Critical art reviews of Detroit galleries and museums weekly

Author: Dennis Nawrocki Page 1 of 4

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

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 Mazzie 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.

The Tyranny of Small Decisions @ Galerie Camille, Detroit, MI

Galerie Camille, Exhibition – The Tyranny of Small Decisions Installation (photo by R Standfest)

Houses loom, and factories downsize at the Galerie Camille in a two-person exhibition of new work by Detroiters Jeanette Strezinski and Ryan Standfest. Enigmatically titled “The Tyranny of Small Decisions,” each artist homes in on a familiar structure redolent of domesticity, work, harmony, catastrophe, safety, loss, reminiscence, oppression, and so on. Entering the gallery, one quickly senses the heady frisson generated by the installation of diametrically divergent works on opposite walls. Stark differences in size and palette, from Strezinski’s monumental black and white paintings to Standfest’s small-scale, multicolored compositions of muted pink, magenta, blue, yellow, and green, draw the visitor back and forth across the space. Media differentiates the work of each artist as well: her tactile, mixed media surfaces (oil, stain, resin, fabric, and construction materials on canvas) and his nubby, textured acrylics on wood panels.

Jeanette Strezinski, Crevices, 2023, Oil paint, stain, resin, fabric, mixed media on canvas, 8 x 9 ft.

Strezinski’s outsize images might be described as documentaries of houses in evolving states of being. Initially, they appear abandoned and ruined, but in reality, several discernible structures overlap one another. In Crevices, at least three gables are superimposed and combined with an unfurnished room at the left. Perhaps renovation is underway with multiple options sketched in by an architect. Like other of her compositions on view, Crevices is built up through a layering of building materials that yield a scratchy, corrugated surface, while its evocative title implies a hint of danger lurking within.

Jeanette Strezinski, Come Home, 2024, Oil paint, stain, resin, fabric, mixed media on canvas, 7 x 7 ft.

Another sizable image on view is labeled Come Home, its titular overtones expressing a plea to return to the traditional, double-gabled house seemingly floating in space. Also visible, however, is a gridded skylight addition at right and deck at left that suggest remodeling and/or deconstruction, as well as an overlapping horizontal ranch house stretched out at the bottom of the white outline that envelopes the artist’s centralized image.

Jeanette Strezinski, Leave The Light On, 2024, Oil paint, stain, resin, fabric, mixed media on canvas, 36 x 48 in.

Leave The Light On, a smaller canvas by Strezinski, is the darkest of her paintings, in which an illuminated window at left glows with yellow light. It alludes affectingly to other iterations of the title in songs and texts that likewise refer to a lighted window as a beacon of home, hope, human presence–or absence.

Ryan Standfest, A System of Love, 2024, acrylic on wood, 16 x 20 in. (photo by artist)

Unlike the frontal impact of Strezinski’s looming houses, Standfest’s modestly sized, framed, precisely rendered images on the other side of the gallery feature the factory as the potent focal image. Presented from a bird’s eye point of view, A System of Love depicts an industrial complex of identical structures topped with identical smokestacks rendered in magenta, pink, green, red, and blue. The tidy, rust-free environment is abuzz with blank speech balloons linking various buildings and workers therein. Are they textless because the workers have nothing to say to one another or because they uniformly echo the prescribed messages of an industrialist’s point of view?

Ryan Standfest, A Perfect Engine of Longing, 2024, acrylic on wood panel, 14 x 11 in. (photo by RD Rearick)

As the series develops, Standfest’s silent, anonymous factories are personified, enlarged, and activated, becoming engaged in capitalist machinations. In A Perfect Engine of Longing, the smokestack, like a dagger, pierces a green hillside, further despoiling the surrounding landscape of wizened shrubs and trees.

Ryan Standfest, A Personification of Romantic Fiction, 2024, acrylic on wood panel, 14 x 11 in. (photo by RD Rearick)

 

And in A Personification of Romantic Fiction, an agile, upside-down factory births another. The newborn, white-hued “infant,” devoid of a full complement of windows and doors like those of its green and blue factory “mother,” connotes the future. More such birthings will produce X number of manufacturing centers ad infinitum. In his artist’s statement, Standfest warns that these “terrible buildings manifest our capacity for creation and catastrophe.”

