Year: 2024 Page 2 of 6

An installation view of In an effort to be held, curated by Allison Glenn, and on view at the Shepherd until October 12. Photo: Detroit Art Review

If you haven’t yet been to the Shepherd, the former church at the center of a new cultural complex on Detroit’s east side, you are missing out on one of the most stunning exhibition spaces in the metro area. Happily, In an effort to be held — the handsome second show at the brand-new gallery (it debuted May 18) — provides a compelling reason to push east of Indian Village to the three-acre site just a block off Jefferson. While a few elements have yet to be completed, notably the coffeeshop, the just-hatched Little Village, as the three block complex is called, boasts a bed-and-breakfast aimed at artists (but open to all), a library devoted to books on artists of color, a skateboard park designed by boarding-legend Tony Hawk, and a whimsical outdoor sculpture park with work by the late, great Charles McGee.

The whole complex is the brainchild of Anthony and JJ Curis. The couple, who own Library Street Collective, curated most of Bedrock’s multiple public art installations throughout downtown, including the “animated” alleyway The Belt, the towering Charles McGee black-and-white mural on the north end of Capitol Park, and the dazzling graffiti art on every level of the Z Garage. The interior of the 1912 Romanesque Revival church has been reimagined by Brooklyn’s Peterson Rich Office as a classic gallery “white box,” albeit one that celebrates, rather than fights, the architecture and the luminous stained glass.

The principal addition to the space is a freestanding mezzanine with a dramatic overlook on the now de-sanctified altar. At the center of this platform is a large oculus, maybe five feet across, that looks down on the gallery space immediately below.

Jordan Eagles, Vinci, Grayscale image of Salvator Mundi; Plexiglass, blood of an HIV+ undetectable long-term survivor and activist, and UV resin; 26 3/4 x 19 x 3 inches; 2018. (Subsequent images by Joseph Tiano, courtesy of Library Street Collective and the Shepherd.)

Curated by the Shepherd artistic director Allison Glenn (who grew up just east of her new workplace), In an effort to be held features one spellbinding piece that directly invokes the structure’s ecclesiastical past – Vinci by New York artist Jordan Eagles, who often, brace yourself, works in blood.

The artist generally sources his material from slaughterhouses, but in the case of Vinci, Eagles used the blood of a person with HIV who’s undetectable. The black-and-white photographic reproduction of the Renaissance portrait of Christ, Salvator Mundi (Savior of the World) – attributed to Leonardo da Vinci, though that’s also disputed, Glenn notes — is washed in a rich, even crimson that, softly illuminated from behind, fairly glows. Some may find the material and association disturbing – others, mesmerizingly beautiful. But there’s no question it’s hard to take your eyes off it.

Celeste, La constelación que viene, Pigments and acrylic base on dyed cotton canvas; Variable dimensions, approximately 29 feet x 16 feet; 2023.

At the far west end of the church, you’ll find the altar, stripped of religious objects, and overhead a delightful use of art in an architectural space. It’s an approach that Glenn particularly likes. “I love working with architecture,” she said. “A lot of my career has been working in public space – so when I saw the former church, I saw all the opportunities that existed outside the boxes.” In suspension above the altar, a bit like so many red-dyed clouds, La constelación que viene (The constellation that’s coming) represents the polar opposite mood from Vinci, powerful though that is. There’s a lightness and celebration attached to La constelación by the Mexican City duo Celeste (Fernanda Camarena and Gabriel Rosas Alemán), that uplifts and turns one’s gaze heavenward. It couldn’t fit the space Glenn chose any better if it tried.

Zak Ové, DP70, Vintage cotton doilies; 74 3/4 inches in diameter; 2023

Equally luminous in its way, though much more pointed in its use of color, is London artist Zak Ové’s DP70, a circular, multihued collage made entirely from vintage cotton doilies that, when seen from a distance, bear an uncanny resemblance to what you’d see looking through a rich kaleidoscope. The British-Trinadadian artist is best known for his loony-tunes, Crayola-colored sculptures, two of which were featured at the British Museum’s Africa Galleries last year. And while it’s mostly two-dimensional, DP70 does an astonishing imitation of a symmetrical, richly 3-D work of oddball power. “Hypnotic” is an understatement – yet at the same time, the whole conceit is drop-dead gorgeous. The artist uses a process he describes as “hyperbolic pattern-making,” invoking the masquerades of Canbulay, a Trinidadian harvest festival that came to represent emancipation in the former British colony of Trinidad and Tobago.

