Seen/Scene @ The Shepherd

On November 5, 2025

Installation, Seen/Scene, Installation, curated by Nick Cave and Laura Mott, The Shepherd. Amalgam (inflate), virtual sculpture by Nick Cave in right foreground, photo courtesy of the Shepherd

For those of us who missed the landmark city-wide event “Here Hear” in 2015, the original creators have staged an exhibition at the Shepherd in 2025 that is both an anniversary and a debut. In the newly opened exhibition “Seen/Scene,” Nick Cave, master of the kinetic wearable and Laura Mott, Chief Curator of the Cranbrook Art Museum, celebrate the ten-year anniversary of a seven-months-long art fest that created a living portrait of the city in motion and in performance. Seen/Scene revisits some of the same themes, while also re-examining Detroit’s identity, present and future, with work from artists (many of them with Detroit connections) from the collection of Jennifer Gilbert.

The human figure is the focus of “Seen/Scene” and through that lens we examine the act of looking and seeing itself. Reflective and refractive surfaces abound, adding conceptual complexity and introducing questions of perception and distortion. We, the audience, are challenged to observe the community and our neighbors as we have changed over the previous decade, with particular attention to the Little Village neighborhood surrounding the newly opened Shepherd.

Akea Brionne, Last Communion, 2023, jacquard textile, rhinestones, thread and poly-fil, photo courtesy of The Shepherd

Just inside the front door of the gallery, Akea Brionne’s fiber piece Last Communion succinctly describes the parameters set by the curators. A solitary bedazzled figure, masked, looks sidelong out of the picture frame, flanked by two walls that angle onto a surreal beach. On the right side, a framed face emerges, and three more framed selves recede into the distance, where the silhouette of the foreground figure is repeated. On the left, we see that same figure through an open window. The self and the process of looking and seeing, in both the optical and spiritual sense, are thus neatly encompassed.

Barkley Hendricks, Yocks, 1975, acrylic on canvas, photo courtesy of the Shepherd

Jammie Holmes, Wearing Fur Coats in America, 2021, acrylic and oil pastel on canvas, photo courtesy of The Shepherd

Mario Moore, It Can All Be So Fleeting, 2024, oil on linen, photo courtesy of The Shepherd

In the first gallery, three large paintings pinpoint the psychological states of African American men past and present. Yocks a 1975 painting by Barkley Hendricks, shows a pair of well-dressed men self-presenting as cool and confident against a blank white background. We are only allowed to know what they choose to tell us. By contrast, the man in the adjacent 2021 painting Wearing Fur Coats in America, by Jammie Holmes, shows the subject set in a domestic scene that clearly shows him within his cultural milieu, and describes his social position. His direct gaze is matter-of fact, without the posturing of the subjects in Yocks.

An adjacent self-portrait by Mario Moore projects the anxiety of the newly successful. Elegantly dressed but uneasy, the artist gazes at the viewer from a gallery where he should feel at home. But the title of the painting describes his apprehension: It Can All Be So Fleeting. As if to drive home his point, Moore has inserted, on the gallery wall behind the subject, an image of a painting similar to George Bellows’ lithograph The White Hope(1921), in which Jack Johnson, the first Black American world heavyweight champion defeated a white opponent, James K. Jeffries. The 1910 event precipitated race riots in over 50 American cities.

Rashid Johnson, Untitled Anxious Audience, 2018, ceramic tile, black soap and wax, photo courtesy of The Shepherd

Across the room, Rashid Johnson’s 2018 white ceramic tile and black soap piece Untitled Anxious Audience (2018), augments the uncertain atmosphere. Fifteen goggle-eyed gargoyles, teeth clenched, telegraph scratchy comic panic.

Kerry James Marshall, Untitled (Painter), 2010, acrylic on pvc panel, photo: K.A. Letts

In Gallery 2, reclining figures sprawl across the walls and engage in dialog with each other, starting with Untitled (Painter) by Kerry James Marshall. As the ebony-toned, camo-clad subject peers out from the left side of the picture, the painted-by-numbers double on the right mirrors the shadowed entity in a pastel-pink decorative reflection. Mickeline Thomas’s Clarivel #5 is created by combining collaged modes of image production: photographic screen printing and painting, decorated with glittering strings of rhinestones. The self-possessed and stylish woman confronts us in a head-on direct gaze. Curator Laura Mott aptly describes the painting as a time-honored art historical trope rendered in “a 1970’s funk and soul aesthetic.” Tom Wesselmann’s Great American Nude #9 (1961) operates within the same aesthetic meme but strips the identity of the reclining female figure down to its constituent parts: an anonymous collection of shapes, lines and colors, visually appealing but devoid of identity.