Ryan Standfest, Company n. 2, 2024, Mixed media, 14 x 9 x 5 in. (photo by RD Rearick)

 

Detail of Company n. 2, (photo by RD Rearick)

Standfest’s oeuvre also includes a series of miniaturized sculptures of industrial buildings, as in Company n. 2, one of four displayed in the show. Each is composed of a rectangular enclosure and tall exhaust element, appears to be abandoned, and exhibits worn, mottled surfaces of various hues, as in the black and rusty red patina of n. 2. One also discovers in the empty window and door apertures, tiny, prone figures, perhaps resting, exhausted, or comatose.

In short, Strezinski and Standfest’s fraught, complicated depictions of vital human habitats, such as homes and factories, address mutual concerns despite their quite distinctive styles of art. As Strezinski observes, in a statement pertinent to both, “My paintings represent dwellings designed for safety and comfort that eventually break down.”

“The Tyranny of Small Decisions” featuring Ryan Standfest and Jeanette Strezinski” remains on view at Galerie Camille through Nov. 29, 2024. The gallery is located at 4130 Cass Avenue in Midtown Detroit.

 

Michael E. Smith @ What Pipeline

Michael E. Smith, Installation view:  What Pipeline, 2024. Courtesy of the artist, Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York, and What Pipeline, Detroit. – Photos: Alivia Zivich

Entering the dimly lit, modestly scaled, rectangular space that features the Michael E. Smith exhibition at What Pipeline gallery, shy of a single object festooning the walls, a visitor might wonder where they have landed. Sparsely furnished with six red velvet armchairs (c. 1950s?) pushed flat against the walls and arranged asymmetrically around the space, they are conspicuously worn, discolored, and stained.

Michael E. Smith, Untitled, 2024, tape, plastic, LEDs, 4 x 4 x 29.5 in.

Providing dusky illumination via LEDs are three thin, tapered pedestals fabricated of stacked rolls of packing tape that also simulate ashtrays. Such accoutrement suggest an empty, forlorn gathering space or institutional waiting room, perhaps of a hospital, dormitory, sleazy hotel lobby, bus station, or brothel.

Michael E. Smith, Untitled, 2024, basketball, tape, metal rods, 9 x 9 x 16 in.

Soon, one notices an oddity, just 16 inches tall, positioned on the floor: a black orb supported on four slim metal rods that reads as a “character” (as described by Smith) with black taped head, metal arms and legs dwarfed by the furnishings surrounding its mute, frozen presence. Marooned in a world of Big Furniture, the diminutive character appears overwhelmed as it sizes up its location, situation, and intentions, perhaps the avatar of an artist evolving a project.

Sculptor and installationist Smith, born in Detroit in 1977, studied at College for Creative Studies and Yale University, exhibits nationally and internationally, as well as at Susanne Hilberry (since closed) and What Pipeline galleries in Detroit, and now lives and works in Providence, Rhode Island. A collector of objects (especially chairs), he transports a selection of found materials to exhibition venues and arranges and edits his miscellaneous trove on site preparatory to opening day.

Michael E. Smith, Installation view: Michael E. Smith, What Pipeline, 2024.

After traversing the spartan introductory gallery and proceeding into the adjacent gallery/office, enticing “treats” by Smith greet the exploratory visitor. Delectable objects on wall, table, and floor include: a pair of cherry dotted cakes (bongo drums wrapped in tinfoil) project from the wall; a sheet cake in a take-away box and a gold foil wrapped present topped by a starfish rest on a table; and a heavenly blue, creature-comfort circular rug both suggests an ideal angle from which to view the artist’s trio of offerings, as well as softening the cement floor of the gallery. Not to mention the luminous daylight that floods through the window of the room.

Michael E. Smith, . Untitled, 2024, cake box, foam, 19 x 15 x 4.5 in.

Michael E. Smith, Untitled, 2024, present, starfish, steel rod, 21 x 15 x 19 in.

Quickly enough, one realizes that not all the goodies are especially appetizing, for the cherries are in fact beads and the butter pecan hued frosting of both cakes is formed from repellant, inedible foam. Moreover, the starfish (instead of a florid bow) that decorates the shiny present, is impaled on a steel rod.

Overall, Smith proffers intriguing dichotomies between front gallery and back room spaces in this newly minted manifestation of his installation and object-oriented practice: spare, minimalist waiting room and bona fide artworks stocking the adjacent room; dusky versus light-filled ambiences; empty lobby and rear room coziness; real furniture and faux edibles. Smith’s mastery of both genres, fore and aft, in tandem with the striking, touching introduction of the “character,” whets an appetite for more such artful alloys anon.

