Detroit Art Review

Janet Crane-Conant, pictured in front of Peter Voulkos’ Plate, loaned the works she inherited from her parents that comprise A View of Earth: The Architect’s Eye – Select Ceramic Art from the Anne and George Crane Collection, on view at Ferndale’s Paul Kotula Projects through January 11. Photo: Jeff Cancelosi.

A remarkable collection of modern and contemporary ceramics, A View of Earth: The Architect’s Eye, will be at Paul Kotula Projects in Ferndale through January 11. The works, which many museums would kill for, were collected by Anne and George Crane, Grosse Pointers, who were, respectively, prominent modernist architects and the owners of a construction company.

Significant names are scattered throughout this 29-artist group show, including Kresge Eminent Artist Marie Woo, the former head of Cranbrook Ceramics, Jun Kaneko, UC Berkeley’s Jim Melcher, and Kurt Weiser, a longtime professor at Arizona State University.

A designer of elegant contemporary residences, among other structures, Anne (Krebs) Crane was born in 1924, and made it in a male-dominated profession that at the time was quite hostile to women. After graduating from the University of Illinois School of Architecture, Crane came to Detroit to study with Eliel Saarinen, but her timing was unfortunate. He died just before she was to start at Cranbrook. All the same, Crane’s work caught the eye of local architects, including Minoru Yamasaki, with whom she collaborated for a number of years before launching her own firm with a partner, Krebs and Fader.

Gallery owner Paul Kotula, a ceramicist and art professor at Michigan State University, knew Crane well, and calls her “a delightful person, both kind and generous, but strong too,” which might help account for her success in her chosen profession. Crane also served for many years as a board member at Pewabic Pottery and from 1993 to 1996 as president, where she refined her appreciation for ceramics – acquiring the discerning eye that’s evident throughout this engaging exhibition.

Toshiko Takaezu, Form #26, Ceramic with rattle, 7 x 5.5 inches, 1989. Photo: PD Rearick.

Anyone’s who already taken in Toshiko Takaezu: Worlds Within at Cranbrook Art Museum (up through January 12), will enjoy a jolt of recognition on spotting this diminutive “closed vessel,” emblematic of the radical work by this Cranbrook Academy of Art graduate who was a longtime Princeton University art professor. Just seven inches tall, this vessel with the slight indentation at its waist – another Takaezu hallmark – packs a wallop, in large part because of its ravishing blue. The word Kotula uses is “luscious.” He says, “It’s a little different from the forms at Cranbrook,” which have more deliberate markings on them. “This is just a very quiet landscape. In addition, the indentation gives a certain sort of softness that Toshiko was embracing. And I know for Anne Crane,” he adds, “blue was one of her favorite colors.”

Otto Natzler, Cube with Fragmented Top, Ceramic, 8.3 x 6.6 x 6.5 inches, 1981. Photo: PD Rearick.

You could almost get whiplash moving from Takaezu’s vessel to Otto Natzler’s Cube with a Fragmented Top, which reads more like brutalist architecture than anything that’s made of kiln-fired clay. But you can totally see why a modernist architect like Crane might be drawn to such an unexpected ceramic form. An Austrian who fled Vienna six months after Nazi Germany annexed the country in 1938, Natzler and his wife and artistic collaborator Gertrud settled in Los Angeles, where their ceramics studio became one of the most influential on the West Coast. They had an intriguing division of labor: Gertrud threw the vessels, while Otto was known for his glazes. And with Cube, you readily see why.

Kotula points out that it’s fired with an unusual, high iron-content glaze. “it’s glorious,” he says. “It’s like steel, and keeps changing with light as you look at it.” Interestingly, he adds that after Gertrud died in 1971, Otto never threw another pot. Everything thereafter, like Cube, above, was made with slabs of clay.

Mary Roehm, Teapot, Wood-fired porcelain, reed handle; 11 x 11 x 10 inches, 1983. Photo courtesy of Paul Kotula Projects.