Mickelene Thomas, Clarivel #5, 2023, rhinestones, acrylic and oil paint on canvas mounted on wood panel, photo K.A. Letts

Tom Wesselman, Great American Nude #9, 1961, oil, fabric and painted paper on collage board, photo K.A. Letts

The formerly sacred interior of the church’s nave, still richly adorned with stained glass, mosaic and gilded marble, allows color and pattern ample interplay with the art installed there. Gold and green checkerboard patterned Pewabic tiles surround and complement the black and white beading of Jeffrey Gibson’s punching bag sculpture Love is the Drug, its heart shaped charms recalling religious ex votos. The richly colored church windows resonate beautifully with the intricate colored metal filigree and delicate floral patterns of Nick Cave’s wall-hung Grapht, and on the altar, a 2011 neon text artwork by Anthony James brightly proclaims HEAVEN.

Jeffrey Gibson, Love is the Drug, 2017, repurposed vinyl punching bag, glass beads, found and collectd mixed metal charms, cotton, artificial sinew, tin jingles and acrylic felt, photo K.A. Letts

Nick Cave, Grapht, 2024, vintage metal serving trays, vintage tole and needlepoint on wood panel, photo courtesy of The Shepherd

The center of the nave is occupied (virtually) by Cave’s two-story sculpture Amalgam (inflate) (2025), a proposed new iteration in the artist’s series Amalgams (2025). The previously fabricated Amalgam bronzes feature the lower part of a human body (Cave’s) fused with elements of the natural world above. In this case, Cave tops the bent legs with some rather puzzling nets, pouches and plates that purport to represent “the bags we carry.” This artwork, as it currently exists, is a virtual draft of a future public monument, and is viewable exclusively through a virtual reality headset.

In preparation for the current exhibition, Nick Cave asked each artist to answer a question: “What strategies or tools do you use to see deeply or share greatly?” That question provides a useful frame for the audience as well, asking us to examine our own experience as members of the Detroit community in dialog with the works in the exhibition.

The past ten years have brought enormous financial, cultural and political changes in Detroit. No doubt the next decade will bring more. It is to be hoped that when we look back on the years between 2025 and 2035, we will find that the city has weathered the current uncertain times with the same resilience and creativity that characterize the art and artists in today’s “Seen/Scene” exhibition.

Seen/Scene,” installation, curated by Nick Cave and Laura Mott, The Shepherd, photo K.A. Letts

Seen/Scene Artists: Nina Chanel Abney, Doug Aitken, Hernan Bas, McArthur Binion, Amoako Boafo, Akea Brionne, Davariz Broaden, Marcus Brutus, Nick Cave, Jack Craig, Arthur Dove, Conrad Egyir, Olafur Eliasson, Beverly Fishman, Helen Frankenthaler, Jeffrey Gibson, Barkley L. Hendricks, Jammie Holmes, Anthony James, Lester Johnson, Rashid Johnson, Fidelis Joseph, Ewa Juszkiewicz, Kerry James Marshall, Tiff Massey, Tony Matelli, A.H. Maurer, Allie McGhee, Mario Moore, Sara Nickleson, A.F. Oehmke, Anders Ruhwald, Henry Taylor, Mickalene Thomas, Matt Wedel, and Tom Wesselmann.

Seen/Scene @ The Shepherd October 5, 2025- January 10, 2026

Contemporary Anishinaabe Art: A Continuation @ DIA

By Sean Bieri

On October 28, 2025

In Costume Design, Drawing, Jewelry, Mixed Media, Paintings, Sculpture

Cressandra Thibodeaux, Fever Visions I ,2023, Infrared photograph

If anything, the photos included in the press kit for the Detroit Institute of Arts’ latest exhibition, Contemporary Anishinaabe Art: A Continuation, don’t do the show justice. To be sure, the kit does include some of the most striking artworks in the show: Cressandra Thibodeaux’s photographic image Fever Visions I, for instance, a color field-like composition of five turquoise discs on a red background, superimposed onto cylindrical hay bales lined up in an actual field. As the title suggests, the piece was inspired by hallucinations experienced by the artist during an illness. Also visionary is Jonathan Thunder’s painting called Basil’s Dream, in which rival spiritual beings — a Thunderbird and a lynx-like Mishibizhiw — shoot some pool while a DJ spins tunes and Ojibwe storyteller Basil Johnston records the scene on a typewriter. Painted all in shades of magenta, the image’s dreamworld atmosphere and cast of enigmatic characters (as well as its “widescreen” format) feel almost Lynchian, though the scene is more good-natured than creepy.