Cameron Harvey, Ancestor 26: Ceratonia Siliqua V; Acrylic, graphite, and reflective glass beads on canvas; 109 x 53 inches; 2023.

Another rich exercise in color is found in LA-based Cameron Harvey’s Ancestor 26: Ceratonia Siliqua V, a construction that looks rather like a ceremonial robe that ancient, far-away royalty might have sported. This is sensuous, high-concept work. Harvey rolls over unstretched, shaped canvas liberally strewn with paint that she impresses as she rotates. The deep-green, abstract horizontal image that repeats from bottom to top of the “garment’s” interior – which has a certain primitive mystique – was created by Harvey pressing her forearm repeatedly into the pigment. The artist has had solo shows in, among other cities, Venice, Rome, Chicago and Malibu. Harvey is currently doing a UCROSS residency in Sheridan, Wyoming. In an effort to be held is her first time exhibiting in Detroit.

Manal Shoukair, Seed of paradise, Nylon and pomegranates, Dimensions variable, 2024.

In another clever application of architecture to a work of art, Manal Shoukair – a Lebanese-American artist working in Detroit – suspended beige nylon from the Shepherd’s mezzanine oculus with a dozen or so pomegranates clearly visible at its center. Shoukair, a 2023 Kresge Foundation “Gilda Award” winner (named for the late Gilda Snowden, artist, and College for Creative Studies professor), grapples with Islamic spirituality and issues of “contemporary femininity,” according to her artist’s statement. The pomegranate is considered a sacred fruit in Islamic tradition, and here Shoukair has created – it might as well be said – an all-nourishing breast with pomegranates at its center. That Seed of paradise is visually lined up with the very spot where the cross used to stand on the skeletal altar just makes the composition all the richer.

In an effort to be held – will be on display at the Shepherd in Detroit (above) through October 12, 2024.

Eric Mesko @ Hatch Gallery

By K.A. Letts

On July 24, 2024

In Assemblage / Collage, Drawing, Paintings, Sculpture

Eric Mesko, Self Portraits, 1990, 10” x 15”, acrylic on cardboard.

Disorientation, exhilaration, and amusement are feelings gallery visitors will experience upon walking into Hatch Gallery right now, where work by Detroit artist Eric Mesko is on display. “Eric Mesko Ain’t Dead Yet” is a retrospective of sorts, though not a complete one. Christopher Schneider and Sean Bieri, who curated the exhibition, have selected a generous slice of Mesko’s 50-year output from a rich trove of art and artifacts in the artist’s Ferndale house and studio. Most of the work is from the 1990s and gives a taste, at least, of the preoccupations and style of expression of this artist and activist, whose work was described by Rebecca Mazzei of the Detroit Metro Times in 2005 as “extreme expressionism.”

Eric Mesko, Oil Wars, 1990, 24” x 36” acrylic and oil stick on board.

Mesko’s childhood in the 1940s, as the son of a lieutenant colonel in the Marines, gave him a unique position from which to view the place of America on the world stage, for good or ill. His frequent moves from military base to base, both in the U.S. and worldwide, gave him a global perspective on both his own American identity and world cultures. Though an inveterate natural draftsman from an early age, Mesko didn’t take an art class until his last year in high school. He enlisted in the Marines after graduation and served three years, until 1967, and only began to study art seriously in the late 1980s when he earned both a B.F.A and an M.F.A. from Wayne State University.

Eric Mesko, installation, Exhibition poster (2024), small Uvalde Kid, (n.d.) wood, found objects.

In a 2002 essay on Mesko, Dick Goody, Director of the Oakland University Art Gallery, described his work as “more steeped in the traditions of cartoon comics than twentieth-century art,” a statement that is both accurate and incomplete. While many of the works on paper undeniably reference the visual tropes of comic books, Mesko’s sculptures equally suggest his deep familiarity with Chicago Imagists like H.C. Westermann and with post-World War II folk art traditions such as hand-painted signs and improvised cultural artifacts. He also claims familiarity with, and appreciation for, American regionalists like Thomas Hart Benton, and even names Jackson Pollock and El Lissitzky as influences. In the end it is impossible, and possibly pointless, to describe Mesko as either an insider or an outsider. His work, while encompassing all these influences, has coalesced into its own unique perspective; he is both insider and outsider, a sophisticated thinker making work within a primitivist visual idiom.

