Author: K.A. Letts Page 1 of 9

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Peter Williams @ David Klein Gallery

On December 10, 2024

Peter Williams, Installation, David Klein Gallery Detroit, Nov. 2-December 21, photo courtesy of David Klein Gallery

As I entered the David Klein Gallery in Detroit this December, the intense face of an African American man confronted me from the middle distance of an enormous painting. Cathedral, by Peter Williams, from the artist’s series “Bent Word,” is now on view along with a dozen of his late masterpieces until December 21. Executed near the time of his death in 2021, the composition is crowded with lively figures, exuberant patterns, and minivans traveling inexplicably through outer space. The enigmatic central figure (possibly Williams himself?) dressed in astronaut’s gear (or are they pajamas?) floats, weightless, in a topsy-turvy environment. Silent behind his helmet, is he waving hello? Or goodbye? Or both? The brilliant white areas of primed canvas recurring throughout the composition create the impression that the painting is starting to shatter into brilliantly colored pieces.

Peter Williams, Cathedral, 2019, oil and graphite on canvas, 72” x 96” All photos by K.A. Letts unless otherwise noted.

Williams’s artworks throughout the exhibition are full of references to pop culture yet grounded in the artist’s deep understanding of Western art history. He created his own unique style by mixing pop culture imagery, geometric abstraction, pointillism, and pattern painting with his studies of Goya, Kandinsky, and Klee. Robert Colescott’s paintings, with figures from art history like St. Sebastian and Picasso’s demoiselles bumping up against pinup girls and Aunt Jemima, also come to mind. In a 2020 interview with the Artists’ Legacy Foundation, Williams explained, “Most people don’t have any kind of dialogue with the work of 500 years ago or even 100 years ago. I’m trying to talk in the language that’s available to most people. We live in a comic universe right now.”

Peter Williams, 2. As the Birds Fly, Another Planet, 2019, oil and graphite on canvas, 72” x 96”

Afrofuturist narratives make up an important part of Williams’s cosmology, particularly in the later paintings. The “Bent Word” series tells stories of imaginary African American colonists (and a character called “the N Word”) who depart earth, escaping environmental catastrophe. In his 2019 painting As the Birds Fly, Another Planet, Williams imagines a new world, strange yet attractively pastoral, where earth’s birds join aliens in paradisical leisure. A lone Black basketball player at the upper edge of the painting seems headed for the planet’s surface.

Peter Williams, Leon Spinks’ Salvation, 2020-2021, oil on canvas, 60” x 72”

Mortality was clearly on Williams’s mind when he painted Leon Spinks’ Salvation in 2020-2021. The world -famous boxer died in February 2021 after a long illness, only a few months before Williams was to follow him. The central, haloed figure in celestial blue seems headed upward, with crosses that might be stars anchoring the astral space. Two white vans (ambulances?) with discarded body parts float, left and right, over the blue planet below. An appalled astronaut mouthing the words “holy shit” expresses, perhaps, the stunned reaction we all share when contemplating mortality. The colorful but thinly painted imagery suggests, once again, the conditional quality of fugitive human existence. A smaller canvas on a similar theme, Leon Spinks’s Taxi, is devoid of figures, focusing instead on cosmic cars leaving earth’s gravity.

Peter Williams, Leon Spinks’s Taxi, 2021, oil on canvas, 31” x 40

NYACK, painted in 2013, makes a helpful comparison to the later work. The comic figures are arranged in a kind of rightward-facing parade, earthbound. The organizing compositional elements are vertical. But a brown figure moves right to left below, missing limbs but still swimming resolutely through the water.

Peter Williams, NYACK, 2013, oil on canvas, 60” x 132” (diptych)

Williams died in Wilmington, Delaware on August 19, 2021. He had recently retired as a senior professor in the Fine Arts Department at the University of Delaware. But before that, he had been an associate professor for 17 years at Detroit’s Wayne State University. Detroit-based Rotland Press published a monograph in 2016 entitled “The N-Word: Paintings by Peter Williams,” which included an interview between Williams and Detroit poet and playwright Bill Harris. A major exhibition of Williams’s work, “Black Exodus,” opened at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit in January of 2021, only a few months before his death, and featured a few of the paintings now on display at David Klein Gallery.

Peter Williams, Peter and Mike, 2019, oil and graphite on canvas, 60” x 48”

Born in Suffern, N.Y. in 1952, Williams grew up in Nyack, N.Y., where he had his first solo exhibition at the age of 17. He earned a B.F.A. from Minneapolis College of Art and Design in 1975, followed by an M.F.A. from Maryland Institute (College of Fine Art) in 1987. A life-altering car accident while Williams was in New Mexico as a young man resulted in lifelong disability. He lost his right leg and required crutches for the rest of his life.