Thunder, Basil’s Dream, 2024 – Acrylic on canvas

Gordon M., 1868: Remember Our Relatives 2022 Annigoni paper, cedar smoke

Also in the press kit: Washita 1868: Remember Our Relatives (2002) by Gordon M. Combs, a sepia-tone tableau of rearing horses, teeth bared and eyes flashing, that seem seared into the paper (it was created using cedar smoke). This harrowing image of terror and pain commemorates the massacre of the Native Americans and the subsequent slaughter of the horses and mules of Washita, Oklahoma by George Custer’s 7th Cavalry. The creatures evoke the horse bellowing at the center of another visual chronicle of military cruelty, Picasso’s Guernica.

Morriseaux Punk, Norval Morriseaux, Punk Rockers, Nancy and Andy 1989 Acrylic on canvas

And naturally, the press materials for the exhibition include a work that’s become something of a signature image for the show (it’s on a lot of the gift shop merch): the irresistible Punk Rockers Nancy and Andy, a vivid acrylic painting from 1989 of a big-haired, leather jacketed couple in profile against a bright red background by the late Norval Morrisseau. A member of the Bingwi Neyaashi Anishinaabek First Nation (the DIA cites the tribal nationalities of the artists on the wall labels), Morrisseau was Canada’s best known contemporary Indigenous artist, in part because his biography is marked by the sort of pitfalls, comebacks, and eccentricities that the popular press enjoys latching onto when reporting on artists. However, it’s Morrisseau’s bold, compelling, often narrative paintings — influenced by ancient petroglyphs, 20th century modernism, Anishinaabe, Christian and Eastern spiritual traditions, and more — that justify his status as the “grandfather” of contemporary Anishinaabe art.

George Morrison, Totemic Column, 1995 (fabricated 2024-25), stained redwood, granite base; Jim Denomie, Untitled (Totem Painting), 2016, Oil on canvas, wood

To be fair to the DIA’s publicity department, no handful of images could entirely do right by such a large, rich, and wide-ranging exhibition, which is fine — it just means there are wonderful surprises awaiting visitors throughout Contemporary Anishinaabe Art: A Continuation. The spirit of the show is encapsulated outside the entrance by two contemporary takes on the totem pole. George Morrison’s beautiful Totemic Column is constructed like a puzzle from wavy, interconnected pieces of redwood; the effect feels a bit like looking down into a flowing river. Jim Denomie’s Untitled (Totem Painting), a tribute to his mentor Morrison, is both more traditional than Column — it features the animal heads one might expect to see on a totem pole — and very modern, as the faces of the creatures are painted onto the column in an expressionistic, cartoon-like style (and anyone who knows my love of comics will know that’s high praise coming from me). Harking back to tradition, forging varied paths forward, integrating old and new influences, commenting on past and current events, honoring predecessors: these threads run throughout the exhibition.

Jim Denomie, Untitled (Totem Painting) 2016 Oil on canvas, wood

Jim Denomie, Untruthful 2014 Oil on canvas

As someone unfamiliar with his work previously, Denomie is a happy revelation for me. A large painting by the late Ojibwe artist greets visitors just inside the show. Depicting four figures on horseback, some with mask-like animal heads, it might be mistaken for some variation on the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. In fact, Four Days and Four Nites, Ceremony (2019-20) refers to the journey to the afterlife made by the souls of the dead in Ojibwe tradition. Denomie’s vivid colors and expressive brushwork give this spirit world a heightened, electric feeling. Denomie often brings a sharp, dark sense of humor to his examinations of historical injustices. His other painting here, Untruthful (2014), depicts the Lone Ranger and Tonto astride their steeds (the pair appear in a number of Denomie’s artworks). “You lied to me!” says Tonto in a cartoon word balloon. “Get used to it,” replies the ranger. Denomie said he used color and humor to draw a viewer in, then he was “able to zap ‘em” with the truth.

