Detroit Art Review

Critical art reviews of Detroit galleries and museums weekly

Diana Al-Hadid, unbecoming @ MSU Broad Art Museum

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On June 29, 2025

In Fiber, Paintings, Printmaking, Sculpture

Diana Al-Hadid, unbecoming, Installation view

To be “unbecoming” is to be something of an embarrassment, a disappointment to one’s peers and betters — a failure who couldn’t rise to certain standards and expectations. But if you didn’t sign on to those expectations in the first place, getting tarred as “unbecoming” could be considered a kind of success. To be unbecoming is not the same as to be coming undone. The latter implies dissolution and defeat; the former, with a little linguistic license, can suggest the first steps toward reinvention, a re-becoming.

Sculptor Diana Al-Hadid’s art seems to be in the process of “un-becoming” as well, physically speaking. Her mixed media works are smeary and obscured, cluttered with marks, in low-contrast color schemes that force close observation to discern their subjects. Her paintings appear to have been corroded by some caustic substance, or else by neglect, leaving streaks of muted colors clinging to a lath foundation, but also revealing glints of gold leaf. The works seem fragmentary, perhaps partially lost to time. On the other hand, they could also pass for recently unearthed artifacts, newly discovered evidence that reshapes our thinking about the past and the present.

Much is made in the catalog for unbecoming about Al-Hadid’s use of space, or rather the way she and her work take up space in a world where women are discouraged from doing so. In that sense, it’s appropriate that the exhibition is hosted at the MSU Broad Art Museum in East Lansing, in Zaha Hadid’s jolting stainless steel edifice — a Bowie-esque lightning bolt upon the placid face of the Michigan State University campus. Like the Broad itself, Al-Hadid’s art simultaneously works with and against the environment it occupies: framed prints are suspended in midair by cables rather than hung against walls; a polished bronze disc casts reflections that become part of the artwork; and an arch of made up of Renaissance-inspired figures seems to dissolve and drip down from the top of one gallery entrance, encroaching on the visitor’s space. Then there’s the six-foot model of a Gothic cathedral, inverted so its spires seem to have been driven forcefully into the ground. The placement of the overturned church is such that the diagonals of the room’s windows, like cartoon speed lines, enhance the sense of its catastrophic descent.

Diana Al-Hadid, unbecoming, Installation view Blue Medusa, Mixed Media, 2023

Mythological or art-historical women are often Al-Hadid’s subjects, and her work attempts to complicate or rewrite their stories. The large mixed media wall-hanging Blue Medusa eliminates the face of the gorgon of Greek myth entirely, leaving only a halo of hair — not snakes — writhing around a cut-out void. Minus a face to scrutinize, we’re left wondering what else we got wrong about this “monster.” Three works here are derived from a Northern Renaissance painting called The Allegory of Chastity, in which a woman, hands folded and eyes downcast, is sealed from the waist down inside a gown-like rock face, guarded jealously by two lions. In Deluge of the Allegory Al-Hadid depicts this “protection” of feminine virtue as the prison it is; the mountain is even hemmed in by walls, but from its peak a flood of angry lava flows forth. In the triptych Hindsight, the woman stands flanked by a smoldering volcano and the imposing peak. In Lionless, the woman has banished her feline escorts and stands free and autonomous. (I’ve listed the artworks this way to create a hopeful narrative arc, but Lionless is earlier than the others by seven years, suggesting some rethinking of the subject by Al-Hadid.)

Diana Al-Hadid, unbecoming, Hindsight, Hand-Drawn ballgrain plate, Lithography on Essex paper, 2020

Diana Al-Hadid, unbecoming, August, after The Seventh Month, Polymer gypsum, fiberglass, steel, plaster, metal leaf and pigment. 2025

Motherhood is a subject Al-Hadid visits and revisits here as well. One painting derives from a previous work of hers, from 2015, now at the Toledo Museum of Art. Though obscured and fragmentary as is her style, the Toledo painting appears to be inspired by icons of St. Catherine; a female figure rests one hand on her belly and holds a sword in the other. As the title, The Seventh Month, suggests, Al-Hadid was pregnant with her son when she made the work. In the 2025 follow-up painting, August, after The Seventh Month, Al-Hadid stands just behind her 10-year-old son, and rests a hand on his shoulder. She has passed her protective sword down to him, and if that wasn’t a warning enough, his t-shirt slogan reads “Do Not Disturb.” The world around them is no less in a state of “un-becoming” than before — incomplete, in flux — but together the two seem resolute.

