The main gallery of the Marshall M. Fredericks Sculpture Museum in Saginaw is a forest of white plaster, packed with casts of the ubiquitous Michigan sculptor’s works in varying scales and levels of abstraction. The massive head of The Spirit of Detroit is flanked by similarly epic portraits of Churchill and JFK. Horizontal male and female figures titled Night and Day sail by at just above head height, not far from a row of attenuated figures representing Seven Saints and Sinners. (A long Satanic snake hangs from the hands of the female figure of Temptation.)

Stylized creatures — birds, otters, bears, gazelles — undulate and soar through the gallery, all watched over by an enormous crucified Christ, sans cross. Fredericks has been called “America’s Public Sculptor,” an epithet one doesn’t earn by being overly confrontational or controversial, and indeed there’s nothing much in Fredericks’s cute critters, children’s book scenes, patriotic and religious themes, and writ-large theatricality that might ruffle anyone’s feathers.

Head of The Spirit of Detroit, plaster, Marshall Fredericks, 1958

Frederick’s energetic figurative and narrative sculptures rhyme nicely with the similarly bold, muscular, allegorical works of Detroit-based painter Peter Daniel Bernal, whose exhibition Searching & Finding Hidden Heritage is on display now through May 24. In fact Bernal, who sometimes adopts the pseudonym “Perez,” is currently working on a mural commemorating Fredericks’ work. It’ll be interesting to see how much the mural celebrates the sculptor and to what extent it pushes back against his visions of American progress or benevolent religion. Bernal’s own work, after all, is hardly non-confrontational.

Bernal is Tejano — Mexican American born and raised in southern Texas. Since 2015, he’s lived in Detroit. In between, he studied art in Kansas City, Rhode Island, and Germany. If you want a fuller biography than that, I think you should just come see his paintings. Bernal’s relationships with family and friends, school and religion, art and politics, his health and that of his community, and above all his search for an understanding of his own complex identity, is on display here in vibrant color and vivid imagery.

The Night, oil on canvas, Peter Bernal, 2021

To begin in the middle: about halfway through Hidden Heritage, Bernal quotes, in title and composition, a brutal painting by Max Beckmann, The Night, a scene of home invasion, rape, and lynching. It can’t be a good sign of the times when a contemporary artist can directly reference art of the Weimar era and it resonates all too well with the current climate. (Bernal lived and studied printmaking in Weimar for five years.)

However, in Beckmann’s painting the victims and perpetrators are almost indistinguishable from one another but for their actions, whereas in Bernal’s The Night, the characters are more specific. A Native American man, whose shorn hair lies at his feet thanks to a scissor-wielding, hooded priest, is strung up by his neck by a modern-day policeman, while a conquistador twists his arm. The dying man is painted in realistic flesh tones, but his half-sized attackers are as uniformly tan as the earth they stand on, like plastic toy soldiers or clay golems, making them preternaturally monstrous. The only hopeful elements here are an Indian child who flees the scene in one corner and an emerald green quetzal bird, an ancient symbol of freedom, that flies off into the blood-red sky in the opposite corner. The collapsing of the temporal distance between conquistador and cop is, as the label for The Night bluntly states, Trumpism depicted not as an unusual historical blip but as an acute case of the authoritarianism undergirding so much of the American project.

Critical Thinkers, oil on canvas, Peter Bernal, 2016

Trump is specifically name-checked in Critical Thinkers, an image of two identical clones of an enraged white man, neck veins bulging, who was caught on video hollering racist comments at Latinos during a protest rally. Each of the two figures carries a mirror-image Trump campaign sign in one hand while thrusting a Nazi-style salute with the other (years before Elon Musk would do likewise after Trump’s victory). The two stand in front of a conspicuously orange backdrop. Contrary to the ironic title of the painting, the two men are depicted as mindless group-thinkers overwhelmed by manipulative rhetoric and blind rage.