Other-worldly and quite marvelous is Mary Roehm’s Teapot, a composition that manages to look vaguely East Asian and futuristic at the same time. By comparison with the works above, this piece nicely demonstrates the expressive properties of unglazed porcelain. Known for her paper-thin wheel thrown or cast porcelain vessels, Roehm typically works without glaze so the effects of her wood-firing will be most obvious, and is known for manipulating her vessels, often tearing the edges or twisting them.

The artist got her MFA at the School for American Crafts at the Rochester Institute of Technology in New York. From 1987-1991, Roehm was executive director of Detroit’s Pewabic Pottery and has multiple works at the Detroit Institute of Arts.

Nicholos Homoky, Untitled, Porcelain, 4 x 4.5 inches, ca. 1982. Photo: PD Rearick.

Also exploiting the aesthetic possibilities of unglazed porcelain is Nicholas Homoky’s vessel, Untitled, an elegant exercise in milky white clay with rings of black. With its astonishingly smooth surface, the piece makes for an interesting contrast with Roehm’s Teapot, and its rougher, more-textured appearance. The Hungarian-born Homoky was educated at Bristol Polytechnic in England, where he still resides, and has work at both the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. “He’s known for this very simple, minimalist take on vessels,” Kotula says, noting that the rings here are actually inlaid black clay. “It is,” he adds, “just a beautiful piece.”

Marilyn Levine, White Ice, Mixed media, 6.25 x 8.5 x 4 inches, 1995. Photo: PD Rearick

Finally, it’s difficult to regard Marilyn Levine’s White Ice – a vessel dressed up like a shoe — without smiling. It will come as no surprise, then, to learn that collector Anne Crane, according to Kotula, had a great sense of humor. Levine, a Canadian artist who ultimately landed in northern California, participated in the funk-art movement of the 1960s and 70s, and became a master of what you could call trompe l’oeil ceramics. She was particularly famous for clay creations you’d swear were leather bags or jackets. Says Kotula, “She could render them to the point where they looked super-realistic” — a nice exercise in the pleasingly deceptive powers of art.

Installation image, A View of Earth, The Architect’s Eye, Paul Kotula Projects, 1.2025

A View of Earth: The Architect’s Eye—Select Ceramic Art from the Anne and George Crane Collection will be on display at Paul Kotula Projects through January 11, 2025.

Peter Williams @ David Klein Gallery

By K.A. Letts

On December 10, 2024

In Paintings

Peter Williams, Installation, David Klein Gallery Detroit, Nov. 2-December 21, photo courtesy of David Klein Gallery

As I entered the David Klein Gallery in Detroit this December, the intense face of an African American man confronted me from the middle distance of an enormous painting. Cathedral, by Peter Williams, from the artist’s series “Bent Word,” is now on view along with a dozen of his late masterpieces until December 21. Executed near the time of his death in 2021, the composition is crowded with lively figures, exuberant patterns, and minivans traveling inexplicably through outer space. The enigmatic central figure (possibly Williams himself?) dressed in astronaut’s gear (or are they pajamas?) floats, weightless, in a topsy-turvy environment. Silent behind his helmet, is he waving hello? Or goodbye? Or both? The brilliant white areas of primed canvas recurring throughout the composition create the impression that the painting is starting to shatter into brilliantly colored pieces.

Peter Williams, Cathedral, 2019, oil and graphite on canvas, 72” x 96” All photos by K.A. Letts unless otherwise noted.

Williams’s artworks throughout the exhibition are full of references to pop culture yet grounded in the artist’s deep understanding of Western art history. He created his own unique style by mixing pop culture imagery, geometric abstraction, pointillism, and pattern painting with his studies of Goya, Kandinsky, and Klee. Robert Colescott’s paintings, with figures from art history like St. Sebastian and Picasso’s demoiselles bumping up against pinup girls and Aunt Jemima, also come to mind. In a 2020 interview with the Artists’ Legacy Foundation, Williams explained, “Most people don’t have any kind of dialogue with the work of 500 years ago or even 100 years ago. I’m trying to talk in the language that’s available to most people. We live in a comic universe right now.”

