites in Washington and New York. Water's Edge is listed in Washington, so use that location when checking entrances, travel and accessibility. Allow the exhibition its own part of the visit instead of fitting it into the final few minutes before the building closes.

Open forms at very different scales

The exhibition record gives Feather Canoe a length of 74 inches, a little over six feet. Ottawa extends 30 feet. Both use peeled willow, yet those dimensions suggest very different physical encounters: one approaches the length of a person, while the other stretches across a room. A reproduction sized to the same width on a phone can conceal that difference.

Another listed work, Wa-Du-Sheh (Bundle), from 1996, measures 24 by 18 by 3 feet and combines willow with paper, wax and leather. The title and materials bring the language of a gathered bundle into an installation on an architectural scale. Alongside these works, the museum lists a 1996 Untitled in powdered pigment and pastel on paper. The exhibition can therefore follow Lowe's handling of structure and open space through both objects and marks on a flat surface.

His education adds a further context. The museum's staff account records an MFA in sculpture at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1973, where he studied modernist art alongside questions of land and identity. From 2000 through 2008 he was NMAI's curator of contemporary art. The retrospective returns his own practice to an institution where he also presented the work of other artists.

The resulting picture of Lowe includes a trained sculptor, teacher and curator as well as a maker who learned from family basketmaking. Those histories can coexist in the same work. The spare materials should not make the sculpture seem culturally anonymous or technically casual. A willow line can define the edge of a vessel while allowing the surrounding room to remain visible through it.

Correction

October 25, 2026: An earlier version dated Feather Canoe to 2019, following a museum staff article caption. The dedicated exhibition record dates it to about 1993; the article now follows that record.