There’s No High Road In Dealing With Monsters, oil on canvas, Peter Bernal, 2021

Not that Bernal is immune to rage. In one of the most astonishing paintings in the show, There’s No High Road In Dealing with Monsters, a skeletal, demon-like apparition wearing the severed head of Texas senator Ted Cruz as a necklace swoops down onto a desert landscape to snatch a police officer and a border agent. Though realistically rendered, the monster’s wings and headdress are flatly painted in the style of Aztec murals, and it carries a bomb wrapped in its long tail. It’s a violent image, created from anger in the wake of two violent acts — school shootings in Uvalde and Detroit — and while it’s not a prescription for violence, it does question when, as the accompanying label puts it, “complacency becomes complicity” with authoritarianism. One character in another of Bernal’s paintings seems to have decided his own complicity has gone too far; in A Policeman Disgusted With Himself, a uniformed officer vomits up a stream of blood, bones, and mutilated corpses, including one still wearing an orange prison jumpsuit. Lit red from behind, perhaps by the lights of his own cruiser, the officer sports a badge on his sleeve indicating his jurisdiction: “Doesn’t Matter Where,” it reads.

A Policeman Disgusted With Himself, oil on canvas, Peter Bernal, 2021

Deuteronomy 20:14, San Antonio, oil on canvas, Peter Bernal, 2024

Bernal’s narrative scenes sometimes evoke poppier artists of the Juxtapoze magazine school of painting, but only superficially. In his Deuteronomy 20:14, San Antonio, an indictment of biblically sanctioned conquest, a huge infant clasping a rosary and seated on a heap of skulls represents God. Its eyes are shut to the angel-winged cowboy types that flit around its head stealing babies while an Indigenous man burns at the stake in the background, but it raises its hand in blessing nevertheless. Something about the “all-seeing eye” on the baby’s red sash and the composition in general are reminiscent of Mark Ryden’s work. Elsewhere, Bernal’s paintings bring to mind the crazy scenarios of Robert Williams, but those artists’ polished pop wackiness have nothing on Bernal in the content department. Religion is a frequent target of Bernal’s work, specifically its role in indoctrinating and dismantling Native American cultures. In Cuauhtlatoatzin Having an Ocular Migraine, Bernal suggests that the Catholic church’s first Indigenous saint, who allegedly saw a vision of the Virgin Mary, might actually have been suffering from a painful optical disorder (Bernal himself has experienced such migraines). On the other hand, Bernal lays claim to Catholic imagery in two paintings, both entitled Santa Marta La Dominadora. In one, the titular saint, who devoted herself to caring for the sick and the poor, carries a large snake that plucks a combat drone from the sky. In this painting, she is shown in her native Dominican Republic; in an earlier version, she’s seen in hospital scrubs with the Detroit skyline behind her.

Santa Marta La Dominadora, oil on canvas, Peter Bernal, 2020

Firecracker, oil on canvas, Peter Bernal, 2021

There are moments of gentle respite in the show. One is a tender portrait of the artist’s wife, Ellen, seated before a dark backdrop with their black cat, Wilhelmina von Kratzleben, curled up on her lap. Another is Firecracker, in which a smiling Indigenous girl runs with a sparkler in one hand. Beside her runs a smaller figure, an animated sculpture of an Aztec warrior, flicking a lighter. Back in the main gallery, over the entrance, Marshall Fredericks depicts the march of progress in a plaster relief sculpture, a timeline of technology showing Native Americans on horseback inevitably supplanted by covered wagons, trains, automobiles, and airplanes. Bernal knows that technologies like the gunpowder in the child’s sparkler can be harnessed for good, though much of the rest of the work in his show reiterates that progress, to put it entirely too mildly, is a double-edged sword, and its history cannot be whitewashed.

Searching & Finding Hidden Heritage @ Marshall Fredericks Museum. Work by Peter Bernal. Through May 24, 2025.

Leif Ritchey @ David Klein Gallery

By Michael Hodges

On March 10, 2025

In Assemblage / Collage, Paintings

An installation image – Sky Studio at David Klein Gallery in Birmingham, up through April 5, 2025.

Creating the illusion of three dimensions on a flat surface has always been one of the great challenges of the painter’s life, and the development of successful techniques for this was one of the great accomplishments of the Renaissance. Consider, for example, the flat, 2-D look of medieval art, and even works from the early Renaissance where, for all his genius, Giotto’s angels hovering mid-air don’t really look like they’re inhabiting space – they look as if they were pasted on. But 100 years after the Florentine’s 1337 death, artists had made considerable strides in communicating depth and perspective. Among the tools they employed to suggest distance was the use of architectural elements, like the receding arches of the pavilion sheltering the Madonna in Fra Angelico’s Annunciation from 1445.