Heron Hill, Joe Kennedy & Daniel Collazos Baakaani-inaaddizi: Their Actions Are Different 2025

One room here is devoted to some amazing fashion designs. Victorian gothic meets East Coast and Great Lakes Native American influences in Ojibwe designer Delina White’s Woodland Elegance: Four Piece Evening Apparel Ensemble, a silky purple dress and black shawl, with gold embroidery, over a black lacy underskirt. Joey Kennedy and Daniel Collazos of Heron Hill Designs offer a melding of Indigenous and queer styles, including an enviable pair of embroidered Doc Marten boots and matching hat. And Jillian Waterman contributes the astonishing In Case of Emergency Bury Me and Watch Me Grow (2024), an ensemble complete with vest, purse, and gas mask, all beaded with red, white, and yellow corn seeds. Also check out Adam Avery/Naawikwegiizhig’s beautifully beaded hats in the next room, Blooming Hat (2020) and Flowering Moon (2024).

Jillian Waterman, In Case of Emergency Bury Me and Watch Me Grow, 2024

Much of the work on display here, in fact, is three-dimensional — furniture, sculpture, jewelry, and other handiwork, from two sturdy birchbark canoes built by Chippewa craftsman Ronald J. Paquin, to a delicate beaded veil with the phrase I Get Mad Because I Love You repeated across it in white and translucent beads, created by Chippewa artist Maggie Thompson as a commentary on psychological abuse. Dennis Esquivel contributes a beautiful cabinet of maple and cherry wood entitled Out of the Woodlands (2019); its legs are streamlined versions of Ottawa war clubs. A dress-shaped object hanging on a wall — Dress for Nookomis, (2023) — made of fabric and painted blood red with thick black and white outlines, is more than just a piece of Pop art; it’s a liminal thing that “exists between worlds — part textile, part memory, part protest,” as artist Nonamey describes it. The red dress is the symbol of the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Relatives movement, which raises awareness about violence committed against Native American women.

Maggie Thompson I Get Mad Because I Love You 2021-22 Beads, filaments, jingles

Dennis Esquivel, Out of the Woodlandds: Standing Cabinet 2019

Nonamey, Dress for Nookomis 2023 Acrylic on reclaimed fabric

I’m getting close to my word count here, and I see I’ve done not much better than the press kit at encapsulating the full breadth of this show. I haven’t mentioned the display discussing African American/Ojibwe sculptor Mary Edmonia Lewis’ friendship with Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, author of the fictional Song of Hiawatha. I haven’t discussed Rabbett before Horses Strickland’s sprawling battle scene Right of Consciousness, or Summer Yahbay’s beaded bandolier bag Nmamiikwendis: I Am Proud of Myself (2024), a traditionally male garment cast in shades of pink that makes a good case for the true strength of that color. There are a number of photo portraits of folks from tribal elders to Iggy Pop. (Why Iggy? Because photographer David Dominic, Jr. of the Little Traverse Bay Bands of Odawa Indians respects the rock star for building a diverse community through his music.) And then there’s the short film that closes the show, Happy Thanksgiving (2023), a comedic crime flick about an Anishinaabe youth who comes up with a creative way to get payback after being asked one too many times to celebrate the subjugation of his people. Suffice to say, Contemporary Anishinaabe Art: A Continuation rewards repeat visits. Museums often tend to seal Native Americans in amber, reducing their culture to a collection of artifacts in a vitrine, but this show leaves no doubt about the multiplicity of artistic voices and practices that live and thrive within the contemporary Anishinaabe community.

Detroit Institute of Arts’, Contemporary Anishinaabe Art: A Continuation

Mel Rosas: La Frontera @ N’Namdi Center for Contemporary Art

By Michael Hodges

On October 18, 2025

In Paintings, Stain-glass

An installation image of Mel Rosas: La Frontera at the N’Namdi Center for Contemporary Art in Detroit. Also on view are two other shows — Darcel Deneau: Remnants, and Omo Misha: Whatsoever Things Are Pure. All three exhibitions are up through Jan. 23.

