Artist Talk: Erik Paul Howard in Conversation
Thursday, September 17, 2026, at 5:30 p.m.
Marshall M. Fredericks Sculpture Museum
Saginaw Valley State University
Join photographer Erik Paul Howard for a conversation about how a photographic body of work is shaped across 20 years through relationships, accumulated images, memory, collaboration, editing, printing, and the demands of finally making an exhibition.
Moderated by SVSU Professor of Art Shaun Bangert, the conversation will center Howard’s development of The Lowriders: From Detroit to L.A. and Back, from the beginning as an evolving photographic archive to its current life as an exhibition.
SVSU alum Kathy Perez stands between two lowriders during her quinceañera celebration. St. Thomas Aquinas Church, Detroit, MI (2013)
Howard will be joined by three guests whose relationships to the work offer distinct ways into its story: Kathy Perez, who grew up lowriding, is an SVSU alum, and first brought Howard to the Marshall M. Fredericks Sculpture Museum 10 years ago; her father, Abel Perez, a lowrider with the Detroit chapter of GoodTimes Car Club; and Gabriela Baginski of Image Works, who worked closely with Howard to print the exhibition.
Together, they will consider how photographs gather meaning through lived experience and collaboration, and how decisions about sequence, scale, materials, and space transformed the project once it entered the museum.