Eric Mesko, Batter, (n,d) wood assemblage, found objects,

Eric Mesko, Uvalde Kid, 1998, 30” x 42” x 17” wood, found objects.

Many of the recurring images in the exhibition circle around the identity and meaning of American masculinity. G.I.’s., baseball players and cowboys figure prominently In Mesko’s personal iconography as symbols of American values past and present. The Uvalde Kid, named after one of many childhood homes of the artist, is one of the larger assemblages in the exhibition. Astride his horse and brandishing a pistol, he is a reminder that frontier violence is an enduring feature of the American psyche, recently made immediate by the mass shootings in Uvalde, Texas. The G.I.’s in Mesko’s pictures, too, practice sanctioned violence in furtherance of national goals. Yet they seem helpless, cogs in an oil-fueled war machine. His large acrylic and oil stick painting on panel Oil Wars (1990) and the small wooden tank that sits in front of it, are two of several artworks that reference the wars in Iraq and the U.S.’s historically vexed relationship to the oil economy.

Eric Mesko, Oil Warrior, 1991, 11” x 14,” Ink and watercolor on paper

Lest all of this should appear too grim, let it be noted that many of Mesko’s images and artifacts are comic. In Self Portrait as Lord Greystoke, the artist pictures himself as Tarzan, bemused atop a herd of hippos. In another large painting, Mesko portrays the sculptor Tony Smith in a battle for art supremacy, King Kong vs. Godzilla style. Mesko’s pictures can be light-hearted, even silly, although they often make an ironic point, as in his American Voter drawing.

Eric Mesko, Self-Portrait as Lord Greystoke, 1984., 11” x 14,” ink and watercolor on paper.

The world’s oceans and the fish that swim in them are also favorite images in “Ain’t Dead Yet.” The sculpture Moby Dick (1990, now in the Wayne State University art collection) is a virtuosic evocation, in found materials, of Captain Ahab’s mythic nemesis. The series Jonah and The Whale, ten paintings on vintage New York Times papers, tell what would have been a really big fish story if only there had been newspapers in Biblical times. The altered book Fish or Cut Bait recounts another, more intimate tale of idyllic fishing trips. A large assemblage, Great Fish of Ferndale, anchors the center of the gallery.

Eric Mesko, Jonah and the Whale (series), 1989, acrylic on New York Times

Mesko describes and critiques contemporary mass culture in America as more conformist, more materialistic and more predatory than the local, particularized regional artifacts and architecture of his American childhood in the 1940’s. “I grew up,” he says, “in the last era where idealism still meant something …The innocence of all that is lost but it wasn’t a fake innocence because in the late forties there was still a lot of idealism in the country and somehow that was important to me from an early age.”

Eric Mesko, American Voter, 1992, 9” x 12,” Ink on paper

After the initial shock and awe of encountering Mesko’s extraordinary vision, we begin to understand his unsentimental assessment of America and Americans. He may be a disillusioned patriot, but he retains enough optimism to keep working into his eighties. As he has put it, “We have to face our future head-on and accept our tasks with determination.“ Or, in the parlance of the show’s title, “We ain’t dead yet.”

Hatch Gallery

Hamtramck, MI

https://www.hatchart.org/

July 13 to August 4, 2024

Work from Mexico @ Flint Institute of Arts

By Sean Bieri

On July 9, 2024

In Ceramic, Printmaking

Installation image of FIA exterior

The Flint Institute of Arts is not an enormous museum, but it delivers a big experience. One of the wonders of the FIA is how they manage to do so much in a relatively small space. The museum boasts a dozen galleries featuring a spectrum of objects from across the ages and around the world; notable contemporary glass and ceramics galleries; a showcase-lined corridor devoted to decorative arts; a theater and a sculpture court; and a small gallery between the obligatory gift shop and cafe that sells work made by students from the adjacent art school. At the very back of the building is the Sheppy Dog Library (named for philanthropist Dr. Alan Klein’s golden retriever), a warm, welcoming reading room stocked with reference books and comfy chairs in which to peruse them.