Peter Williams, 2. As the Birds Fly, Another Planet, 2019, oil and graphite on canvas, 72” x 96”

Afrofuturist narratives make up an important part of Williams’s cosmology, particularly in the later paintings. The “Bent Word” series tells stories of imaginary African American colonists (and a character called “the N Word”) who depart earth, escaping environmental catastrophe. In his 2019 painting As the Birds Fly, Another Planet, Williams imagines a new world, strange yet attractively pastoral, where earth’s birds join aliens in paradisical leisure. A lone Black basketball player at the upper edge of the painting seems headed for the planet’s surface.

Peter Williams, Leon Spinks’ Salvation, 2020-2021, oil on canvas, 60” x 72”

Mortality was clearly on Williams’s mind when he painted Leon Spinks’ Salvation in 2020-2021. The world -famous boxer died in February 2021 after a long illness, only a few months before Williams was to follow him. The central, haloed figure in celestial blue seems headed upward, with crosses that might be stars anchoring the astral space. Two white vans (ambulances?) with discarded body parts float, left and right, over the blue planet below. An appalled astronaut mouthing the words “holy shit” expresses, perhaps, the stunned reaction we all share when contemplating mortality. The colorful but thinly painted imagery suggests, once again, the conditional quality of fugitive human existence. A smaller canvas on a similar theme, Leon Spinks’s Taxi, is devoid of figures, focusing instead on cosmic cars leaving earth’s gravity.

Peter Williams, Leon Spinks’s Taxi, 2021, oil on canvas, 31” x 40

NYACK, painted in 2013, makes a helpful comparison to the later work. The comic figures are arranged in a kind of rightward-facing parade, earthbound. The organizing compositional elements are vertical. But a brown figure moves right to left below, missing limbs but still swimming resolutely through the water.

Peter Williams, NYACK, 2013, oil on canvas, 60” x 132” (diptych)

Williams died in Wilmington, Delaware on August 19, 2021. He had recently retired as a senior professor in the Fine Arts Department at the University of Delaware. But before that, he had been an associate professor for 17 years at Detroit’s Wayne State University. Detroit-based Rotland Press published a monograph in 2016 entitled “The N-Word: Paintings by Peter Williams,” which included an interview between Williams and Detroit poet and playwright Bill Harris. A major exhibition of Williams’s work, “Black Exodus,” opened at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit in January of 2021, only a few months before his death, and featured a few of the paintings now on display at David Klein Gallery.

Peter Williams, Peter and Mike, 2019, oil and graphite on canvas, 60” x 48”

Born in Suffern, N.Y. in 1952, Williams grew up in Nyack, N.Y., where he had his first solo exhibition at the age of 17. He earned a B.F.A. from Minneapolis College of Art and Design in 1975, followed by an M.F.A. from Maryland Institute (College of Fine Art) in 1987. A life-altering car accident while Williams was in New Mexico as a young man resulted in lifelong disability. He lost his right leg and required crutches for the rest of his life.

Peter Williams’s paintings are housed in the permanent collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among many others. In 2020, he received the Artists’ Legacy Foundation Award, followed a few months later with a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Williams’s paintings defy categorization as they settle into their place in contemporary art history. They are funny, wild, sometimes terrifying, but always deeply human, combining abstraction, figuration, storytelling and racial advocacy in a persuasive worldview that takes into account not only the world as it is, but our future as it could become.

Peter Williams @ David Klein Gallery, November 2-December 21, 2024

By Ron Scott

On December 3, 2024

In Uncategorized

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How We Make the Planet Move: The Detroit Collection Part I @ Cranbrook Art Museum

By Michael Hodges

On November 29, 2024

In Assemblage / Collage, Ceramic, Furniture, Installation, Mixed Media, Paintings, Textile

An installation photo of How We Make the Planet Move: The Detroit Collection Part 1 at Cranbrook Art Museum through March 2, 2025 (Courtesy Cranbrook Museum of Art, PD Rearick; subsequent photos by Detroit Art Review).