Detroit’s N’Namdi Center for Contemporary Art is hosting three separate exhibitions by Detroit artists – Mel Rosas, Darcel Deneau and Omo Misha – very different practitioners of their craft, and yet each an undeniable colorist with a strikingly personal intensity. Gallery director Izegbe N’Namdi says she brought these three together at the same time because she likes the dialogue they set up with themselves, as well as with the other two artists.

Longtime Wayne State University art and art-history professor Mel Rosas takes us once again to a mostly imaginary Latin America in La Frontera, where his eye generally lands on street scenes defined by deeply saturated colors and, not uncommonly, a solitary pedestrian passing across the canvas, as with Primo Textura, below.

Mel Rosas, Primo Textura, Oil on panel, 24 x 36 inches, 2024.

Rosas’ life, as he tells it, has been an exercise in straddling various lines or divisions. Much of this runs bone deep, perhaps springing from his experience growing up as a half-Panamanian, half-American kid in homogenous Des Moines, Iowa. (He overcame in part by becoming a high-school baseball star.)

This neither-one-side-nor-the-other philosophical orientation plays out in his artistry as well. He’s particularly drawn, he told the Detroit Art Review in 2023, to opposites, as with his highly realistic painting style that, counterintuitively, all the same often manages to convey dreaminess and uncertainty.

As critic Matthew Piper put it in a 2016 Essay’d, “With their luscious surfaces, painstakingly lifelike textures, and subtly surreal depictions of almost-possible places, Rosas’ paintings are portals that offer the artist passage into his Latin American ancestry, and the viewer into a lush and evocative dream world.”

Indeed, passages and openings nearly always figure in Rosas’ work, sometimes framing an impossibly verdant landscape, or the immensity of the ocean itself. But with this show, La Frontera – easily translated, and, you’ll note, yet another line or division – the doorways are mostly closed, as with Primo Textura, or open into an impassable hellscape as in The Four Elements (Fire).

Mel Rosas, The Four Elements (Fire), Oil on board, 8 ½ x 11 inches, 2008.

It’s something of a departure for Rosas. Generally in the past these glimpses through doors and windows pull us into beguiling natural landscapes, but with The Four Elements, this aperture is full of threat and menace. Not to wax too psychological, but if these portals are in their way windows into the unconscious, Four Elements offers up a troubled and troubling vision, indeed.

Rather more enigmatic and possibly hopeful is The Need for Angels, in many ways the most surreal piece that Rosas has in this show. We’re presented with what appears to be a freestanding blue wall that also acts as a film strip with holes for sprockets at top and bottom, all framing black-and-white ads for movies set in large, deep squares. To the left, a giant pink arrow points at the classic image from filmmaker Wim Wenders’ 1987 “Wings of Desire,” with a trench-coated Peter Falk sporting angel wings, standing on the edge of a rooftop. Yet to his left, in case we thought this was all mysticism and reverie, a fire is in full and violent eruption from within a metal garbage bin.

Mel Rosas, The Need for Angels, Oil on canvas, 48 x 72 inches, 2024.

Izegbe N’Namdi says the first time she saw work by Rosas, she was immediately sucked into the piece at hand, landing in her a deeply meditative frame of mind. It’s a judgment the artist might well treasure.

Darcel Deneau, Heading West, Stained glass and found objects on wood panel, 12 x 16 inches, 2024.

Detroit artist Darcel Deneau works in a rarefied medium – constructing large mosaics out of tiny shards of stained glass, as with the current show, Remnants. It’s painstaking, time-consuming work. Moreover, colored glass always runs the risk of being “too pretty,” thereby trivializing its subject, whether fair or no. Darcel nicely avoids this trap by working with urban vignettes drawn from Detroit streets – “throwaway” shots of cars and buses and traffic lights, what you could call your standard city-road view.

A particularly nice example of this is Heading West – looking down Warren Avenue from Woodward toward Old Main at Wayne State. A striped, mint-colored city bus taking up the right side of the frame is reflected in nearby puddles, while a sunset edges, convincingly, from yellow-orange to chilly blue and lavender overhead.

Omo Misha, Brotherhood (The Mother’s Garden Series), Oil on canvas, 48 x 60 x 1.5 inches, 2025.