Michael E. Smith remains on view through June 15, 2024. The gallery, located at 3525 W. Vernor Highway, is housed in a small, gable roofed building set back from Vernor Hwy with parking directly in front. Learn more about the gallery at info@whatpipeline.com.

Mark Newport and Jane Lackey @ Simone DeSousa Gallery

Mark Newport and Jane Lackey: Correspondence  @ Simone DeSousa Gallery

Installation image out front of Gallery. All images courtesy of Simone De Sousa Gallery

Former Fiber Artists-in-Residence, Mark Newport (2007-2023) and Jane Lackey (1997-2007), who served long tenures at Cranbrook Academy of Art, have reunited in a two-person exhibition at Simone DeSousa Gallery in Detroit. Though both have developed singular practices and careers, their show, self-titled Correspondence, showcases underlying similarities in their art-making processes. Indeed, despite their physical distance from one another–Newport works in the Detroit area while Lackey has resided in New Mexico since 2009–they remain in touch and together initiated the exhibition concept.

Installation view of Mark Newport and Jane Lackey: Correspondence

At first glance, observing their art on opposite walls in the main gallery, one might think the two clusters of art represent antithetical points of view and execution. Newport’s robust stitchery versus Lackey’s inclination to highlight the process of flowing; his darkling monochromatic palette, her startling cobalt blues; his army blanket supports, her meticulously hand-drawn grids on paper; his gnarly surfaces, her neat, calm meshes; his irregularly shaped compositions, her Spartan rectangles.

Yet correspondences, as Newport and Lackey remind us, emerge upon further viewing: their vertical compositions convey a kind of order and classical uniformity; asymmetric shapes and forms enliven and colorize the pictorial spaces; both employ open ended, ad hoc creative techniques; and repetitive titles emphasize the seriously serial explorations of mending and flowing, the common but enthralling modus operandi of these two makers.

Mark Newport, Mend 21, Wool, acrylic, cotton, 40 x 28 in., 2021. Photo: George P. Perez

Mend 21 (2021), a prime example of one of Newport’s ongoing Mending series, began, like most, with a cut into the wool army blanket material, indicative of the inevitable tears and abrasions in a fabric used to warm and protect a vulnerable body. The subsequent mending of the cut, via darning and embroidery, leaves a physical reminder of the repair or “scab,” as per the artist.  Executed with thick or thin thread, the circular or rectangular halos surrounding these wounds add subtle color and texture to the gray wool ground of the blanket.

Mark Newport, Swathe, Wool, acrylic, cotton, 83 x 59 in., 2023. Photo: George P. Perez

Swathe (2023), the largest and one of the latest Newport works on view, is boldly and brazenly colorful, sporting three swaths of yellow at the left, a squiggly yellow line above, green, black, and brown horizontal stitching within two amoebic forms near the top, plus an organic oozing of multicolor hues at mid-center countered by a punchy red and black plaid patch at lower right. Moreover, the scrunched and bunched ball of fabric right of center heightens tactility and tautens Swathe’s irregular shape.

Jane Lackey, Almost being said, flow 3, Acrylic, ink, graphite, paper, 35 x 23 in., 2022. Photo: Addison Doty

Lackey’s Almost being said, flow 3 (2022), one of her identically titled drawings (with numerical designations), establishes the format for a quartet of spare, asymmetric arrangements of flowing cobalt forms encroaching upon precisely drawn paper grids. Like Newport, she too begins with consistent support, his an army blanket, hers a grid, that each artist then disrupts or interrupts. Here, in flow 3, two cobalt forms appear to be advancing toward the center, one on the left edging in slowly, the other at the upper right moving (hurtling?) comet-like toward the center. As Lackey’s lyrical titles imply, something undefined is being said, thought or felt, but provocatively, what that is, is only “almost” laid bare.

Jane Lackey, Almost being said, flow 4, Acrylic, ink, graphite, paper, 35 x 23 in., 2022. Photo: Addison Doty

Similarly, in Almost being said, flow 4 (2022), the slowly descending blue form appears to be on the verge of enveloping the tight, orderly grid. The tempo varies from composition to composition, evoking states of mind, emotional ups and downs, shifting moods and, as Lackey observes, “assertions of self within a plaid of connective tissue.”