There was a time, decades ago, when Cranbrook held itself at a careful remove from the city of Detroit, only 18 miles distant, but light years away. Anne Morrow Lindbergh, who spent two happy years in the early forties at the Academy of Art while Charles helped Henry Ford convert the Willow Run plant from auto to bomber production, called it “the Ivory Tower sitting on the outside of the volcano of Detroit.”

In recent years, that relationship changed dramatically – a shift epitomized by the current exhibition, How We Make the Planet Move: The Detroit Collection I, at Cranbrook Art Museum through March 2. The museum has been energetically acquiring art by contemporary Detroit artists, and since 2014 has amassed over 300 works, of which 30-odd are currently on display. The show includes young artists like Sherri Bryant and Matthew Angelo Harrison, as well as the late, beloved Gilda Snowden, and Cass Corridor greats Michael Luchs, Nancy Mitchnick and Gordon Newton. “This was a substantial gear shift in our focus,” said chief curator Laura Mott, “to be a storyteller of Detroit art, and I think that’s an important role.”

Charles McGee, Play Patterns II, Fabrics, paper, the artist’s hair, paint and enamel on Dibond attached to wood frame, 120 x 240 inches, 2011.

Their biggest acquisition, both in price and size, was the late Charles McGee’s Play Patterns II from 2011, a dazzling, colorful canvas starring spindly, hieroglyph-like figures that’s a close cousin to the artist’s 1984 Noah’s Ark: Genesis at the Detroit Institute of Arts.

Over an 80-year career, McGee – named the Kresge Foundation’s first Eminent Artist in 2008 – produced a mountain of work ranging from the severely geometric to idiosyncratic figurative portraits and highly stylized abstractions, both in painting and sculpture, that formed much of his later work. A good example of the latter is the black-and-white United We Stand outside the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History. McGee died in 2021 at 96.

Joshua Rainer, The Flying Dream, Oil on canvas, 46 x 102 inches, 2023.

Mott says she first included a painting by Joshua Rainer at the Art Museum in Skilled Labor: Black Realism in Detroit, which closed last March, without knowing that he was an Art Academy student. Indeed, he’s the first enrolled student to appear in a non-student exhibition at the museum. Mott says artist Mario Moore, who co-curated Skilled Labor with her, “calls Rainer ’the human printer’ because his skill level is insane,” noting that the portrait of his grandmother in Skilled Labor was often mistaken for a photograph.

Rainer’s piece in Detroit Collection is The Flying Dream. It’s less photo-realistic and moodier, an evocatively colored work in grayish pinks and dull orange, in which a body – presumably the artist – is suspended horizontally in mid-air, face down. The unexpected hues give it an undeniable dream-like quality, an image halfway between believable and hallucinatory. But in ways that are hard to explain, the painting’s dominant impression is one of a profound, mesmerizing stillness.

Ed Fraga, 229 Gratiot, 35 x 35 x 3 inches, 1986.

Ed Fraga, a 2009 Kresge Artist Fellow, has produced a rich oeuvre that mostly wanders the subconscious, delving both into the psychological and the spiritual, with results that are enigmatic yet oddly beguiling. In considering the Wayne State University grad’s relationship to his audience, Steve Panton in Essay’d speculated that, “Perhaps at times it is closer to the artist as magician, encouraging the viewer to suspend disbelief, and see more mystery in the world.”

“Mysterious” is certainly the word for 229 Gratiot, a collection of small portraits a bit like a whimsical two-dimensional closet of curiosities. They range from an apparent saint whose halo divides into concentric circles, a luminous female fetus floating on an azure square, a palm bearing stigmata, and a tiny cameo of the kneeling Land-o-Lakes butter maiden. Typical of much of Fraga’s work, it’s a bit dizzying and elusive but an awful lot of fun to study.