Diana Al-Hadid, unbecoming, Untitled, Bronze, 2014-21 Bronze

The most unusual piece in the show is an untitled disc — more like a puddle — of bronze, looking like a patinated hand mirror that fell, shattered, and then melted in the sun like a forlorn ice cream cone. The polished, fragmented surface casts tangles of reflected light on the wall above it. It was inspired by a sculptural group by Jean-Joseph Perraud representing lyrical drama, part of the facade of the Napoleon III-era Palais Garnier opera house in Paris. In the sculpture, a fallen man is shown his reflection in a mirror by a woman standing to one side, as a winged female figure holding a torch aloft steps over his body. In Al-Hadid’s version, the broken mirror replaces the broken man, and the flickering reflections stand in for the victorious angel, creating a sort of condensed, perhaps lyrical version of the original. (A wall text describing the piece as “a metaphor for deconstructing standards of beauty and conduct” is on-point with the theme of the show, but it’s an unsatisfying explanation of an intriguing piece, especially minus an explanation of the original Perraud piece.)

Diana Al-Hadid, unbecoming, Smoke Screen 2015, Polymer, gypsum, fiberglass, steel, gold leaf, plaster, and pigment

Diana Al-Hadid, unbecoming, Spun of the Limits of my Lonely Waltz Wood, polystyrene, plaster, fiberglass, and pigment, 2006

That drippy veil of fiberglass and gypsum that hangs down across the entrance to the show’s final gallery is entitled Smoke Screen. Amidst the drips are the subtle outlines of multiple figures, inspired by Northern Renaissance artworks, that mingle and intertwine, congregating around the entrance and reaching into the visitor’s space. Beyond the veil is the epically-titled Spun of the Limits of My Lonely Waltz, Al-Hadid’s imposing model cathedral made of plywood, plastic, and plaster. Inverting the structure reveals its foundation (visible from the museum’s second floor), which was formed by the pattern of the artist’s footprints, made as she danced a one-person waltz around her studio. This personal ritual, performed in the sanctity of Al-Hadid’s art-making space, has superseded those of the traditional church, overturning its authority in favor of her own autonomy. The piece is a dramatic exclamation point at the end of an intriguing show.

Diana Al-Hadid, unbecoming @ MSU Broad Art Museum

Luminosity: A Detroit Arts Gathering, @ the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History in Detroit

By

On May 30, 2025

In Ceramic, Paintings

 

An installation view of Luminosity: A Detroit Arts Gathering will be at Detroit’s Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History through March 31, 2026. (Courtesy of the Wright Museum. All other images by Detroit Art Review.)

Long before the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History took up residence in its spectacular building in Detroit’s Cultural Center, it started life on West Grand Boulevard in 1966 in a building owned by Dr. Charles H. Wright himself. To celebrate this sixtieth anniversary, the museum has mounted a large, dazzling show, Luminosity: A Detroit Arts Gathering, an exhibition of Black art by Detroiters past and present that will be up through March 31, 2026.

Organized by freelance curator Vera Ingrid Grant in Ann Arbor, previously a curator at the University of Michigan Museum of Art as well as a Fulbright Scholar in Germany, this expansive historical survey features 97 works by 69 artists. Included are superstars from the past, like Hughie Lee-Smith and Al Loving, giants of the contemporary Detroit art world such as Allie McGhee and Carole Harris, and relative newcomers like Akea Brionne and O’Shun Williams.

Grant says Wright officials were looking for “a celebration of the museum and its ties to the community,” a challenge that thrilled her. Given the celebratory nature, she adds that it was important to her to highlight joy in African-American life. There are images of despair, to be sure — like Jonathan Harris’ sharp-edged painting of the classic photo taken moments after Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was shot — but Grant wanted to make sure that gloom and tragedy did not overwhelm.