Hence, Mark Newport and Jane Lackey: Together and apart, singular but connected, Midwesterner and Southwesterner, two makers linked across the miles via stitching and flowing. Correspondence, not competition, as they’ve confirmed, is the order of the day.

Correspondence is on view at Simone DeSousa Gallery, 444 W. Willis St., Detroit, MI, through August 12, 2023.

Harold Neal @ Wayne State University

Harold Neal and Detroit African American Artists: 1945 Through the Black Arts Movement at the Elaine L. Jacob Gallery, Wayne State University

Installation view of Harold Neal and Detroit African American Artists: 1945 Through the Black Arts Movement, Image courtesy of DAR

“Harold Neal is a people painter,” so goes the artist’s succinct, self-identifying description of his art, life, and career on the first page of the exhibition catalogue. But this is not a solo exhibition. While Neal deservedly headlines the show, the title adds clarifying information plus a timeline subtitle, finally weighing in as: “Harold Neal and Detroit African American Artists: 1945 Through the Black Arts Movement.” The other artists number ten, and the years actually extend from 1945 – 1980. It is, in fact, an extraordinarily ambitious overview of thirty-five years of African American art in Detroit, and presents both an exhibition and a probing, in depth catalogue, the result of a ten year project, initiated and produced by Julia R. Myers, Professor Emerita of Art History at Eastern Michigan University, who now resides in New Mexico.

Harold Neal, [Still Life], Oil on board, 12 ¼ x 15 ¾” 1950

Born in Detroit in 1924 (d. 1996), Neal completed his BFA at College for Creative Studies (1953) at the age of 29 after a decade of on and off enrollment. An early still life of bottles, Still Life, establishes stylistic hallmarks of his oeuvre: translucent layering of thinly pigmented hues, flattened and indeterminate space, and figural representation, a mode influenced by CCS teachers Sarkis Sarkisian and Guy Palazzola. Another early work post-graduation, its Title unknown, portrays a field worker sprawled in the midst of a parched, barren landscape. His striking yellow shirt and blue jeans, foreshortened pose, enlarged hands and feet, and sad expression convey the arid shortcomings of his condition. Notably, his head is farthest from the viewer, emphasizing his deliberate distancing and studied remove from those nearby. Intimations of Rodin’s The Thinker perhaps?

Harold Neal, Title unknown, Oil on board, 32 ½ x 24 ½” before 1958

As the feisty, contentious 1960s dawned in Detroit and across the nation, Neal’s subjects and point of view shifted. The Brown vs. Board of Education civil rights bill had passed in 1954 and Rosa Parks refused to give up her bus seat in 1955; Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X were promoting their campaigns for social justice for African Americans; the Black Arts Movement(BAM) (1965), Black Power (1966), Black Panthers (1966) and the “Black Madonna” (1967) at Central Congregational Church in Detroit hove into view; while the Detroit revolution of 1967 prompted the 1969 exhibition of Seven Black Artists at the Detroit Artists Market (a first for the Market) and the subsequent founding of Charles McGee’s Gallery Seven (1969-1978) in the same year.

Concurrently, against the turbulent backdrop of the decade, the Black Arts Movement (BAM), founded in 1965, “established” more or less clearcut guidelines that sought to enhance the potency, validity, and accessibility of Black visual art. The directives emphasized imagery that portrayed the experience of African Americans in order to engage Black audiences, and to reject abstract art that dominated the white art world at the time. Or, phrased more colorfully and pertinently, Neal asserted that “Artists must stop being specialists and must be like any other Black man fighting for his freedom [rather than] going along with tired white boys who introduce a series of dots one year and are hailed by critics.” On the other hand, a number of Black artists felt just the opposite, one of whom, Al Loving, queried: “Is art supposed to be propaganda for Civil Rights? That seemed to be the attitude at the time.”

Harold Neal, Status Seekers, Oil on board, 30 ½ x 47 ½” 1963

Resolutely, Neal soldiered on, producing in 1963 Status Seekers, one of the largest and most riveting compositions in the show. It’s a streetscape peopled with two vignettes, a group of adolescents on the left and a pregnant mother and child on the right. Two of the boys stretch upward toward balloons bobbing above them while another status seeker struts along on stilts, his head cut off at the top of the frame. Two others have donned white masks, as they too aspire towards success in the white world. Meanwhile, the woman in red strolls by defiantly ignoring the foolish boys from whose bogus goals she seeks to shield her young child.