Peter Williams’s paintings are housed in the permanent collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among many others. In 2020, he received the Artists’ Legacy Foundation Award, followed a few months later with a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Williams’s paintings defy categorization as they settle into their place in contemporary art history. They are funny, wild, sometimes terrifying, but always deeply human, combining abstraction, figuration, storytelling and racial advocacy in a persuasive worldview that takes into account not only the world as it is, but our future as it could become.

Peter Williams @ David Klein Gallery, November 2-December 21, 2024

Echoes from the Rust @ Elaine L. Jacob Gallery

By K.A. Letts

On October 29, 2024

In Drawing, Installation, Mixed Media, Paintings

Echoes from the Rust @ Elaine L. Jacob Gallery, Wayne State University

“Echoes from the Rust,” Elaine L. Jacob Gallery, Exhibition installation. All photos by K.A. Letts

It’s a tall order to ask a few to speak for the many, as these six artists from Detroit and Pittsburgh have been chosen to do in the exhibition “Echoes from the Rust,” on display at Elaine L. Jacob Gallery until January 10, 2025. The expansive theme of resilience in the face of hardship and of the importance of ethnic identity, immigration, labor, and location in the region’s artistic production could easily encompass the stories of 60 artists…or six hundred. But these half-dozen accomplished makers of images and objects, selected by independent curator Kemuel Benyehudah, describe as well as anyone can how midwestern values are shaped by personal experience, geographic displacement, and economic adversity.

Hubert Massey, Cityscape of Detroit, 1999, charcoal drawing on paper.

Narrative art enjoys exceptional credibility in the Midwest, where the ghosts of Thomas Hart Benton and Diego Rivera lurk in the consciousness of several of the exhibition’s artists. Eminent Detroit muralist Hubert Massey’s reverence for the craft of drawing is evident in the two semi-circular charcoal works on paper displayed on the gallery’s main floor. In these preparatory drawings for his frescos in the Detroit Athletic Club, carefully rendered architectural features of Detroit form a backdrop for monumental figures that would be at home in a depression-era WPA mural. N.E. Brown, of Pittsburgh, likewise traffics in the archetypal, with meticulously painted scenes of workers that range from the miniscule “Blue Collar” to “The Mill,” in which a masked and gloved worker rendered in burnt wood to graphically evokes the heat and dim light of an industrial environment.

N.E. Brown, Blue Collar, 2024, oil on canvas.

Like several other artists in the exhibition, Adnan Charara is an immigrant delivered in 1982 to Detroit by political upheaval in his native Sierra Leone. Charara’s family of Lebanese descent found a home in the Middle Eastern diaspora of Dearborn, while the artist himself found a vocation in fine art after completing his education in environmental studies and urban planning. Charara is that odd combination of a highly educated, yet self-taught, artist. Through his extensive self-guided studies, he has arrived at a style of expression that seamlessly combines a variety of art historical styles with his comic sensibility.

Adnan Charara, Unconscious, 2006, oil on canvas.

Charara’s three black and white silkscreen prints of workers, created in 2014, are reminiscent of Diego Rivera’s DIA murals, but represent less an homage to Rivera than Charara’s direct observations of industrial workers from the same source materials. Two large canvases, more typical of his current style, are wiggly, jittery masses of small figures crawling over and across a more-or-less undefined, yet urban, space. Hieronymous Bosch might recognize and approve of the anxious yet optimistic citizens of this no man’s land.

Omid Shekari, Is there a way Out, 2023, acrylic on industrial canvas.

Omid Shekari, another global transplant, arrives at the gallery from Iran by way of Pittsburgh. Displaced by the political upheavals in his native country, Shekari vividly remembers his experience as the victim of an oppressive regime, a past that continues to shape his art practice. He says, “My work looks at power and questions the levels of violence that it causes, as well as possibilities to resist such a phenomenon.”

Shekari’s musings on questions of political power and its oppressive use take form as imaginary architecture, metaphors for the cultural and political structures that imprison humanity. Seen as if from above, Body – Nation – State’s wall-mounted metal structure evokes a dream-like sense of displacement juxtaposed with a brutal reminder of human vulnerability. In the middle of this miniature built environment, a small piece of meat adds a jarring note of corporeality. Human fragility hangs suspended and displaced, surrounded by an edifice both shadowy and solid. The same aerial point of view shows up in Shekari’s painting Is There a Way Out, depicting a claustrophobic vision of a nation imprisoned. The same theme is revisited in his metal sculpture, Nation [government-bank-armed forces-prison] State, a seemingly impenetrable labyrinth for holding in –or keeping out–something. Is it information? Free thought? Free expression?

Halima Afi Cassells, Gold Cash Gold, 2024, paper cut.