Installation, From Earth To Sky: Ancient Art of the Americas

Of course, there’s generous space given over to large headliner exhibitions, but there’s also a tiny media arts gallery — a “black box” theater designed to show video works. And just in front of the library is the FIA’s graphics gallery, a dark-walled room with subdued lighting, just big enough to comfortably showcase a dozen or so prints or drawings. All three of these spaces are currently hosting art created by Mexican artists, featuring work that spans two millennia. In the main galleries is the exhibit From Earth To Sky: Ancient Art of the Americas, showcasing ceramic figures and objects from the collection of a Texas oil magnate. The graphics room offers Mexicanidad, a portfolio of twelve prints created by El Taller de Gráfica Popular, a progressive-minded, Mexico City-based printmaking collective founded in 1937. And in the Security Credit Union Media Arts Gallery, they’re showing Pocha Dream, an eleven-and-a-half minute excerpt from the Dream Machine Archive, a “psychodynamic audio and video tool” designed by artist Natalia Rocafuerte to help immigrant women interpret their dreams. (Rocafuerte grew up around the Mexico/Texas border, and became a naturalized US citizen in 2019.)

Ted Weiner was a second-generation oil man who threw himself and a chunk of his fortune into art collecting in the 1950s. He acquired an impressive array of modernist works, as well as a large collection of indigenous Mexican sculptures, which were experiencing a vogue at the time. He was noted for his “catholicity of taste” — which could be taken as a backhanded compliment. But Weiner’s collection of pre-Hispanic ceramics was of such quality that when his daughter offered the complete set to the FIA after his death, the museum (after doing due diligence) gladly accepted it.

Jalisco, Ancestor Pair, ca. 200 BCE – 200 CE Ceramic

Many of the pieces on display here are smallish terracotta figures or vessels from the Nayarit, Jalisco, and Colima regions of western Mexico, created to be buried along with deceased members of elite families, in underground tombs beneath a family’s home. The tombs were accessible by shafts, and often contained the remains of several of a family’s ancestors. To modern eyes, the figures depicted by the sculptures might seem enviably relaxed and relatable: seated on stools, sitting arm-in-arm, smoking, or leaning back with legs spread as if lounging on the beach. But the elaborate jewelry, scarifications, tattoos, headwear, and other features on these figures indicate prestige and authority handed down through ancestral bloodlines. Male-and-female couples sitting side by side are thought to represent the ancestral progenitors from whom a family’s elite status flowed. Some figures have abstracted features to emphasize rank over individual likenesses. Elsewhere in the exhibit, other walks of life are represented; most dramatic are the shaman warriors, dressed in cylindrical armor and outsized helmets, and brandishing clubs. Everyday activities such as playing ball, preparing food and medicines, and giving birth are depicted as well.

Colima, Dog, ca. 200 BCE – 200 CE Ceramic

Dogs were a favorite subject of these sculptures, and ceramic canines were common in the tombs. They’re undeniably cute; one small dog on display here is flopped with its legs splayed out, and another boasts a rotund belly, toothy grin, and even an anatomically correct backside that will charm any dog person. For ancient Mexicans, these dogs held spiritual significance as well; they may have acted as guides for the deceased into the underworld, valued companions in death as they were in life. The chubby “Colima Dog” has since become iconic of the region, and its image has been adopted by contemporary Mexican artists such as Guillermo Ríos Alcalá, whose monumental version of a pair of the dogs dances over a traffic circle in Colima, part of an ongoing process of re-establishing connections to pre-Hispanic culture.

Mexicanidad, Installation view

The concept of Mexicanidad (essentially, “Mexican-ness”) links the ancient works in the main gallery with modern ones in the FIA’s print gallery via the post-revolutionary nationalist movement by that name. Most often associated with the mural projects of “Los Tres Grandes” — Orozco, Siqueiros, and Rivera — the Mexicanidad movement had an important printmaking aspect as well, rooted in the social commentary of predecessors such as José Guadalupe Posada. While the “Big Three” educated the people on progressive issues with large-scale public wall paintings, the printmaking collective El Taller de Gráfica Popular (TGP) took the opposite tack: creating small, accessible, and affordable artworks, though still with powerful leftist political messaging. The portfolio displayed here, simply titled “Mexican People,” comprises a dozen lithographs produced in 1946 by TGP for the purpose of promoting Mexican products in the United States.