Harold Neal, Man Span, Oil on board, 23 ½ x 47 ½” 1963

Another stunning and rather unexpected image from the same year, 1963, Man Span, represents a bridge raised high above the chasm it fords. Its tall, elegant red/orange columns support a roadway absent any sign of vehicular traffic. As Neal explained, laborers who built the structure are whom Man Span” celebrates: “Sometimes in seeking respite [from anger about the treatment of African Americans] I try to show through the paining of bridges, houses, and still life what the human hand is capable of in the brief period between its destructive endeavors.”

Harold Neal, Title unknown Oil or acrylic on board, 37 x 30” 1968

A disheartening but compassionate trio of images from the late 60s continue to broach the inequities of racial strife, beginning with Title unknown, Neal’s stoical portrait of a semi-shadowed woman displaying in her arms for all to see her dead, bloodied child slain by a National Guardsman during the Detroit rebellion of 1967. The mother and child, centralized in the composition, are redolent of both a classical madonna and child or Pieta composition. The date of the child’s death, 7-25, is incorporated into the light filled, graffitied urban setting that Neal often employs to contextualize his dramas.

Harold Neal, Title unknown, Riot Series?, Oil on board, 24 x 39” 1960s

In another Title unknown work, Neal advances his subjects so close to the surface that upper and lower parts of their figures are cut off by the picture frame, so observers all but merge with the pictorial space of the image. Here, a seated mother and child on the left are paired with a male figure on the right, his back turned to the spectator and his hands tied. Suspended in time and place, they wait for the inevitable. The savory pink, lavender, and red hues of their attire, plus a gray, overcast atmosphere, adds poignancy to the taut, anything-could-happen deadlock which fences them in and ties their hands.

Harold Neal, Rag Doll, Lamp black on paper, 28 x 47” c. 1967-1969

The third of these late 60s depictions is the most searing of the lot. Titled Rag Doll, it is chromatically limited to black and white and to a single figure, but is sizable in scale (28 x 47”) for maximum impact. Viewers witness an incensed Black boy who, with his bare hands, deliberately and furiously rips and tears apart a white rag doll, peeling off its arm and severing its torso. Kinship with Goya’s visceral “Disasters of War” echos here. Exhibited in the 1969 Seven Black Artists exhibit at the Detroit Artists Market, a breakthrough show curated by Charles McGee, its present day aura registers as fiercely and as hauntingly now as then.

Harold Neal, Checkers, Oil on board, 51 x 48” c. 1972-1973

By the mid to late 70s, Neal, along with many of his BAM cohorts, had ”cooled his fire”: “I don’t have time to be angry anymore….I can’t carry the burdens of oppression on my shoulders my whole life.” Checkers, from 1972-73, is suffused with light and transparency as onlookers and players mingle and merge around a floating checkerboard, one of the last of Neal’s paintings to appear in the show. Among subjects that continued to appeal to him were jazz and blues, which he referred to as “African American Classical Music.” Participation in outreach social programs, conferences, art councils, and teaching for many years at Wayne County Community College also provided an outlet for his socially progressive urgings: “I have awakened a lot of young people to their potential and I encouraged them to pursue alternative means of expression.”

A video interview from 1971 embedded in the show introduces visitors to Neal’s calm, composed demeanor even when asserting controversial and passionately felt points of view. He argues, for instance, that abstract artists “immunize” themselves in their studios, selfishly thinking they own their talent and style without acknowledging the societal responsibility for human intercourse. He asserts as well that the 60s expression, “Black is Beautiful,” is of manifestly lesser social and political importance than “Black is powerless, Black is hungry, Black is jobless, and etc.”

Lastly, writing in 1974, critic Charlotte Robinson observed that Black “social statement is almost never hanging on the walls [of] large art institutes or museums and rarely even in white galleries.” Well, in fact, here it hangs, on the walls of the Jacob Gallery at Wayne State University in Detroit for two more months. Do plan a visit.

Harold Neal and Detroit African American Artists remains on view through –  Jan. 20, 2022, at the WSU Elaine L. Jacob Gallery.  Contact the gallery in advance at tpyrzewski@wayne.edu to schedule your visit.

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