Karen Comer Lowe is a curator first and foremost. She’ll tell you so directly. After more than 25 years championing artists of the Black diaspora, she holds relationships with galleries, museums, collectors and auction houses that make her a trusted guide for collectors entering those spaces. But the curatorial instinct comes before the advisory work. As a curator, she centers the art and the artists. As an adviser, she centers the client.
“Artists of the Black diaspora continuously need support and exposure,” Lowe said. “In this current climate of cultural erasure, it is vital to proactively uplift and elevate the critical conversations surrounding Black art.”
Lowe came to the work through decades of institutional practice, building ties along the way with artists including Ming Smith, Hank Willis Thomas, Rashid Johnson and Radcliffe Bailey. She served as the first Guest Curator of the Atlanta Art Fair, bringing a regionally focused but globally engaged vision to its curatorial framework. In 2025, she curated “We Say What Black This Is” at the Spelman College Museum of Fine Art, an exhibition built around MacArthur Award-winning artist Amanda Williams‘s abstract paintings and shaped in part by students from Spelman, Morehouse College and Clark Atlanta University. This fall, Lowe has an exhibition opening at the Museum of Contemporary Art Arlington.
But the project she’s most focused on right now isn’t a gallery show. It’s the Red Clay Art Circle, a private membership community she launched for emerging and established collectors who want to deepen their relationship with Black contemporary art. “I would suggest not navigating this alone,” she said. “This is an unregulated market, and many gallerists and artists aren’t trained in the arts. There is intrinsic value in community.”
What the market tells Lowe
Lowe occupies a rare vantage point. She moves between museum walls and private homes, between auction houses and art fairs, between Atlanta and the global circuit. From that position, she sees a tightening art market.
“Collectors are more cautious due to the current economy,” she said. “Major galleries are closing, or shifting their modes of operation. This trickles down to the collectors.”
Atlanta collectors, she noted, have always been strategic about how they build collections. The current climate makes them more careful still. Lowe sees a silver lining in that caution — this moment, she said, is strengthening the bond between collectors and the artists they believe in.
What Atlanta lacks, in Lowe’s view, is not collectors or artists. It’s infrastructure. “For a city this size, we should have at least three museums comparable to the High Museum of Art,” she said. Other cities run multiple major institutions that bring in work from around the world and inform collectors about what’s happening globally. “There should be more investment from the city and state,” she said, “not for programs, but for arts institutions.”
Who she’s watching
Ask Lowe which Atlanta artists collectors should be paying attention to and she names four: Michi Meko, Sheila Pree Bright, Shanequa Gay and Paul Stephen Benjamin. She also noted that the list is longer than that and that some of Atlanta’s most interesting artists aren’t connected to the local scene, while others cycle through on residencies such as the Pullman Yards Artist Residency and the Mildred Thompson Legacy Project’s Artist & Curatorial Residency program.
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Lowe pays close attention to the next generation coming through programs like the AUC Art Collective, where she has taught. What strikes her most is access. “They can open their phones and have access to the top curators, artists and tastemakers of the arts,” she said. “This builds broader awareness of what is happening in the global contemporary arts ecosystem.”
The long view
For now, Lowe is building out the Red Clay Art Circle and preparing for her fall exhibition. “There is intrinsic value in community,” she said. The work of elevating Black art, she has made clear, is never finished — it just changes shape.