Alberto Beltrán, The Sugar Mill, 1946 Lithograph

Alfredo Zalce, Lumber Workers, ca. 1945 Lithograph

American ex-pat artist Pablo O’Higgins (FKA Paul Higgins before becoming an assistant to Diego Rivera) contributes two prints, one of a man and child stacking bricks, and another of an older woman selling her wares at market. O’Higgins employs heavy, sinuous lines that lend his subjects both muscularity and grace. Alberto Beltrán’s image of a man feeding sugar cane into a donkey-driven mill is as elegant as it is diagrammatic, concisely describing the process in a masterfully composed image. Alfredo Zalce’s litho of a lumber operation is similarly beautiful, the arc of a precariously balanced worker’s saw echoing that of reddish logs, splayed like fingers and bobbing in blue-green water. Francisco Mora depicts a silver miner, hunched and approaching the viewer in a claustrophobic tunnel, but not alone — his companions are visible laboring in the background. Though the prints in the “Mexican People” portfolio were intended for a US audience, they nevertheless evince the TGP’s populist concerns; for a campaign promoting export products, the images here pointedly privilege the laborers, their tools and their environments over the products themselves (in much the way Rivera emphasizes the auto manufacturing process over actual cars in his Detroit Industry murals).

Natalia Rocafuerte Pocha Dream, 2021 Lithograph

Inspired by Jungian analysis, which posits that dreams are the way the unconscious communicates with the conscious mind, artist Natalia Rocafuerte set up a hotline, complete with ads featuring cheesy late-night infomercial style graphics, encouraging immigrant women from Detroit and South Texas to call in and answer a survey about their dreams. From these reports, Rocafuerte created short films interpreting the dreams, done in a chaotic, disjointed video collage technique that echoes dream logic: overlapping images, snippets of random advertisements and social media videos, computer games, songs and other pop ephemera.

Natalia Rocafuerte Dream of Emma and Tony, 2021 Lithograph

The eleven-and-a-half minute clip featured at FIA is entitled Pocha Dream, a reference to a (somewhat joking) slang term for Mexicans who’ve lost their Spanish, and perhaps their culture — who have “changed color,” like a rotting fruit (so explains the robotic voiceover that opens the video). The clip includes Dream of Emma and Tony, a short that got Rocafuerte named Best Michigan Filmmaker at 2021’s Ann Arbor Film Festival. In Emma and Tony, Rocafuerte recounts a dream encounter with her normally reclusive (and deaf and blind) grandmother. As she talks, home movies of the older woman are intercut with a face-constructing computer program from the Sims game, as if Rocafuerte’s mind was casting about trying to build a memory of her Abuela. Nostalgic TV ad jingles and graphics from news programs occasionally interrupt the story. The scene somehow segues to an elevated train, traveling first through a Chicago-esque cityscape, then into the desert of west Texas. Along for the ride are an annoying white tourist, and SnapChat denizen and self-described “ladies man” Tony Johns, who hoots and drops inane life advice. Obnoxious as Johns seems, Rocafuerte finds herself admiring his self-confidence. The desert gives way to a meadow just before the dream abruptly ends.

Aside from noting their common origins from Mexican artists, it might be a bit fraught to suggest there are common threads running between 2,000-year-old clay figurines, 78-year-old lithographs, and a Covid-era short film. Suffice to say that the artworks in each exhibit address, and dignify, the quotidian concerns of the artists and their subjects. Those concerns may be personal or political, practical or spiritual, and sometimes all of the above.

From Earth To Sky: Ancient Art of the Americas – On view now through August 25

Mexicanidad – On view now through September 8

Dream Machine Archive: Pocha Dream –On view now through July 31

Kinship: The Legacy of Gallery 7 and From Scratch: Seeding Adornment @ MOCAD

By K.A. Letts

On July 2, 2024

In Ceramic, Mixed Media, Paintings

**Kinship: The Legacy of Gallery 7 and From Scratch: Seeding Adornment, New Work by Lakela Brown @ Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit**

Visitors to MOCAD this summer will have four new shows to enjoy, each adding a facet to the kaleidoscopic multicultural Detroit art scene. At the entrance to the museum, we find “Kinship: The Legacy of Gallery 7.” It’s a collection of significant objects and images providing a window into the art world of the late 1960’s, post-rebellion, when African American artists in Detroit achieved a collective sense of themselves and their purpose. Next, Lakela Brown’s first solo museum show “From Scratch: Seeding Adornment,” looks to a future that explores Black experience through racially specific foodways and styles of personal adornment. Drawing our attention out to the broader landscape, Meleko Mokgosi , a Botswanan artist and academic now living in the U.S., provides a scholarly examination of Black artists as they have seen themselves and are seen by others through the lens of colonialism and diasporic history. Lastly, in Mike Kelly’s Mobile Homestead, museum visitors will find a more informal conversation among the city’s artists, curators, and administrators on the collaborative nature of art presentation.

