Concrete Cathedral (Prototype #1), 2022
601Artspace, NYC

Concrete Cathedral is the first in a series of sculptures inspired by an anecdote Howe heard from Edi Rama, an artist who is also the Prime Minister of Albania. At a talk hosted at the Marion Goodman gallery in 2016, Rama talked about growing up under an extreme communist government that outlawed religion and actively persecuted practitioners. He described churches that were covered in concrete and turned into movie theaters and basketball courts. Howe turns this borrowed recollection into a meditation on physical erasure and architectural repurposing, two long-standing gestures of authoritarian rule. Borrowing from the structural paradigm of the Fabergé egg, a concrete box is cranked open to reveal a cathedral which in turn opens to reveal a pristine basketball court.