Sydney James, The Westside Johnsons, Acrylic on raw canvas, 72 x 120 x 1/10 inches, 2023.

This point of view hits you right as you enter Luminosity and behold Sydney James’s large, color-filled canvas, The Westside Johnsons. A buoyant portrait of an extended family set against a rich red background, the painting fairly radiates affection and joy, with not an ounce of sappiness to it. These 12 Johnsons are so individualized and real, you feel like you could start a conversation with any one of them right there in the gallery.

James, a muralist with outdoor work around Detroit, put fringes on the edge of the painting (sadly not visible in the image above), giving the composition some of the feel of a quilt, with all the folk implications that carries. Grant loves the work, calling it “gorgeous,” adding that she chose it for the entryway to set the mood for the whole exhibition.

Jonathan Harris, Hear no evil, See no evil, Speak no evil (Triptych); Oil on canvas, 36 x 36 x 1½ inches; 2021.

These three panels by Jonathan Harris invoke the classic proverb, originally derived from Japan, and star the artist himself in black glasses and a white t-shirt, acting out the gestures every child knows and will readily imitate. Harris has positioned himself in front of a strongly colored background – the bottom half a sort of starry nightscape, and the top half a uniform deep red with stars scattered here as well. Strewn over the compositions are strands of bright-green ivy that crisscross the artist’s shirt and, in the last case, frame his head.

Harris, a graduate of the Detroit School for the Fine and Performing Arts and Oakland University, notes in his artistic biography that he utilizes “an oil enamel technique, resulting in graphic, high contrast portraits, without the use of a brush.” The result with Hear no Evil… is a trio of powerfully magnetic paintings, ones that are almost impossible to ignore. “The audience is definitely drawn to them,” Grant says, “as well as to what he’s expressing, and his accessibility in a psychological space.” Underlying all Harris’ work, she suggests, is the question of “how we in Detroit manage life in these United States.”

Austen Brantley, Watch Over Me, Ceramic, 28 x 12 x 12 inches, 2025.

The ceramic sculpture Watch Over Me by Austen Brantley, a 2023 Kresge Artist Fellow, is both whimsical and striking with its bust of a handsome young Black woman with an angel perched atop her head, wings framing the girl’s face. Given the craftsmanship (which actually reads like metal, not ceramic), it’s shocking to learn that Brantley, chosen last year by the city of Detroit to sculpt boxer Joe Louis, is an entirely self-taught artist.

Grant particularly admires a certain rough, unfinished quality to his approach. “Brantley’s developed an ability to stop work in the midst of something that’s still raw,” she says. “It just kind of lets you in, in a way that a fine-tuned, fully-refined sculpture emitting a kind of glossiness would not.”

Glanton Dowdell, Untitled, Oil on canvas, 40 ¼ x 24 ½ x 1 ½ inches, 1975.

Glanton Dowdell spent 12 years in prison for what Grant calls “a dead-serious crime,” i.e., second-degree murder. Before incarceration, however, he’d been formally trained in painting, but while behind bars, the Detroiter, born in 1924, refined this talent to a remarkable degree.

“Dowdell came out of prison in the midst of the 1960s with everything going on,” Grant says, “and I think he must’ve received a political education there, too,” because, among other things, he co-founded the Detroit branch of the Black Panthers.  You can read activism and rage in this untitled portrait of three lynched bodies hanging from a tree, a tragic trio that includes a woman, which is a bit unusual, as well as a man with no trousers. Apart from its grisly subject, what makes this painting especially startling is Dowdell’s choice of pastels for background colors. You might think he intended the juxtaposition to shock, but the hues – a tender rose and soft green – almost read like the artist’s blessing upon the three unfortunate souls.

Eventually, like a number of Black radicals in that era, Dowdell abandoned the United States, in his case moving to Sweden, where he spent the rest of his life. Out of the blue in the 1970s, Dowdell mailed this canvas to the Wright Museum with a note saying, in effect, “Here – this is for you. This is what I’m thinking about in Sweden.” The painting has been in the Wright’s collection ever since.