With apologies to the creatives responsible for “Zones of Non-Being” and “Word of Mouth,” and meaning no disrespect, l will concentrate here upon the artists represented in “Kinship” and “From Scratch. “

Kinship: The Legacy of Gallery 7

Those with a particular interest in the art history of Detroit and of the African American artists working in abstraction in particular, will have the pleasure of seeing a selection of work by some of the city’s most significant practitioners, many represented by the iconic Gallery 7, which showed outstanding work by Black (male) artists from 1969-1979. (In a spirit of retrospective reparation for past gender discrimination, Abel Gonzalez Fernandez, the curator of the exhibition, has also tactfully included work by several contemporaneous female artists, Elizabeth Youngblood, Gilda Snowden, and Naomi Dickerson.)

Fernandez has done an admirable job of telling the story of this seminal period in the city’s art history by employing a small, but choice, selection of artworks begged and borrowed from collectors, the artists themselves or their estates. A welcome bonus is a newspaper-style publication accompanying the exhibition, which includes a well-researched and written short history of the gallery by the curator. The compilation of contemporary press coverage that accompanies his essay goes a long way toward explaining the excitement that accompanied the art that was shown there during the gallery’s ten-year existence. It is also a melancholy reminder of how much the art audience lost when intelligent art journalism in Detroit’s mainstream newspapers ceased with the advent of the Internet.

Lester Johnson (b. 1937) The Sorceress and the Dreamtime Spirits, 1974, installation: wood, fabric, vegetal fiber, feathers, bells. All images courtesy of K.A. Letts

Several of the artists in “Kinship” take inspiration from African artifacts. One of the show’s highlights is The Sorceress and The Dreamtime Spirits (1974) 9 wall-mounted sculptures by Lester Johnson that mimic the form of West African ceremonial objects. The long rods made of found branches and poles are fabricated and decorated with industrial and post-industrial materials, a process Johnson describes as “creating a hybrid product between ancestors and urban present.”

Elizabeth Youngblood (b. 1952) Loop 8, 2015, porcelain and wire.

Loop 8, by Elizabeth Youngblood, subtly references Black personal adornment, a recurring theme in the art of female African Americans, as we see in Lakela Brown’s nearby solo show. (But more on that later.) Using the simplest means of expression, wire, and barely modeled porcelain clay, Youngblood teases out tremulous but insistent meaning from humble materials.

Harold Neal, a major figure in the Black Arts Movement of the 1970’s, is represented in “Kinship” by Brotherhood, a medium-sized, text-heavy artwork that wears its racial advocacy on its sleeve. The artist’s work, through the 1960’s and 1970s when Gallery 7 was in operation, was figurative and militantly political. As a movement leader, he led a faction of Black creatives whose radical work was in tension, if not in opposition, to the more cerebral concerns of his fellow gallery artists. (A recently published history of this group, “Harold Neal and Detroit African American Artists: 1945 through the Black Arts Movement” by Julia R. Myers, is available from Amazon.)

Harold Neal (1924-1996) Brotherhood, n.d., oil on board.

The art practice of the Gallery 7 artists focused primarily on their own personal experience as African Americans, or as gallery founder Charles McGee explained, “My roots are in America, and the ideas I deal with as an artist come out of this time and place.” McGee occupies a special position in Detroit’s art history. In addition to his importance as the force behind Gallery 7, he was an influential arts educator and a leader in the African American art community. Many of his public artworks can be seen throughout the city, and his importance was recently acknowledged by a posthumous survey of his work in the newly opened Shepherd in Detroit’s Little Village. Ring Around the Rosy, an early McGee work from the 1960s, is a tantalizing glimpse of the artist’s figurative work before he moved in a less conventional direction.

Charles McGee (1924-2021) Ring Around the Rosy, ca 1950’s, oil on board.

Allie McGhee, a significant Detroit artist honored by a major retrospective in 2022 at Cranbrook Art Museum, is represented here by a couple of lively abstract paintings. The Artist in his Studio (1973) is chromatically subdued, allowing the gestural line to take center stage. His recurring use of a personal icon, the banana moon horn, was first seen during his tenure at Gallery 7 and continues in his current work, a personal, idiosyncratic emblem of ancestral energy brought from the past into the present. Coco Blue (1984), a more colorful cousin to The Artist in His Studio, is typical of McGhee’s later work and exhibits the exuberant presence typical of his paintings.