Halima Afi Cassells views the state of the Midwest with guarded optimism through the lens of her deep cultural roots in the city of Detroit. Her carefully crafted paper cuts acknowledge the importance of technical mastery in a region known for making things. Three delicate artworks privilege the aesthetic over the political, but her strong social justice message is fully displayed in her 17-minute video, Detroit Future State. Composed of two parts, Detroit Future State is a polemic in which the ideal is contrasted with the real. In the first part of the video, an elegantly clothed and coiffed Cassells describes a utopian Detroit future as if it has already come to pass, with community gardens, abundant housing, and adequate healthcare. At the end of this blissful description, Cassell trades her fashionable costume for down-to-earth street clothes and delivers—in black and white–a wry description of things as they actually are in the city.

Josh Challen Ice, Held Together, 2024, plywood, plastic, construction lumber, ratchet strap, blue tape, inkjet print.

The exhibition’s underlying theme honors the importance of labor in defining the soul of the rustbelt, past and present. It finds its most elegant expression in constructions by Pittsburgh artist Joshua Challen Ice. Ice honors the value of beauty and the importance of craftsmanship in the making of things. He creates each object and installation, often from upcycled materials, with precision while leaving evidence of his labor in the form of clamps, stamps, and straps. His remarkable sculpture, Held Tight, is an impressive example; it replicates the shape of a strand of DNA beginning at ground level and traveling upward. Beautifully created in wood and wrapped around one of the gallery’s central pillars, the construct echoes the architecture of the spiral staircase nearby. Left on one of the crosspieces, as if by accident, is a workman’s jacket, a reminder that these unique and impressive objects are made by someone.

“Echoes from the Rust” is an exhibition in which superior technical and formal expertise serves the artists’ progressive vision. Each artist’s output reflects, in its own way, a shared ethic of hard work, craftsmanship, and social justice. There is an abiding optimism in the work that describes an often neglected part of America, brought together here in a celebration of resilience and grit.

“Echoes from the Rust,” Elaine L. Jacob Gallery, Installation. Background: Hubert Massey Cityscape of Detroit, 1999, charcoal drawing on paper. Foreground: Josh Challen Ice, Absent Hands, 2024, construction lumber, ink stamp, concrete.

Echoes from the Rust @ Elaine L. Jacob Gallery, Wayne State University, on display until January 10, 2025.

Ethiopia at the Crossroads @ Toledo Museum of Art

By K.A. Letts

On October 8, 2024

In Ceramic, Paintings, Photography, Prints, Sculpture

House of Yatreda (est. 2021), Abyssinian Queen, 2024, 1/1 NFT single-channel video. “Beneath the dense canopy of an ancient forest that divides her realm and blurs the line between history and legend, the Abyssinian queen journeys from one kingdom to another within historic Abyssinia, carried with solemn grace by her devoted attendants.” All photo images by K.A. Letts unless noted.

Ethiopia’s long history as an important but often overlooked center of world art is getting a sweeping survey in the Toledo Museum of Art’s newly opened exhibition, “Ethiopia at the Crossroads.” From now until November 10, images and objects from the horn of east Africa illustrate the region’s importance as a point of contact for trade and cultural exchange beginning in the 7^th Century BCE. Myths and stories derived from a wealth of sources, from indigenous religions to archaic Judaism to Byzantine Christianity and Islam, form the basis for a composite culture that is uniquely coherent and remarkably complex.

In antiquity, the Nile provided Ethiopia’s traders and envoys with access to Egypt and the civilizations of the Mediterranean Sea. Contact with the Byzantine empire brought eastern orthodox Christianity, which then developed, in conjunction with other local mythic influences, its own idiosyncratic religious identity. Ethiopia was only the second country—after Armenia–to adopt Christianity as its state religion in the 4^th century CE.

(l. to r.) Cross with St. Blaise, 10-11 c., copper alloy (Walters Art Museum), Processional Cross, 10 c. – 12 c., brass alloy, (Dallas Museum of Art), Processional Cross, 13 c. bronze, (Institute of Ethiopian Studies Abbas Ababa)

“Ethiopia at the Crossroads“ can be described as two exhibitions in one, actually. One collection of artworks, along with extensive photo documentation, centers on the country’s rich and lengthy art history. Another strand of the exhibition, woven seamlessly into the historical record, presents the work of contemporary Ethiopian artists and makes a convincing case that these living creatives are successfully carrying their unique cultural identity into the 21^st century.