Jack Craig, Molded Carpet Chair, Green; Molded carpet, wood, fabric; 32 x 22.5 x 21 inches, 2024.

Leaping genres, one creative endeavor the Academy of Art has always been known for is chair design, starting with Eero Saarinen and Charles Eames’ molded plywood chairs that took first place for seating in the 1941 Organic Design for Home Furnishings competition at the Museum of Modern Art. Along with other Academy designers of that era like Ralph Rapson, Florence Knoll and Harry Weese, Cranbrook’s output revolutionized the look of the American home and office, and made U.S. modernist design a world leader.

Continuing that grand tradition, but giving it a more artsy, less functional, spin is Jack Craig’s Molded Carpet Chair, Green, which was also exhibited at the David Klein Gallery in a solo show that closed in October, and included a number of other phantasmagorical pieces. Mott notes that the early Eames and Saarinen works went into commercial production, but with recent Academy alumni like Craig and Chris Schanck, “you see more of an art design. Molded Carpet Chair is not going into production,” she said. “These are exquisitely made art objects that suggest function,” rather than exhibiting it. In the case of Molded Carpet Chair, the result is a lush object that feels more organic than structural, with all sorts of exuberant, textured excrescences sprouting on it.

A companion show on the Art Museum’s first floor is Toshiko Takaezu: Worlds Within, which runs until January 12, 2025. One of the world’s most-celebrated ceramicists, Takaezu died in 2011 and had a most-astonishing biography. Born into an impoverished Japanese immigrant family on a remote part of Maui, Takaezu was the sixth of 11 children and had to quit school at 15 to work as a housekeeper in Honolulu to help support her family. But luck was on her side – when the family left during World War II, she got a job at the Hawaiian Potters Guild. Ultimately, she studied ceramics part-time at the University of Hawaii at Manoa under Claude Horan, whom Takaezu called the father of Hawaiian ceramics.

Toshiko Takaezu, Light, Porcelain, 1970.

The turning point in Takaezu’s life came when she saw pieces by Maija Grotell, who was the head of ceramics at the Academy of Art. Never having traveled to the mainland, Takaezu made her way to Michigan, applied to Cranbrook, and got in. That not only supercharged and refined her touch with clay, but also started her on an academic path that landed her eventually at Princeton University, where she was a longtime professor and inspiration to generations of ceramicists.

Takaezu’s artistic genius spanned numerous genres. She not only worked in ceramics, but also weaving, painting, bronze casting and printmaking, displaying remarkable finesse in each. Part of the pleasure of this career retrospective, organized by The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum in New York, is that there are examples from all these various disciplines on display.

But most remarkable are her signature creations, the “closed vessels,” like Light in the image above — essentially large pots that suggest a mouth or opening at the top but, on examination, turn out not to be there. This ability to both suggest a vessel while at the same time denying it is part of what gives the artist’s work its profundity. These pieces are, as the exhibition’s biographical panel notes, “abstract paintings in the round.”

Toshiko Takaezu, Gaea (Earth Mother), Stoneware, 1979-90.

How We Make the Planet Move: The Detroit Collection Part 1 – is at Cranbrook Art Museum through March 2, 2025. Toshiko Takaezu: Worlds Within will be up through January 12, 2025.

Heloisa Promfret @ N’Namdi Center for the Arts

By Ron Scott

On November 22, 2024

In Ceramic, Drawing, Installation, Paintings, Sculpture

Heloisa Pomfret, Installation image, and image of the artist in a black dress. All images courtesy of DAR

On November 1, 2024, the George N’Namdi Gallery opened a solo exhibition, “The Brain,” by Brazilian-American artist Heloisa Promfret. This collection of 45 artworks builds on her earlier work, including abstract paintings using the palimpsest process, where layers of paint are scratched into the surface, revealing further colors beneath. Despite lacking a specific context in contemporary art history, Pomfret’s work combines mysterious marks, multiple colors, and shapes executed on burlap, paper, and ceramic objects.