Tylonn Sawyer, Royal, Charcoal, pastel, and gold leaf on paper, 50 x 36 inches, 2022

Tylonn Sawyer, a 2017 Kresge Artist Fellow, gives us one of the most magnetic portraits in the entire show with Royal. This painting of a young Black woman amounts to a high-concept composition, indeed. The subject may be wearing jeans and high-top sneakers, but her aura, as Grant notes, is anything but pedestrian. “He’s presenting her in her ordinariness,” she says, “but her stance is regal, and he’s given her this golden backdrop and a kind of asteroid behind her.”

That heavenly body streaks through a horizontal black band that divides the painting in two, framed above and below by textured, hard-to-take-your-eyes-off gold leaf. It’s a remarkable artistic conceit, one that lifts this work way beyond the expected.

“It’s a surprise,” Grant says. “What would you normally see in a royal portrait? You’d see the individual’s treasures, their symbolic pieces — but her backdrop is this kind of universal sky with a comet going by. That’s the disjuncture, right? It makes it startling.” Grant always saw this as one of the key works for the show. “It stands in for the things I’ve tried to share about joy,” she says, adding, “It captures the luminosity of Detroit.”

Luminosity: A Detroit Arts Gathering, will be up at the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History in Detroit through Mar. 31, 2026.

“Melissa Beth Floyd: Now What” and “Sabrina Nelson: She Carries” @ Saginaw Art Museum

By

On May 20, 2025

In Paintings

If you’re local to the Detroit area, it’s well worth making the shortish trek north to visit the Saginaw Art Museum and Gardens. Located in the grand former home of a local lumber magnate, the SAM boasts a collection of European and American artworks from the last 200-plus years, plus a few pieces from elsewhere in the world. One gallery is devoted to the work of Saginaw native E.I. Couse, who studied under Bouguereau, and a rotating selection of prints from the museum’s collection is displayed in their library room. Of course, they feature special exhibitions as well. Two shows are up now; both are by local women artists, and both address family matters, though from different angles. Sabrina Nelson: She Carries runs through May 23, and Melissa Beth Floyd: Now What is on display through September 6.

The Good Life, Oil on Canvas,  2025

“Now What” sounds like it could have been the cheeky title of a mid-century survey show at MoMA. It definitely sounds like the exasperated grumble of a mother who just heard a loud crash come from her kid’s room — a mother who might rather be visiting MoMA, or working on her own art. Many of Cranbrook grad Melissa Beth Floyd’s paintings feature women dressed and coiffed in the style of archetypical white 1950s housewives, each having her dreams and desires thwarted, often by small armies of rambunctious children. Kicking against the chirpy idealism and starchy conformity of the ‘50s has been popular in America since… well, since the ‘50s. Humorists have frequently lampooned the century’s squarest decade, maybe to the point of cliché. But now that many of the retrograde attitudes of that age seem to be enjoying renewed popularity— the “trad wife” trend, the gross “pronatalist” movement, etc. — maybe the time is right again to evoke the imagery of the 1950s in order to comment on the current cultural climate.

One harried mother in a painting entitled The Good Life sits exhausted at her easel, beset by kids with toothy, mewling maws demanding her attention; on her canvas is a sketch of a scene not unlike the painting itself. The would-be artist wears a round red nose and eye makeup like the clowns in the pictures that decorated so many mid-century rec rooms. Floyd’s images are a sort of revisionist version of the ads and illustrations found in the Saturday Evening Post or similar magazines. Norman Rockwell might come to mind first, but Floyd’s work, with its lively compositions and deft brushwork, more closely resembles that of other members of the Famous Artists School, such as Ben Stahl or Al Parker.