Allie McGhee (b. 1941) Artist in the Studio, 1973, mixed media on Masonite.

Allie McGhee, Coco Blue, 1984, mixed media on Masonite.

Album, a self-portrait by Gilda Snowden, is a psychological and physical evocation of the artist, an embodiment of her tempestuous and elusive power. Her unexpected and premature death in 2014 cut short a promising career, but this painting preserves her positive presence. It is an enduring influence she shares with the eminent artists represented in “Kinship.”

Gilda Snowden (1954-2014) Album, 1989, oil on canvas.

Artists represented in “Kinship: The Legacy of Gallery 7” Namoi Dickerson, Lester Johnson, Charles McGee, Allie McGhee, Harold Neal, Gilda Snowden, Robert J. Stull, Elizabeth Youngblood. June 28-September 8, 2024

From Scratch: Seeding Adornment

LaKela Brown describes her first solo museum show, “From Scratch: Seeding Adornment,” as a love letter to her community. “I want to center culturally significant objects that challenge and hopefully correct historic […] notions of value and taste while loving the brilliance and ingenuity of my community,” she explains. Brown practices a kind of archeology in reverse—preserving present cultural artifacts for future appreciation rather than searching for ancient objects to excavate and exploit. She is looking forward rather than back.

Lakela Brown, Parts and Labor (Eight Collard Green Leaves, Five Hands) 2024, urethane resin.

Brown, who grew up in West Detroit, has filled two large galleries at MOCAD with resin and plaster casts of foods specifically related to the culture of the Black diaspora and objects of personal adornment, particularly doorknocker earrings. The materials she uses to create these artworks are well-known to artists and lend an air of elegance and permanence by their association with classical museum casts.

Lakela Brown, Doorway to Adornment, 2024, site-specific installation, urethane resin.

The first gallery features resin casts of vegetables– collard greens, corn, okra–artfully arranged on the gallery walls in square formats. In a surreal touch, and in tribute to her matriarchal connections, the artist tucks barely visible casts of the delicate hands of her grandmother, Evelyn Helen Brown, in among the vegetables. Though the usual designation for artworks featuring food is still life, these pieces, in the formality of their presentation and their low-relief arrangement on a rectilinear base, seem to be more architectural in nature. In particular, the ruffled edges of the collard greens call to mind decorative rococo details one might see in an 18th-century European drawing room. Brown makes the comparison explicit with the site-specific row of cast collard greens installed over the doorway to the second gallery, Gateway to Adornment (2024). With her casts of ethnically specific doorknocker earrings, chain necklaces, and other ornaments to the body—including casts of crowned teeth—Brown taps into a rich vein of visual associations she shares with many of her contemporaries. A case in point is the work of Tiff Massey, now on view at the DIA, which features hair ornaments—oversized ponytail ties and enormous replicas of Snaptite Kiddie Barrettes, as well as an entire wall of hair weaves. The exhibition’s curator, Jova Lynne, who also shares many of Brown’s creative interests in her own work, says, “Lakela’s practice is a mirror to Black legacies that encourage people across the diaspora, including myself, to take pride in reflections of home…In her work, I see the cultivation of land, the preservation of adornment, and the production of artworks acting as ledgers of Black life.”

Lakela Brown, Coverall Composition with Doorknocker Earrings. , Gold (2023) plaster

The exhibitions on view now at MOCAD emphatically demonstrate the interrelated nature of the art community in Detroit, a true commonwealth of creatives who share philosophies, exchange materials and cross-pollinate cultures. Born of common experience, each collection of artworks forms part of a contrapuntal melody–or maybe a jazz improvisation–of mutually reinforcing themes which flow from one gallery to the next and out into the city.

Kinship: The Legacy of Gallery 7 and From Scratch: Seeding Adornment @ MOCAD

Sharon Que @ MATE’RIA Gallery

By Ron Scott

On June 13, 2024

In Assemblage / Collage, Metal, Mixed Media, Sculpture

Sharon Que, Installation image. All images courtesy of DAR

Born Sharon Querciograssa, Sharon Que opened a new exhibition at the MATE’RIA Gallery on June 8, 2024, with constructed reliefs that rest on the wall, keeping the viewer engaged through exotic material, illustrated line drawings, and intriguing compositions. Que refreshingly sets her oeuvre apart from mainstream American sculpture. Her eclectic collection of disparate objects first confronts the viewer with an aesthetic experience, followed by a precise, calculated, measured, and intellectually investigated, sometimes having scientific connotations.