Leif Ritchey, On the Beach, Latex, acrylic, paper and fabric collage; 84 x 72 inches, 2025

Unsurprisingly, abstract painters have always had a greater challenge in this regard, one that Ann Arbor colorist and musician — he and his father perform in a group called Shades — Leif Ritchey has mastered with unusual finesse. His newest exhibition, Sky Studio at the David Klein Gallery, up through April 5, gives us a series of mesmerizing, multi-hued impasto collages, all created this year, that pull the viewer deep into unexpected dimensions and space.

Consider, for example, On the Beach, a striking work whose vertical black slashes seem to exist in a violent foreground all their own, framing a confusion of elements beyond, ranging from a soft green to a magenta tinged with gray and brown. Everything else on this canvas is at the dull end of the color spectrum, apart from the immensely appealing green that acts a series of exclamation points, drawing one’s eye to various parts of the painting.

Leif Ritchey, Leaked Shadows (Keyed Up Color), Latex, acrylic, paper and fabric collage; 40 x 50 inches, 2025.

A number of Ritchey’s collages have what could be called a central organizing element, as with the black verticals in On the Beach. In the case of Leaked Shadows (Keyed Up Color), a large aqua detail just off center and a slanting “column” to the left with small, sharp-pink explosions, grab the viewer’s eye and won’t let go. Leaked Shadows is one of the most exuberant works on display, and, largely owing to the wide, skewed vertical, also one of the pieces with the most obvious structure to it. It’s a commanding work, one that looks like it ought to be the dominating element in the lobby of some classy corporate office building.

Leif Ritchey, Leaked Shadows (Keyed Up Color) – detail, Latex, acrylic, paper and fabric collage; 40 x 50 inches, 2025.

Impasto, by definition, suggests textured layers of paint, but Ritchey, a self-taught artist who’s exhibited in New York and Europe, carries this to pleasing extremes in this exhibition group. “My process involves layering, imprinting, and excavating,” the artist said this year, “building and removing layers. In doing this, I can weave the collage materials and paint with the energy of the moment.”

Take the image above, that’s found at the very bottom of Leaked Shadows, just off to the right, where greens, dark magenta, tan and silver all collide and appear to buckle under the force of their contrasting tones. Many of these topographical eruptions involve bunched-up paper or fabric covered with thick brushstrokes. But these are almost always minor elements – not huge bulges, as with some artists, but visual footnotes that reveal themselves only on closer inspection.

Leif Ritchey, Plaza Scape, Latex, acrylic, paper and fabric collage; 60 x 50 inches, 2025.

Another collage with obvious structure to it – indeed, almost architectural structure – is Plaza Scape, where a large, dark-crimson irregular square sits atop what could almost be a stone foundation, set in an olive and dun-colored background. The red is so striking, and such an exception to Ritchey’s usual low-key palette, that it virtually jumps off the canvas. Rising up from it is an expanding cloud of blues, greens and yellows that appear to dissipate at the top of the collage.

Leif Ritchey, Ave, Latex, acrylic, paper and fabric collage; 54 x 40 inches, 2025.

Generally speaking, Ritchey avoided geometric shapes in these paintings, preferring amorphous forms with no firm edges. However, on Ave, although the central organizing element is a pock-marked splotch of pink just off-center, two features outlined by straight lines stand out. At the upper left is a sharp right angle defined in shades of blue, while just below it is a slightly slanting grayish-green vertical with a ruler-straight right side. If you’ve walked through most of this captivating show before you come upon Ave, the sudden appearance of these sharp details is likely to startle and surprise.

Leif Ritchey – Sky Studio will be up at Birmingham’s David Klein Gallery through April 5, 2025.

Nightshade: The World in the Evening @ Oakland University Art Gallery

By Michael Hodges

On February 12, 2025

In Paintings

An installation shot of Nightshade: The World in the Evening, at Oakland University Art Gallery through March 30, 2025. All photos courtesy of OUAG except where noted.