Feeding Frenzy 2025, Oil on Canvas, 

When Floyd’s women aren’t being mobbed by kids, they’re often being harassed by angry, Hitchcockian birds, as in Feeding Frenzy, in which a flock of seagulls descends upon a woman in a blue dress and broad-brimmed hat. Unlike in the horror movie, the birds’ motives here are obvious — they’re after the sandwich their victim is holding. Food is another recurring theme here, as Floyd’s women attempt to eat donuts, hamburgers, ice cream cones or, in one innuendo-heavy image, a large sausage. As aggressively hungry as her birds are, Floyd’s women can be just as ravenous, defiantly indulging their appetites when there are no avian threats to interfere with them. In Binge, a blonde woman digs into a spread of candy-colored pastries with a furious gusto, and the character in Brontosaurus Burger seems about to unhinge her jaw snake-style to swallow her supersized sandwich.

Binge 2024 Oil on Canvas, 2024

Far Enough, Oil on Canvas, 2025

Men show up in Floyd’s paintings here and there, too. In Far Enough, a Brylcreemed, lantern-jawed guy in a pinstripe suit looks up at a looming mountain range from the puddle of mud he’s sitting in; Nature itself seems to have finally gotten tired of his nonsense and knocked him on his ass. And in Untitled (After Magritte), a bearded academic type with a red clown nose puffs away at six “ceci n’est pas une pipes” simultaneously, a humbling image that reminds this, ahem, arts writer to mention the wry humor that runs throughout this wonderful show.

Untitled (after Magritte) Oil on Canvas, 2024

 

Song of Solomon 2:1, I am the Rose of Sharon Lily of the Valley Wax pencil and gel pen on paper 2025

Sabrina Nelson takes on issues of female resilience and resistance as well, specifically regarding Black women, but in a more personal way — quiet, earnest, and no less powerful. Using watercolor, gel pens, and colored pencil, Nelson creates thoughtful and tender portraits of friends and family, multilayered images that include not just her subjects but their family members and ancestors — pictures within pictures in the form of framed photos, t-shirts, or sculptures worked into the compositions. (Paying tribute to loved ones in her art is an impulse Nelson has passed along to her son, the painter Mario Moore.)

The Gardener  Wax pencil and gel pen on paper  2025

Plant life appears in many of Nelson’s portraits, lending another level of warmth to the images, but also gesturing to cultural or personal symbolism as well. For example, one portrait depicts a musician friend surrounded by Western and African instruments (she even wears a tambourine for a hat). The background is patterned with outlines of hibiscus flowers, a.k.a. the Rose of Sharon, as mentioned in the biblical Song of Solomon that lends the portrait its title. In a particularly beautiful drawing entitled The Gardener, a young woman cradles a bundle of collard greens, while okra blooms in the background; both vegetables are staples in traditional Black American cuisine. The subject of another portrait holds a sprig of St. John’s wort, a plant used in traditional medicine. Many of Nelson’s portraits are drawn onto black paper, making the jewel-like colors glow even more intensely. Others, such as 2022’s She Carried Her Sons, are drawn on white paper in muted tones that suggest old sepia or black-and-white photos; these are embellished with three-dimensional corsages made from doilies and dried flowers.

 St. John’s Wart, McKinney

In her opening remarks on the show, Nelson describes a trip to Zimbabwe, during which she observed women, even quite elderly ones, carrying things — firewood, water, food, and children. The experience prompted her to consider what she and other women carry, in every sense — physically, but also emotionally, psychologically, and spiritually. (A short video recording of her remarks, as well as a longer one in which Nelson explains the show in more depth, are both available on the Saginaw Art Museum’s YouTube page.) It’s something Nelson wants museum patrons to contemplate as well. In the center of the room — near a collection of suitcases containing baby clothes, aprons and gloves, antique medicine bottles, and other traces of family history — is a small box with a sign asking, “What Do You Carry?” Visitors can write their responses on slips of paper and add them to the growing collection in the box — or, perhaps, keep them and carry them away, a souvenir of a day well spent at a fine Michigan museum.

She Carries, Installation image. 

