Marvin Lowe, printmaker, musician, and educator was born in Brooklyn, New York on May 19, 1922. He attended Brooklyn Technical High School where his focus was on math and physics and during these formative years he learned to play the saxophone and developed a deep affinity for jazz.

During World War II, Lowe play tenor saxophone in Artie Shaw's navy band, as well as in the band on the battleship USS Arkansas. After his discharge from the Navy, he played in the big bands led by Raymond Scott, Woody Herman, and Bobby Sherwood.

Lowe studied musical composition at the Juilliard School and earned his B.A. degree in English literature from Brooklyn College in 1955. While he continued to support his family by playing in jazz clubs, he began to focus on drawing. With the encouragement of Larry Rivers, Lowe applied to the printmaking program at the University of Iowa, where he studied for four years under Mauricio Lasansky and earned his M.F.A. in 1960.

His teaching and professional career as a visual artist began at Berea College in Kentucky and Bucknell University in Pennsylvania. In 1967 he joined the faculty at Indiana University at Bloomington where he teamed with Rudy Pozzatti and later with Wendy Calman to build the Printmaking Workshop, which earned an outstanding reputation for teaching and research. He retired from teaching in 1991.

Lowe received a National Endowment for the Arts Artist’s Fellowship and a Ford Foundation Grant. His prints and mixed media paintings were included in over two hundred national and international exhibitions. Lowe’s work is represented in over eighty permanent museum, university, and corporate collections, including the Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts, the Art Institute of Chicago, the British Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, the Library of Congress, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum,

Marvin Lowe died in Tucson, Arizona on April 28, 2010.

reference: Wendy Calman's tribute to Marvin Lowe.