This book was published by North Park University in conjunction with an exhibition by the same title at the Visual Arts Center of the Washington Pavilion in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. Both the exhibition and the book are retrospective in nature, presenting art by Tim Lowly from the last 27 years, focusing on work related to a single subject: Tim's daughter Temma. As a newborn infant, Temma had a cardiac arrest, and the ensuing brain damage rendered her life as one on the margins of "normal" human existence. To some, such a life might appear limited in significance, but this body of work by Tim Lowly suggests otherwise.
This art is multifarious in conceptual intent, and is in conversation with multiple traditions of art while engaging ideas as diverse as painting, identity, beauty, power, being, attentiveness, sight, blindness, time, presence, absence, touch, representation, spirituality, collaboration, and community. In that spirit, the book occasioned a gathering of heterogeneous approaches to writing about art.
- Author and pastor Sherrie Lowly, Temma's mother, mined her journals to offer intimate glimpses of life with Temma.
- Author Karen Halvorsen Schreck presents a new work of fiction, as well as a previously published essay about a single painting.
- Art historian Henry Luttikhuizen focuses on the role of love in Tim Lowly's representation of Temma and contextualizes the work in relation to art historical precedent.
- Artist and disability scholar Riva Lehrer contributes an essay exploring the relationship between beauty, perception and disability.
- Artist and professor Kelly VanderBrug focuses on two works by Tim Lowly in a reflective essay suggesting a theory of the poetic in painting.
- Artist, scholar and project editor for the book Kevin Hamilton engages Tim Lowly in a peripatetic conversation on painting, time, epistemology, and living with others.
"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.