The third exhibition on display is Whatsoever Things Are Pure by Omo Misha, aka Misha McGlown, a multifaceted artist and curator. (The title comes from a Biblical passage.) Among other positions, Misha – a Detroit artist with a large presence in New York City – is curator of the Windows on Amsterdam gallery at City College of New York. In Detroit, she’s worked with various groups, including the Irwin Gallery on West Grand Boulevard.

Her art ranges widely, but in this particular case Misha gives us a series of fairly realistic portraits of young people. Several canvases are bright and highly vivid. But Brotherhood: The Mother’s Garden Series is set in a landscape of soft green on the edge of a forest. Its subjects, however — little boys dressed to the nines in their Sunday best — are rendered in shades of brownlish-gray, setting them off from the rest of the canvas.

But the focal point of the painting is the doll the smallest boy, right there in front, is holding out in front of himself. The doll is a veritable technicolor feast with rich yellows, reds and greens that sets up a striking and otherworldly contrast with the monochromatic children.

Three shows, Mel Rosas: La Frontera, Darcel Deneau: Remnants, and Omo Misha: Whatsoever Things Are Pure, will up at the N’Namdi Center for Contemporary Art in Detroit through Oct. 30. Three artists’ talks are scheduled, each from 2 to 4 p.m. on Nov. 8 (Omo Misha), Dec. 13,2025 (Mel Rosas), and Jan. 10 (Darcel Deneau).

System and Sequence: Pattern and Ornamentation in Contemporary Art @ Oakland University Art Gallery

By Michael Hodges

On September 24, 2025

In Paintings, Photography, Prints

An installation image of System and Sequence: Pattern and Ornamentation in Contemporary Art, up at the Oakland University Art Gallery in Rochester through November 23. (All photos by Detroit Art Review)

Repetition seduces the human eye, tugging on it with irresistible attraction. The power of endless duplication is explored at length in System and Sequence: Pattern and Ornamentation in Contemporary Art, which will be at the Oakland University Art Gallery through November 23. Curated by gallery manager Leo Barnes, the 35-odd works on display take us on a kaleidoscopic journey through forests and thickets of ornamentation, sometimes used as a framing device, at others the dominating element in a given painting or photograph.

Jocelyn Hobbie, Floating World, Oil on canvas, 24 x 24 inches, 2024.

Curator Barnes said he’s always admired work by Brooklynite Jocelyn Hobbie, and how she “leans heavily on pattern and ornament in her work – I’ve always liked that. So I looked around for other artists who employ that theme in their work,” he added, “and that’s how the show grew.” As Barnes began to amass potential works, he was struck by how the artists, in one way or another, “were all having a similar conversation about family heritage or history that they were trying to portray with pattern as their work’s focal point, rather than just as background.” What’s striking about Hobbie’s work generally, and certainly with Floating World, above, is the juxtaposition of the subject’s expression – blank and possibly troubled – with the giddy patterns that surround her. It’s this sharp edge that Barnes zeroed right in on, the “contrast between this beautiful thing and a not-happy person.”

Nearby you’ll find Rachel Perry’s large Lost in My Life (Price Tags Reclining), which looks to be right in synch with Floating World with a female subject and dense ornamentation. But Perry’s taken these elements and pushed them about as far as they’ll go, in ways both captivating and amusing. In Lost in My Life, a woman’s head, turned away from us and apparently asleep, pokes out from beneath a comforter on a very large sofa. Every single surface, her hair being the sole exception, is covered in a red, yellow and white repeating pattern of photographed receipt slips that the artist has turned into both fabric and wallpaper.

The issue at hand, says Barnes, is one of Bostonian Perry’s favorite themes – how consumerism overwhelms and envelopes all of us.

Rachel Perry, Lost in My Life (Price Tags Reclining), Archival pigment print, 36 x 26.25 inches, 2011.

Alia Ali, ‘Echo’ Glitzch Series, Pigment print with UV laminate mounted on aluminum Dibond in custom-built wooden frame hand-upholstered by artist with Dutch wax print sourced from Nigeria, 2024.

When Barnes came upon Alia Ali’s ‘Echo’ Glitzch Series, “it just clicked,” he said. “It embodied everything I was looking for, with a very much in-the-forefront, in-your-face pattern — yet there’s a human form there as well, making you focus on the pattern and what’s going on.” The human form Barnes refers to is completely wrapped in a strong, handsome pattern of what appear to be identical, stylized blue flowers on bright-yellow stems. In this case, no skin is visible – the fabric covers both face and head. The figure is silhouetted against another repetitive pattern that stars dark-blue, stylized spirals rather like nautilus shells. Growing up in Sana’a, Yemen, Ali writes that she got her passion for pattern on textiles from her grandmother, whose self-created fabrics, in Ali’s words, “documented our heritage.”