“Melissa Beth Floyd: Now What” and “Sabrina Nelson: She Carries” @ Saginaw Art Museum

 

El De Smith: Take My Name Off the Order List Don’t Want Anything @ Trinosophes

By

On May 12, 2025

In Paintings

Installation image, courtesy of Trinosophes

Trinosophes, the multidisciplinary arts space on Gratiot Avenue across the street from Eastern Market, is now featuring an exhibition of El De Smith, an erstwhile denizen of Detroit’s Cass Corridor area during the art movement’s vintage years in the 1970s. (Born in 1913, the artist’s death date remains unknown.) Smith’s “outsider art” on view, comprised of paintings, signs, and texts from 1970-76, the approximate years he lived amidst the territory of the Corridor artists, as evidenced by the several artists who held onto his works and lent them to the current presentation. In his introductory essay, Steve Foust asserts, “He gave away his works, saying that they were his communication to others.”

El De Smith, Take My Name Off the Order List Don’t Want Anything, n.d., ballpoint pen on paper, excerpt from a longer text.

The lengthy title of the show is, in fact, drawn from a typical text by Smith that expresses an emphatic point of view, as in: “Take My Name Off The Order List Don’t Want Anything.” Such a blunt declaration about unwanted interferences in his life is apparent in other texts and handwritten statements accessible to visitors in a file case displayed in the exhibition.

El De Smith, Untitled (Bull), c. 1972-74, paint on plywood, 11 x 27 in., Collection of Steve Foust & Nancy Bonoir

Smith’s pictorial imagery often features animals, many of them farmyard familiars such as cows, dogs, roosters, and bulls, often posed before solid, uniform backgrounds. In Untitled (Bull), the centralized image of a snorting bull is outlined against blue sky and green grass barely distinct from one another. The arc of the bull’s body is aptly echoed by the parenthetical curves of the sides of the plywood panel. And the clever, handwritten title affixed to Rooster to Wake One Up, pictures a rooster whose puffed-up body, and ostensibly harsh wake-up cries, literally obliterates most of the blue background.

El De Smith, Rooster to Wake One Up, 1973, paint on matboard, 12 x 13 in., Collection of Jim Chatelain.

Figural representations by Smith include a couple of friendly ghosts, three humanized bears from the children’s story, and several portrayals of that stealthy arch-enemy, the devil, aka Diablo, who is often (if not always) up to no good. In Two Holy Cows, a naked woman and a cow stand in the foreground of a landscape with the sea and a cliff as backdrop. At the far upper right, however, behind another of Smith’s affixed labels reading “Evil Nest,” a devil leers at the scene below, and the age-old story of Susanna and the Elders hoves into view as proverbial prototype.

El De Smith, Two Holy Cows, c. 1972-74, paint on Masonite, 13 x 13 in., Collection of Douglas James.

Another devilish depiction, Untitled (Devil with Painting), is the largest in the exhibition at three feet tall, and is delicately cut from sheet metal. Presented in profile, this lanky devil seems elated as he trots along with a painting under his arm. Has he just completed his latest masterwork, or is he absconding with stolen goods? And true to form, in Untitled (Diablo with Book) the evil villain, teeth bared, hunches threateningly as he grasps his ill gotten treasure while poised atop a green hilltop depicted, somewhat unexpectedly for Smith, with swirling, expressive brushstrokes applied alla prima.

El De Smith, Untitled (Diablo with Book), 1972, paint on hardboard, 18 x 13 in., Collection of Jim Chatelain

Lastly, a human figure captured in a human predicament appears in a scene representing a dejected man bestride a looming chair. Hunched over, with a hand shielding his face, he remains unresponsive as the cartoon rabbit beside him absurdly queries, “What’s up, doc?” The rigid, towering blue chair on which he has collapsed, plus the hot, sultry red hue, vivify the emotional tenor of the setting. Is this perhaps a self-portrait of the artist undergoing a dark night of the soul?

El De Smith, What’s Up Doc, c. 1972-74, Paint on matboard, 17 x 23 in., Collection of Jim Chatelain.

The “paint on matboard” materials that Smith employs in this touching portrayal may have been scavenged and/or furnished by the Cass Corridor entourage, whom he knew and they him, as he dwelt among them. He traveled and camped out with them on occasion before leaving the Corridorian enclave in 1976. Indeed, Foust appreciatively summarizes the rediscovery of Smith’s art, concluding that, “He was a community member and Cass Corridor artist.”