After entering through the circular rotunda at the beginning of the exhibition, museum visitors will journey through a complex narrative of the region’s cultural patrimony that includes more than 225 artifacts stretching over 1750 years. Devotional painted icons, manuscripts, coins, textiles and basketry, metalwork and carved wood crosses of various scales from periods from 7 century BCE through the 19^th century CE form a beautiful and emotionally resonant parade that marches down the center of the main gallery. The exhibition design features a long, purpose-built terracotta-colored display structure that organizes what could easily be a baffling collection of diverse influences and objects. On the outer perimeter of the central structure, smaller groupings of objects amplify elements of Ethiopia’s long and complex story. Included in these collections are small, glazed black terracotta figurines characteristic of the Ethiopian Jewish community and wooden Waakaa memorial figurines from the Konso people of South Ethiopia. Illuminated manuscripts of both Christian and Islamic provenance are represented as well as magic healing scrolls that illustrate the hybrid beliefs characterizing Ethiopia’s Orthodox Christianity.

Folding Processional Icon in the Shape of a Fan, late 15 c., tempera with ink on parchment, wood handles, 24 ¼” x 154 1/8” x 4 ¾” (Walters Art Museum) photo: Toledo Museum of Art

The gallery holds a particularly rich trove of religious artifacts from the liturgical history of Ethiopia. A standout is the rare Folding Processional Icon in the Shape of a Fan, created in the late 15^th century and one of only 6 known to exist. Illustrating the influence of European artists in icon painting are two side-by-side pictures representing the Madonna and Child. The two paintings demonstrate how European religious tropes were routinely translated into Ethiopian visual language. One is by Ethiopian artist Fare Sayon (active 1445-1480,) and the other is from the workshop of Venetian Bartolomeo Vivarini (ca. 1485.) Using the vivid colors characteristic of the Ethiopian palette, Sayon makes the image his own by adding two flanking angels important in Ethiopian Christianity, Michael and Gabriel, and interpolates elaborate textile patterns into the figures’ garments.

(l. – r), Fare Sayon (Ethiopian) Diptych (right panel) Virgin Mary and Christ Child with Archangels Michael and Gabriel, ca. 1445-1480, glue tempera on panel Workshop of Bartolomeo Vivarini, Venice, Madonna and Child, egg tempera on panel.

The co-location of work by contemporary Ethiopian artists alongside historical artifacts demonstrates how a coherent identity based upon shared myths and traditions has persisted over time. Of particular interest is work by the House of Yatreda, a family-based artist collective now in a year-long residence at the Toledo Museum of Art. At the entrance to the exhibition, a large photo portrait (Mother of Menelik) minted on blockchain combines the traditional folklore of Ethiopia with web-3 technologies. The House of Yatreda’s leader, Kiye Tadele, poses as Makadda, the legendary Queen of Sheba, pregnant with Menelik, the offspring of King Solomon and founder of Ethiopia’s Solomonid dynasty. In a large gallery towards the back of the exhibition, a series of large-scale black and white single-channel videos by the House of Yatreda, entitled Abbysinian Queen, is on display. Described as “in the style of tizita (nostalgia or longing for the past),” the narrative follows the journey of an imaginary Ethiopian queen traveling through mystical forests to new kingdoms.

House of Yatreda (est. 2021), Mother of Menelik, 2023, NFT single channel video, photo: Toledo Museum of Art

The many creatives in the exhibition are a testament to the ongoing vibrancy of the region’s visual culture. Elias Sime of Addis Ababa, London-born Theo Eshetu, and Helina Metaferia of Washington, D.C., among many others, showcase the ongoing cultural significance of present-day Ethiopian art. Their work demonstrates that the artists share a strong stylistic correspondence between their art’s historical antecedents and their own work. Elias Sime’s Tightrope, Zooming (2012), now in the collection of the Toledo Museum of Art, is an elaborate longitudinal mosaic made from discarded elements of digital technology—circuit boards, computer keyboards, and the like. Helina Metaferia has created her version of a traditional metalwork crown that carries a meaning that is both royal and religious. With it, she honors Empress Taytu Betul, a national hero of the resistance against the invading Italian army in 1896. The traditional crown installed next to it shows, once again, the common sensibility that unites these artists with their patrimony.

Elias Sime, Tightrope, Zooming (2012), reclaimed electronic components and assorted small ephemera on panel, 83 ½” x 313” photo: Toledo Museum of Art

The abundant and varied collection of artifacts that makes up “Ethiopia at the Crossroads” is deserving of multiple visits, but if you can make only one trip, the beautifully illustrated and scholarly catalog of the exhibition is highly recommended and available from the Toledo Museum. Ethiopia at the Crossroads, edited by Christine Sciacca, is a comprehensive introduction to this neglected yet significant sub-section of world art history.

(l. – r.) Crown, 18-19 c., brass (Peabody Essex Museum) Helina Metaferia, Crown (Taytu) 2023, brass sculpture with etching (Toledo Museum of Art).

Ethiopia at the Crossroads @ Toledo Museum of Art, on display through November 10, 2024. https://toledomuseum.org/exhibitions/ethiopia-at-the-crossroads

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

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