Sharon Que, Pollination, Mahogany, Plywood, Pine, Gold Leaf 20x31x3.75″

In Pollination, the wooden grid pieces are divided into two fields; squares of solid stained mahogany are juxtaposed against laminated squares of like-sized pine, punctuated with a spill of protruding star-like objects painted and covered with gold leaf. We are left be-dazzled in wonder, in awe of the precision with which the squares are made and arranged.

In an essay by Mary Ann Wilkinson, the former curator at the Detroit Institute of Arts, she says, “Que has been making objects for more than thirty years. She credits her awakening as an artist as a consequence of her eye-opening travels to Italy, Greece, and Turkey in the mid-1980s. Que’s deft combinations of physical elements often lead viewers to overlook the subtle emotional undercurrent of her work. Often, the mood seems to be melancholy, evoked by dark coloration, a sense of being anchored or bound, or a suggestion of emotional ambivalence.”

Sharon Que, Roller Coaster, Steel, Wood, Gold Leaf, Paint 29x36x15″ 2024

In Roller Coaster, Que finds a used wooden frame, creates an imaginary metal circular structure, and places it in the upper half of the composition, where it rests and comes forward. The simple line drawing acts as a side view, which we might perceive as an elevation view.

In her statement, she says, “There is a scaffolding system that exists for each of my sculpture exhibitions made up of the interactions with people, nature, music, and art that I have come across accidentally or made great efforts to experience. My imagery can take the form of data visualization algorithms. Algorithmic operations describe motion and growth; data visualization aims to reduce the clutter to make complex data more accessible.”

Sharon Que, I’ll Watch Over You, Wood, Birch Bark, Paint, Gold Leaf, 2024

Those familiar with Sharon Que’s work will notice motifs that often reoccur. In “I’ll Watch Over You,” the squares of wood appear with a drawing of a previous oval sculpture on the left (Dear Mr. Fantasy), and the repetition of a line matrix forms a field on the right side. In addition, she is repeatedly drawn to using the same tree bark as a background (Birch) while finding comfort in a band of colored strips next to her geometric field of circular shapes.

Sharon Que, That Long Lonely Highway, 9.5×16.5X2.25″ Wood, Birch Bark, Paint, Gold Leaf, 2024

In an interview with Sharon in 2014, I asked her about influences in her work, and she responded by talking about walks in the woods and at the beach; she said, “I was working simultaneously with magnetic sand from Lake Michigan and a two-dimensional image of the field of force around a magnet. In retrospect, it seems obvious to put the two together, but the obvious sometimes evades me.” In response to a question about her family, she says, “Some of my ancestry goes back to Emilia Romagna in Italy, where Ferrari, Maserati, and Lamborghini all originated. Before that, in ancient times, this region was inhabited by Etruscans, the undisputed masters of bronze casting.”

Simone DeSousa, the gallery owner, says that Sharon Que approaches her work from a triad of content, material, and technique, looking for synergy among the three. She uses recurring images from nature and geometry to reveal her own “coded inner life.

My personal experience with Sharon started when she was a middle school student at Shelby Jr. High School. She was taking my art class, and there was a brief introduction to ceramics. It was her turn after I did a rather crude demonstration of using the electric potter’s wheel. She dropped a large clump of stoneware down, centered the clay without effort, and pulled a beautiful, perfect cylinder with ease. At that moment, it was clear the teacher became the student.

It is hard to place Que’s work in a historical context. Still, in some ways, her work reminds me of the work of Joseph Cornell, a collector of objects with ambiguous meanings and mysterious connections. In both Que and Cornell, their work becomes a metaphor for their lives.

Transcending a simple literal reading, Que’s work explores the mysterious link between the known and the unknown. In each piece, she dips into her trove of life experience and formulates an expression that is exclusively hers, a very personal sensibility, and original.

Sharon Que earned a BFA from the University of Michigan in 1986. Her works are part of the permanent collection at the Detroit Institute of Arts and the public sculpture on the campus of Oakland University. She has also exhibited in Venice, Italy, San Francisco, and Chicago and extensively in the metro Detroit area.

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