“Twenty works in all were rediscovered for this Trinosophes production co-curated by Rebecca Mazzei and artist Jim Chatelain;  designed/installed by artist Dylan Spaysky.” One hopes that additional works by El De Smith will be located in the future, whether tucked away in the Detroit metro area or found farther afield.

The El De Smith exhibition remains on view through May 25, 2025. Trinosophes is located at 1464 Gratiot Avenue. Parking is available at the front and back of the building. Hours are 10 – 3, Wednesday – Saturday.

 Rachel Ruysch: Nature into Art @ Toledo Museum of Art

By

On May 7, 2025

In Paintings

Rachel Ruysch, Flowers in a Glass Vase, 1704, (collection of Detroit Institute of Art) photo courtesy of Toledo Museum of Art.

Rachel Ruysch (1664-1750), a prolific painter of still life whose canvases combined scientific knowledge with breathtaking beauty, achieved unprecedented fame and acclaim during her long creative career. She was the first woman to gain membership in The Hague painters’ society and was one of the highest-paid artists of her day; her crowning achievement was her appointment as court painter to Duke Wilhelm, Elector Palatine in Düsseldorf in 1708.  Now, in this first-ever major exhibition of her work, “Rachel Ruysch: Nature into Art,” the Toledo Museum of Art, Alte Pinakothek, Munich, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston collaborate to bring her back into focus from recent relative obscurity.

Ruysch was born at the approximate high point of the Dutch colonial empire, when explorers, scientists, and traders created a global network of outposts and colonies, including vast holdings in North and South America, the Caribbean, southern Africa, mainland India, and the Far East. The exhibition celebrates the burgeoning body of scientific knowledge that came with these explorations and contributed to the voracious appetite of the Dutch bourgeoisie for so-called “flower paintings.”

Rachel Ruysch, Flowers in a Glass Vase on a Stone Table Ledge, 1690s, oil on canvas (Krannert Art Museum, University of Illinois-Urbana-Champaign) photo, K.A. Letts

Like many female artists, Ruysch became a professional artist through family connections which, in her case, included numerous prominent scientists, artists and intellectuals. Her father was an especially helpful influence. Frederik Ruysch, a noted anatomist and botanist, was much admired for his life-like taxidermy which included human infants, among other specimens that might now seem bizarre to modern eyes. Ruysch herself assisted in the preparation of these biological and botanical artifacts, an experience that must have proved useful in her later work as a painter of flowers, birds, and beetles. Her father’s lavishly illustrated Thesaurus Animalum (a copy of which is on display in this exhibition) was painstakingly accurate and extravagantly fantastical, vividly showcasing the aesthetic attitudes of an era in which science overlapped seamlessly with religion and art.

In acknowledgement of Ruysch’s budding talent, she was apprenticed at 17 to the well-known still life artist Willem Van Aelst, several of whose paintings are on exhibit here. Her early paintings show that she had absorbed his elegant way with flower arrangement along with an interest in compositional asymmetry.

Rachel’s sister Anna was also an accomplished flower painter, though not nearly as successful as her illustrious older sibling. The two appear to have collaborated with and copied from each other, as can be seen from canvases that share individual elements and sometimes whole compositions. Anna’s obscurity compared to Rachel’s can perhaps be explained by her habit of seldom dating or signing her work.

Clearly many of the artists working in the still life genre felt no compunctions in borrowing from or even copying the work of others. A particularly interesting cross-pollination of Ruysch’s work with her fellow artists is her 1686 painting Floral Still life, in which she copies, verbatim, the right side of Jan Davidsz de Heem’s 1660 painting Forest Floor Still life with Flowers and Amphibians.  De Heem’s composition includes a landscape–complete with ruins–on the left side of the painting (a common compositional device of the time, but one which Ruysch herself seldom employed.)

Michiel van Musscher and Rachel Ruysch, Rachel Ruysch 1664-1750, 1692 oil on canvas, (Metropolitan Museum of Art) photo image: K.A. Letts

As she gained experience, Ruysch’s unique style and superior craftsmanship sparked recognition. Often a strong diagonal ran through her paintings and whiplike stems and tendrils moved the eye around the composition. She placed the lighter colored blossoms in the center of the painting, with darker colors arranged around the periphery, fading into shadow.