Nightshade: The World in the Evening at the Oakland University Art Gallery explores the shadowed world as light declines to dark. It’s a liminal space – not quite here, not quite there — that ushers us into the absorbing night and the “emergence of otherworldliness,” as the introductory panel tells us on entering the gallery. This group show of 18 international contemporary painters will be up through March 30.

Gallery director Dick Goody says he wanted to touch on the ways in which twilight and darkness are spiritually and emotionally different from daylight. “If you’re working during the day, at 11 a.m., you’re not going to start thinking about metaphysics and existence,” he says. “You do that at night. So I introduced nighttime to the gallery as a way to reflect and connect to yourself.”

Sean Landers, Wildfire (Mendocino National Forest), Oil on linen, 2022.

One of the delights of Nightshade is the broad range of painters and painting styles Goody has assembled, ranging from highly realistic to the marvelously simplified or distorted. Probably the most realistic canvas, and certainly the most depressing, is New Yorker Sean Landers’ Wildfire (Mendocino National Forest), a panorama of incineration roaring on both sides of a highway, a thoroughly freaked deer frozen in the middle of the road. Indeed, both Wildfire and the next work below, Willy Lott’s House by Ulf Puder, seem to gesture towards a darker, more metaphorical twilight than just the routine passage from day to night

Landers’ canvas packs special punch right now, just after the Los Angeles fires were mostly contained. But the painting touches on the gloomy, more-disturbing twilight we’re entering, whether we know it or not – the dimming of the mostly generous world humanity has known, give or take, for 10,000-plus years, and its possible replacement by the far more hostile realm of fire and flood.

Ulf Puder, Willy Lott’s House, Oil on canvas, 2022.

Hewing more closely to the show’s focus on the literal shift from day to night is German artist Ulf Puder’s Willy Lott’s House, a much simplified and abstracted portrait of a house with a wrap-around porch under glowering gray twilight. The sky and trees feel vaguely menacing, as does the rowboat and apparent debris pushed up right against the porch. Horizontal reflections running up to the house all around suggest flooding. Somewhat at odds with this downbeat possibility, however, are large blocks of color on the wall running along the porch, which form a small, sublime composition in themselves. Goody calls Puder “a painter’s painter — he really reduces things to simple brush strokes,” resulting in works that Goody characterizes as “austerely elegant.”

Danielle Roberts, Tomb of a Time, Acrylic on canvas, 2024

The previous two works are each essentially landscapes. For something completely different, spend a few minutes in front of New York artist Danielle Roberts’ Tomb of a Time, a glimpse through large windows of a party of young people. Goody notes the voyeuristic quality of the composition – we’re peering in at the party-goers, all of whom are blissfully unaware, cans of beer in hand, that they’re being studied. Adds Goody, “and nobody’s meeting our gaze.” Color-wise, this canvas is almost German Expressionist in its lavish use of aqua and purple-pink on faces and bare arms. The last thing to say about this gathering is that nobody appears to be having a good time. There’s a somber, hip pall hanging over everything that runs against the very notion of party – though, truth be told, we’ve all probably been there.

Goody is bullish on Roberts’ future: “You’re going to hear a lot more about her.

Marcus Jahmal, Illuminated, Oil on canvas, 2023.

And now for something completely absurd – take Marcus Jahmal’s Illuminated, an almost cartoon-like juxtaposition of odd elements: a woman’s leg stuck straight out, horizontal to the floor; a black cat about to hiss; a chandelier and a colorful grandfather clock. Goody suggests that the leg belongs to a Halloween witch, an interpretation that fits well with the black cat who’s arching its back menacingly.

Jahmal, who lives in Brooklyn and is entirely self-taught, also pulls off another nice color study in rectangles of black, mustard and violet that set off the composition’s four elements – leg, cat, chandelier and clock — very nicely. “It’s such a simple painting, but evocative of something a bit like Matisse, with his simplified, reductive forms,” says Goody, adding, “and a little bit of slapstick.”

Hein Koh, The Dark Sea (detail), Oil on canvas, 2024. Photo by Detroit Art Review.