Helosia Pomfret, Untitled #7, Diptych 34 x 36″ 2024

Diptych, Untitled #7, displays a multicolored, organic, abstract composition in which the canvas is cut, re-arranged, and re-stitched. She says, “My work involves the transformation first from the idea of an impulse to scientific representation and measurement, and second, from scientific representation back to abstracted mark-making, color, texture, and re-purposed and re-constructed materials.” These plant-like shapes illustrate a new environment for the viewer to ponder.

Helosia Pomfret, Glimpse Series, #2, Oil on Stitched Canvas, 38 x 53″. 2024

In the painting Untitled #2, the artist confronts her audience with a wall of movement that contrasts these vertical panels against a sea of shapes and colors moving from right to left in the background. The small, dark shapes feel like microbes swimming over the scratched surfaces. It is a primitive dance, as energy, order, and chaos co-occur during the movement concert. Raised in Brazil and later relocated to Detroit for her study of art, one wonders if something in her South American DNA makes these compositions so unusually new and fresh.

Heloise Pomfret, Untitled # 6, Glimpse Series, 36×34″ 2024

The series of Mandala-like circular paintings located in the gallery provides a contrast to the horizontal compositions and flirts with the idea of scientific explosions on the planet. They are an entirely different kind of sensibility that occupies the artist’s conceptions, especially when making the transition from rectangle to circle.

She says in her statement, “My work involves the transformation first from the idea of an impulse to scientific representation and measurement, and second, from scientific representation back to abstracted mark-making, color, texture and re-purposed using re-constructed materials.” There is a mobile and versatile side of Heloise Pomfret’s work in the exhibition when you consider the paintings, the structures, and the ceramics.

Heloise Pomfret, Construction # 8, Burlap, oil, and Bamboo, 25 x 12″. 2024

In Bamboo, the relief construction uses oil to create a dark vertical grid that feels like something produced by native people of South America. Stitched onto burlap, it suggests some spiritual practice to this viewer. She says, “The philosophy of my work is about the energy, order, and chaos that occurs during psychological or physical stress, which serves as theoretical support to the mark-making and constructs of my work. The surface is often an analogy to the body and memory, in which experience occurs and is transformed.”

Heloise Pomfret, Clarity Series, Stoneware, 6 Pieces, 9×5″, 2023

It is not often that an artist whose primary work is two-dimensional will make drawings, prints, or photographs, but even less frequently will they create a ceramic body of work. Yet, in this exhibition, Heloisa Pomfret presents a series of 15 ceramic objects. Most are wall reliefs; she chooses stoneware with a black glaze to express her ideas. In the Clarity series, she scratches her motifs into the glaze, in keeping with the other bodies of work she has created for this exhibition.

Heloise Pomfret, Installation, small circular objects on plywood.

The work in this exhibition reflects the varied mediums and materials that Pomfret employs to explore her personal psychology in paintings, installations, and ceramic objects. A large piece of plywood displayed in the center of the gallery demonstrates yet another approach, reflecting the diversity of the artist’s aesthetic means. These circular stitched and scratched smaller pieces reflect the translation of her emotional impulses into physical form, “The Brain” is a delightful and multifarious collection of original objects, literally unlike anything this writer has seen.

Heloisa Pomfret is a Brazilian-American interdisciplinary visual artist. She earned an M.A. and an M.F.A in Painting/Drawing from Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan. She also earned a bachelor’s degree in journalism from Casper Libero College in Sao Paulo, Brazil.

Detroit Art Review

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A View of Earth: The Architect’s Eye @ Paul Kotula Projects

A View of Earth: The Architect’s Eye—Select Ceramic Art from the Anne and George Crane Collection will be on display at Paul Kotula Projects through January 11, 2025.

Peter Williams @ David Klein Gallery

Peter Williams @ David Klein Gallery, November 2-December 21, 2024