Ruysch’s paintings were particularly notable for the many small living creatures that inhabited them. She could almost as easily be called a painter of invertebrates, amphibians and reptiles as a flower painter. Her compositions could be considered pastiche, as many of the flowers and animals depicted would not have co-existed in nature.

The exhibition begins in an octagonal gallery of the museum and features a map of Amsterdam, the port city in which Ruysch lived and worked throughout her life. The location of friends, family and professional peers are included and paint the picture of a closely connected community of like-minded intellectuals and artisans. Nearby, a timeline with dates documenting the artist’s life provides context for her work alongside important historical events of the time.

From there, the design of the exhibition is circular, with paintings arranged around the periphery of the galleries from Ruysch’s earliest canvases alongside artwork by influential fellow artists, through her subsequent, highly successful career and culminating in her appointment as court painter to Duke Wilhelm. A few of her late paintings, equally skilled, but lighter in tone and less ambitious in scale (in line with emerging tastes in the mid 18th century) round out the extensive collection.

Rachel Ruysch, Posy of Flowers, with a Tulip and a Melon, on a Stone Ledge, 1748, oil on canvas (private collection, Switzerland) Photo: K.A. Letts

 An impressive “cabinet of wonders” located in the central gallery gives some idea of the variety of newly discovered plants and animals that fascinated artists of the time and often appeared in their paintings. Preserved specimens of beetles, butterflies, reptiles and amphibians share space with published material describing their physical features and life cycles. There are, as well, drawings and dried specimens of exotic plants such as the carrion flower (Orbea variegata) and devil’s trumpet (Datura metel).

Jurriaen Pool II (Dutch, 1666-1745) and Rachel Ruysch, Juriaen Pool II with Rachel Ruysch and Their Son Jan Willem Pool, 1716, oil on canvas (Stadtmuseum Düsseldorf) Photo: K.A. Letts

Two portraits of the artist are included in the exhibition. In the first, by Michiel van Musscher, with floral additions by the artist herself, was painted in 1692 as Ruysch was becoming well known but not yet at the zenith of her career.  The second, painted by her husband Jurriaen Pool in 1716 (and also including floral painting by Ruysch) was intended as a gift for their patron Duke Wilhelm, though it appears he died before it could be delivered. The child in the picture is Willem, named after the duke, one of the couple’s eleven children–of whom 3 survived.

It would be difficult to overemphasize the esteem in which Ruysch was held during her lifetime, making it all the more puzzling that her reputation fell into eclipse after her death. Johan van Gool’s two-volume survey of prominent Dutch artists, written in 1749, included a comprehensive entry on Ruysch that ran to 24 pages. It was one of the most complete biographies of a female artist prior to modern times and is still the most important source of information on her life and work.

Many enraptured verses were written in honor of the eminent painter, twelve of which were gathered into a volume published posthumously by her son Frederik Pool.  A stanza from a 1749 encomium by Lucretia Wilhelmina van Merken sets the tone:

Why do you, fascinated songstress,

So fix your eyes in marveling raptness

On Rachel’s  art, her divine prowess?

   Thank her for all the work you see…

You’re silent. Is your tongue too weak?

    I understand, yes, Poetry

Is dumb when th’ Art of Painting speaks.

Rachel Ruysch, Posy of Flowers with a Beetle, on a Stone Ledge, 1741, oil on canvas, (Kunst Museum, Basel) photo courtesy of Toledo Museum of Art. 

“Rachel Ruysch: Nature into Art” was recently seen at the Alte Pinakothek, Munich, and will be on view at the Toledo Museum of Art until July 27, 2025. Thereafter, the exhibition travels to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (August 23, 2025-December 7, 2025.) Selldorf Architects is the Toledo Museum of Art’s exhibition design partner for this exhibition. A note: I want to thank my gallery companion-for-the-day, art historian Pam Tabaa, many of whose perceptive observations have found their way into this review.

 Rachel Ruysch: Nature into Art on display at the Toledo Museum of Art, April 12  – July 27, 2025.

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