Hein Koh, also Brooklyn-based, gives us the only black-and-white work in Nightshade, as well as the most abstract and geometric. The Dark Sea stars a small, prone figure confronted by the rushing sea. “Koh’s work,” says Goody, “is usually one person or character facing some sort of ordeal,” which would fit this. Constructed in parallel or concentric wavy brush strokes a bit like dark-grey icing, The Dark Sea is a pleasurably mesmerizing visual experience. There’s a rhythm to Koh’s lines. The canvas almost seems to vibrate.

One of the smaller paintings, The Dark Sea is the last in the exhibition, at least if you walk the gallery in the most-obvious way. “It’s not very big, and I think it’s a nice coda for the show,” Goody says, and in that he’s correct. The work is surprising and engaging, and an astringent contrast to all the color that preceded it.

Anna Kenneally, Nocturnal 1, Oil on canvas, 2022.

Nightshade: The World in the Evening will be at the Oakland University Art Gallery until March 30, 2025.

Making Her Mark @ Flint Institute of Arts

By Sean Bieri

On February 1, 2025

In Ceramic, Sculpture, Uncategorized

Clay, of course, has been a fundamental material for both artistic and utilitarian objects for millennia. In Europe, ceramics had long been a masculine pursuit, maybe because digging up clay, feeding fiery kilns, and other physical aspects of the process were deemed too strenuous (or unseemly) for women. After the Industrial Revolution mechanized the manufacture of ceramics, women were employed as “china painters,” adding decorations to factory-made pottery, but weren’t involved in the actual creation of the objects. Once the ideals of the British Arts & Crafts movement — its revolt against industrialization and its emphasis on human-made objects — found their way to the U.S., studios began making ceramics featuring distinctively American designs. Some of these potteries were run by women, and some tutored and encouraged girls to take up ceramics as a vocation. After World War II, women artists emerged as important members of the Studio Ceramics movement, helping their male counterparts to bring the medium fully into the realm of fine art. Now, the Flint Institute of Arts, which boasts an impressive array of ceramics in its permanent collection, presents “Making Her Mark” (through September 28), a smallish but eclectic exhibition of ceramic artworks by women that proves that, released from any obligation to practicality, clay can be an almost endlessly versatile medium for expression.

Evelyn Cheromiah, Olla, Stoneware

Many of the objects in the show do at least nod toward the utilitarian vessels usually associated with ceramics. Evelyn Cheromiah’s Olla, a stoneware pot decorated with geometric earth tone patterns, is perhaps the most faithful piece here, sourced, fired, and painted according to the traditions of the artist’s Laguna Pueblo heritage. English innovator Clarice Cliff’s hand-painted Art Deco “Bizarre” ware is represented by two perfectly functional Fantasque Pitchers, adorned with colorful fruits and a country cottage. Sara Paloma’s jet-black Bottles, with their pencil-thin necks, and Eva Hild’s untitled white porcelain bowl (studded with nails) are at least nominally practical.

Ursula Morley Price, Fountain Plume Form, Stoneware, 2009

Some works demonstrate the medium’s ability to mimic other materials. Ursula Morley Price’s Fountain Plume Form(2009) is a vase-like object made up of thin vertical vanes that resemble a rusting turbine, while Anne Marie Laureys’ Clay-e-Motion looks like a supple, bundled scarf. You’d be forgiven for mistaking Mary Roehm’s porcelain Tea Bowl #1 at first for translucent glass with a metal rim and base, and Lucie Rie’s small conical piece, its thin walls punctured with ragged holes, could pass for a crudely made metal sieve.

Carol Gouthro, Aurlia gouthroii Barnaclette, Porcelain, 2012

Clay lends itself to some delightfully odd biomorphic creations as well, such as Bonnie Seeman’s untitled stalk of rhubarb-like vegetation, its leaves cut away to reveal ruby red pith; the piece recalls similar vegetable- and fruit-shaped teapots and pitchers from the 18th and 19th centuries. Debbie Weinstein’s Vessel is crowned with purple polyps that could be writhing undersea creatures, and Carol Gouthro’s Aurlia gouthroii Barnaclette depicts a weird fictional organism — scientifically named for the artist — with mouth-like pods sprouting from an orange stem, anchored to a mass of purple seashells. More subtle is Chieko Katsumata’s untitled flower-like form, a fleshy, bright yellow blossom, both vivid and ponderous.