Spandita Malik, Noshad Bee, Unique photographic transfer print on khadi fabric, 64.5 x 47.5 inches, 2023.

Spandita Malik, originally from Chandigarh, India – the modernist state capital Le Corbusier created – works with an Indian organization that teaches abused women traditional, regional embroidery techniques, both to lend self-respect and give them an opportunity for a trade. New York-based Malik returns to India to photograph these survivors with their permission, and then transfers an individual’s image to fabric. That gets sent back to the woman in question, who then applies embroidery of her choice to round out the composition.With Noshad Bee, we have what almost looks like a wedding portrait, in which the apparent groom, but not his bride, has been partly obscured by a gorgeous pattern of maroon flowers and golden leaves that cover his entire frame. Given that these women have been abused, is it significant that the man’s face is half-hidden behind a flower? Perhaps. In any case, the woman who created the ornamentation appears to have utilized beautiful imagery to, as it were, blot out the man – a nice, ironic touch.

Antonio Santin, Momo, Oil on canvas, 63 x 86.6 inches, 2024

With some of the works on display in System and Sequence, the ornamentation is so complex and precise that one is almost tempted to imagine it must be digital one way or another. But no. Everything in the show, broadly speaking, is either painted or photographed. Antonio Santin’s huge work, Momo, calls up this question almost immediately. At roughly five feet by seven feet, this portrait of a furrowed Oriental carpet seems impossible to craft by hand. But if you look closely, paint has been applied in identical small, rounded spurts – squeezed from a syringe, according to Barnes – to create this hyper-realist canvas.

How many tens of thousands of syringe squeezes must have been involved dizzies the mind. But what floors Barnes is that the artist, having created this meticulous tapestry out of minute blobs of paint, then goes back with black spray paint and adds shadowing that gives the work its astonishing 3-D appearance. “Talk about nerve-wracking,” he says, “all this intricate work, and then at the end you come in with a black airbrush and just spray over it!”

System and Sequence: Pattern and Ornamentation in Contemporary Art, @ Oakland University Art Gallery in Rochester through November 23, 2025

Lynn Galbreath – Conversations @ Birmingham Bloomfield Art Center

By Sean Bieri

On September 13, 2025

In Paintings

Lynn Galbreath starts off her exhibition at the BBAC with a painting that seems at first like an outlier from the rest of the work in the show. It depicts a stack of books — surveys, essay collections, and textbooks — authored by artists, critics, and academics that will likely be familiar to any student of art history: Arthur Danto, Robert Hughes, Lucy Lippard, Marcel Duchamp, the ubiquitous Gardner and Janson. Atop the stack is a bouquet of white tulips. The painting is titled 1000 Missed Dialogues, an odd opener perhaps for a show called Conversations. But the artist explains via email that this painting is just one of several that comprised a 30-foot-long linear installation, “created after chaperoning university students to Italy.” Included in that piece were portraits, still lifes, scenes from Italian piazza life, and more. The books depicted are, Galbreath says, “representative of the study of studio art at the university level,” and run the gamut from basic drawing and art history, to academic disciplines and theory, before arriving at Fairfield Porter’s collection of criticism Art On Its Own Terms. For Galbreath, art itself is the conversation, one that “has been going on since the beginning of mankind.”

Lynn Galbreath, 1000 Missed Dialogues

Juxtaposing objects puts them in conversation with one another, like one book on top of another, or one image next to another. It’s a technique Galbreath uses often in her quest to engender communication. “Today, no one talks enough,” she says. “Everyone is in a hurry. Everyone is constantly online checking social media.” Her art seeks to remedy this: “Conversations with opposite points of view are very healthy. Diptychs, triptychs (any multi-panel piece) are great platforms to address conversation. They can portray varying views and feelings.”

