Detroit Art Review – Critical art reviews of Detroit galleries and museums weekly

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

On May 30, 2025

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 Sean Bieri

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 Dennis Nawrocki

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 K.A. Letts

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 18^th 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.

Menagerie and Descriptive Intuition @ BBAC

By Michael Hodges

On April 15, 2025

In Mixed Media, Paintings, Sculpture

An installation shot of Jackson Wrede’s Menagerie at the Birmingham Bloomfield Art Center. It and a companion show, Descriptive Intuition by James Kaye, will be up through May 1.

Two lively shows by Michigan artists at the Birmingham Bloomfield Art Center up through May 1 — James Kaye’s Descriptive Intuition and Menagerie by Jackson Wrede — offer up a refresher course in the relative power of abstraction vs. figurative art. Side by side, the two exhibitions make for punchy viewing. Passing from one into the other is both stimulating and invigorating.

On entering BBAC, you’ll find yourself descending several steps into Jackson Wrede’s Menagerie in the center’s airy and spacious DeSalle Gallery. The lighting design in the room is particularly dramatic, and singles out Wrede’s individual color-packed works in ways that make them pop off the walls. See if you can resist their pull – the betting is you can’t. Wrede, who lives in Grand Rapids and is a graduate of the Kendall School of Art and Design, has remarkable skills in the hyperrealist realm, but these are not soulless, technical exercises. The face of the young woman in Girl Wearing Fur, for example, conveys an almost palpable sense of emotional depth.

Jackson Wrede, Girl Wearing Fur, Oil on linen panel, 24 x 18 inches.

It has to be said that Wrede’s oeuvre is both wide and impressively ecumenical, ranging from the sensitive portrayal above to an equally compelling picture of electric-green iguanas sharing a very private moment. Or consider Wrede’s take on the Mona Lisa, sporting a pair of hyper-developed, Arnold Schwarzenegger arms. Truth be told, in Mona Lifta (note the distinction), she looks even more pleased with herself than usual. But credit Wrede with precision: Everything above the icon’s shoulders is exactly as it is in Da Vinci’s original, even down to the pastoral landscape behind the subject that appears to be happening at two dramatically different levels. Overall, the portrait is great fun, shot through with absurdity and humor. Bring the kids. They’ll love it.

Jackson Wrede, Mona Lifta, Oil on canvas, 20 x 14 inches.

In a 2023 interview with the online British magazine, “Behind the Artist,” Wrede said that despite the classical formality of many of his pieces, he pretty much goes on gut instinct.

“So many artists have rules or templates they think about when composing an image—the rule of thirds, the Golden Ratio, we’ve heard them all,” he said. “I don’t use any of those really. Perhaps they accidentally come out in my work sometimes, but I think the main question you have to ask yourself is, ‘Does this look cool?’” And certainly, in the case of the self-portrait below, with its cartoon aesthetic, the answer pretty much has to be “Yes.”

Jackson Wrede, Self-Portrait in a Cowboy Hat, Oil on linen panel, 24 x 18 inches.

Detroiter James Kaye plows a completely different furrow than Wrede. Most of Descriptive Intuition in BBAC’s Robinson Gallery falls into the abstract-expressionist basket, and these works are rendered with a certain, for lack of a better word, forcefulness. They certainly command attention. And the level of technical skill and detail the College for Creative Studies grad deploys is daunting. Consider Dissecting Escape, somewhat more monochromatic than many of the works on display here, with its dozen-odd horizontal canvas strips sewn together and then painted in highly textured relief. The acrylic and enamel are applied in seemingly slapdash fashion, built up in layers and punctuated by small dots of strong red. The upshot is the piece reads as both free form and, with all those parallel stitched lines, oddly structural at the same time. It’s a gratifying juxtaposition.

James Kaye, Dissecting Escape (detail), Canvas, foam, acrylic paint, enamel paint, steel.

Kaye, a College for Creative Studies graduate, has snagged one long wall for his Fingertips 1-24 series, a parade of two dozen identically sized abstracts clearly painted with gusto and starring strong splotches of color. The individual works are charming, but it’s the visual power of all 24, marching across the wall two by two, that makes it such a magnetic sight.

James Kaye, Fingertips 1-24, Enamel paint, glue, acrylic paint.

Kaye doesn’t confine himself just to painting. He’s also got a small collection of sculptures and vessels on display, which have every bit as much authority as the canvases. Intriguingly, his bowls are all crafted from turned wood, despite looking for all the world like they were highly glazed works created on a potter’s wheel. Consider Flying, a warm, maple vessel that features a wood-grained base partly painted over in strong gray, black and white circles. The aesthetics of the sharply outlined dots stand in contradiction to the veined wood, yet the combination of the two is both peculiar and pleasing – about the best any artist could hope for.

James Kaye, Flying, Spalted maple, enamel paint, epoxy.

**Two exhibitions will be at the Birmingham Bloomfield Art Center through May 1, 2025: Jackson Wrede’s Menagerie and James Kaye’s Descriptive Intuition.**