Irina Zaytceva, Twins, Porcelain, 2013

Magda Gluszek, Small Pond, Ceramic, 2013

Ceramics can, of course, be figurative, even narrative. Ruth Duckworth’s Black Angel is an elegantly abstracted figure with blunt “wings” and a slender neck supporting a half-circle head that’s part helmet, part halo, with just a suggestion of a face. It recalls both early modernist works and ancient Cycladic sculpture. Irina Zaytceva’s Twins is a small porcelain vessel decorated with delicate, meticulously rendered images of mermaids and other mythical sea creatures, with a stopper resembling branching red coral. Magda Gluszek contributes Small Pond: a pale female figure in a translucent green swimsuit reclines in a sort of kiddie pool made of transparent plastic and what looks like floral upholstery off a 1970s sofa. She’s blowing a party noisemaker, and her blushing skin, hairless eyebrows, and large pointed animal ears suggest she’s some sort of puckish faerie creature, up to some mischief in the human world.

Sara Lisch, Lion’s Journey, Stoneware, 2002

Another fairytale-looking piece, Sara Lisch’s Lion’s Journey, is rich with details that hint at a narrative. A woman dressed as a swimmer, with a monkey seated in front of her, rides astride a lioness wearing a blue collar and a bracelet on one paw. The big cat’s body is perforated to reveal small animals inside its belly. Who these characters are remains mysterious, but the tableau is a beautiful one, painted in blues and browns over a white glaze.

Viola Frey, A Pile of Figurines and Masked Man.

Mariko Paterson, Willow Bago, Porcelain, 2014

Mariko Paterson, who says her works “range from pretty to political,” contributes Willow Bago, a humorous porcelain sculpture with perhaps some serious commentary about imperialism and cultural exchange. It depicts a cartoonishly tall and narrow Winnebago RV, with a cut-n-paste image of Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, smiling from behind the windshield. The white body of the vehicle is decorated with cobalt blue Chinese-inspired images of pagodas, boats, and trees — the “Willow pattern,” as it was known when it became popular in the late 1700s. The RV is made even more precarious by the tourist luggage and Chinese loot piled high on its roof. Britain’s misadventures in China are notorious, so it’s easy to read Willow Bago as a critique, despite the plaque on its roof claiming it commemorates “100 wonderful years” of the Queen Mum.

Viola Frey, A Pile of Figurines and Masked Man

Viola Frey, whose imposing 10-foot tall Arrogant Man stands watch over the FIA’s main ceramics gallery, is represented here by a chaotic bricolage sculpture called simply A Pile of Figurines and a Masked Man that gloms together multiple kitschy ceramic collectibles along with original creations. Among the clutter are what look like a Dutch girl, a bunny, and possibly the Virgin Mary and one of the three wise men, all colored in bright splashes of red, yellow, and blue. Trying to make his way through the jumble is one of Frey’s signature men in suits, either placing a Roman bust on his head or trying to remove it. In Frey’s work, the commercial and fine art traditions of ceramics collide to make an appropriate centerpiece for this wildly varied exhibition.

Making Her Mark on display at the https://flintarts.org through September 28, 2025.

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

By Michael Hodges

On December 31, 2024

In Ceramic, Mixed Media, Sculpture

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Detroit Art Review

Critical art reviews of Detroit galleries and museums weekly

Searching & Finding Hidden Heritage: Work by Peter Bernal @ Marshall Fredericks Museum

Searching & Finding Hidden Heritage @ Marshall Fredericks Museum. Work by Peter Bernal. Through May 24, 2025.

Leif Ritchey @ David Klein Gallery

Leif Ritchey – Sky Studio will be up at Birmingham’s David Klein Gallery through April 5, 2025.

Nightshade: The World in the Evening @ Oakland University Art Gallery

Nightshade: The World in the Evening will be at the Oakland University Art Gallery until March 30, 2025.

Making Her Mark @ Flint Institute of Arts

Making Her Mark on display at the https://flintarts.org through September 28, 2025.

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

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