Lynn, Galbreath, artist, (art in background) Left, Pure Hope, oil on canvas Right, Can You Hear It Now, oil on canvas

Lynn Galbreath, Damn The Torpedoes

Conversations features 17 paintings from three different bodies of Galbreath’s work. An accomplished representational painter, she often tinges her work with a sense of intrigue by overlaying incongruous elements within her scenes. For instance, in one large painting a cascade of lemons, cherries, and blueberries flies up (or tumbles down) across a blue sky full of fluffy white clouds. That this cheerful image is given the warlike title Damn The Torpedos, Full Speed Ahead is a jarring juxtaposition indeed! (Perhaps this bracing burst of edible primary colors is a rallying cry to artists to rise and shine and get to work?) Another piece here with the curious title Can You Hear It Now is similar in concept: a column of tumbling rosebuds, succulents and sea anemones (!) in a range of pinks, reds and violets, rises in the foreground before what might be a blooming southwest landscape, painted with loose brushstrokes in a pink-and-green palette that Monet would have approved of.

Lynn Galbreath, Working Triptych L to R: Unsustainable Living – Bruna Javier Sustainable Living – Waylon oil on Baltic birch

Three paintings grouped together on one wall of the gallery represent Galbreath’s series Working Hard For A Living. On either side are images of workers preparing food for sale. Only their torsos and their hands are visible; their heads extend off the top of the canvas, and their legs are obscured behind outsized heaps of foodstuffs. The image on the left is Unsustainable Living – Bruna, in which the titular worker cuts open fish with a pair of scissors, revealing the pink flesh inside. She’s based on Galbreath’s photos of a Portuguese fishmonger. Her counterpart on the right is a kale seller at Detroit’s Eastern Market, shown bundling up leafy greens in a painting called Sustainable Living – Waylon. The central, largest painting is a Mexican beach vendor who lends his name to the painting’s title, Javier. He turns his head to peer at the viewer, his body all but obscured by the jumble of colorful woven baskets he’s carrying. Taken as a whole, the triptych almost feels like an altarpiece, dedicated to hard-working individuals the artist has encountered in her travels.

Lynn Galbreath – Dusk On Cleveland

Lynn Galbreath, Pontiac Morning Fog On Main Street, oil on Baltic birch

The most compelling of Galbreath’s paintings are the diptychs in which she pairs scenes of roads and freeways — mostly “widescreen” images emphasizing the far-off horizon — with swatches of flat color sampled from the color schemes of the paintings. For instance, Dusk On Cleveland Street, in which car headlamps and streetlights glow under a light-polluted night sky, is accompanied by a rectangle of deep midnight blue. In Pontiac Morning Fog on Main Street, the city’s downtown recedes into the haze until skyscrapers and even traffic lights are all but invisible; next to this is a square of misty pinkish-gray. A smaller work, Chelsea Grey, depicts cars parked outside a New York emissions testing site; its swatch is the hue of concrete, pigeons, and smog. Galbreath describes these as “atmospheric” studies depicting “the color of heat, humidity, time of day and year. They are compositions of location and materiality.” The color swatches might be seen as a sort of summing up of those conditions, a shorthand description of the atmosphere.

Lynn Galbreath, Chelsea Grey Lynn Galbraith, Chelsea Grey, oil on Baltic birch

Lynn Galbreath, Marlette Road Lynn Galbreath, Marlette Road, oil on Baltic birch

“Aesthetically,” she says, the road diptychs are “visual responses to extraordinary light characteristic and specific to a location.” Indeed, Michiganders will recognize the cold, clear conditions depicted in some of her highway paintings. The largest of the diptychs, Marlette Road, may appeal to the poetically inclined viewer, as it recalls nothing so much as Robert Frost’s most famous work. On a crisp bright day somewhere in Michigan’s thumb, two roads diverge in a wood, one paved, salted and plowed, the other almost indistinguishable from the snow on the shoulder. A yellow sign with a black arrow urges motorists to the left, while a diamond-shaped sign seems to warn them off from the riskier path on the right. Here as elsewhere in this series, Galbreath’s brushwork is deft and sketchy, impressionistic; closer inspection reveals splatters and drips of white, yellow and pink paint in the thickets of leafless trees in the background. The accompanying color swatch is a noncommittal light violet-gray, picked up from flashes of purple on the snow, a neutral statement with no advice on which path to choose. The relative merits of each road might be a worthy topic for conversation.

Detroit Art Review

Critical art reviews of Detroit galleries and museums weekly