Author: Michael Hodges Page 1 of 9

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

On May 30, 2025

An installation view of Luminosity: A Detroit Arts Gathering will be at Detroit’s Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History through March 31, 2026. (Courtesy of the Wright Museum. All other images by Detroit Art Review.)

Long before the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History took up residence in its spectacular building in Detroit’s Cultural Center, it started life on West Grand Boulevard in 1966 in a building owned by Dr. Charles H. Wright himself. To celebrate this sixtieth anniversary, the museum has mounted a large, dazzling show, Luminosity: A Detroit Arts Gathering, an exhibition of Black art by Detroiters past and present that will be up through March 31, 2026.

Organized by freelance curator Vera Ingrid Grant in Ann Arbor, previously a curator at the University of Michigan Museum of Art as well as a Fulbright Scholar in Germany, this expansive historical survey features 97 works by 69 artists. Included are superstars from the past, like Hughie Lee-Smith and Al Loving, giants of the contemporary Detroit art world such as Allie McGhee and Carole Harris, and relative newcomers like Akea Brionne and O’Shun Williams.

Grant says Wright officials were looking for “a celebration of the museum and its ties to the community,” a challenge that thrilled her. Given the celebratory nature, she adds that it was important to her to highlight joy in African-American life. There are images of despair, to be sure — like Jonathan Harris’ sharp-edged painting of the classic photo taken moments after Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was shot — but Grant wanted to make sure that gloom and tragedy did not overwhelm.

Sydney James, The Westside Johnsons, Acrylic on raw canvas, 72 x 120 x 1/10 inches, 2023.

This point of view hits you right as you enter Luminosity and behold Sydney James’s large, color-filled canvas, The Westside Johnsons. A buoyant portrait of an extended family set against a rich red background, the painting fairly radiates affection and joy, with not an ounce of sappiness to it. These 12 Johnsons are so individualized and real, you feel like you could start a conversation with any one of them right there in the gallery.

James, a muralist with outdoor work around Detroit, put fringes on the edge of the painting (sadly not visible in the image above), giving the composition some of the feel of a quilt, with all the folk implications that carries. Grant loves the work, calling it “gorgeous,” adding that she chose it for the entryway to set the mood for the whole exhibition.

Jonathan Harris, Hear no evil, See no evil, Speak no evil (Triptych); Oil on canvas, 36 x 36 x 1½ inches; 2021.

These three panels by Jonathan Harris invoke the classic proverb, originally derived from Japan, and star the artist himself in black glasses and a white t-shirt, acting out the gestures every child knows and will readily imitate. Harris has positioned himself in front of a strongly colored background – the bottom half a sort of starry nightscape, and the top half a uniform deep red with stars scattered here as well. Strewn over the compositions are strands of bright-green ivy that crisscross the artist’s shirt and, in the last case, frame his head.

Harris, a graduate of the Detroit School for the Fine and Performing Arts and Oakland University, notes in his artistic biography that he utilizes “an oil enamel technique, resulting in graphic, high contrast portraits, without the use of a brush.” The result with Hear no Evil… is a trio of powerfully magnetic paintings, ones that are almost impossible to ignore. “The audience is definitely drawn to them,” Grant says, “as well as to what he’s expressing, and his accessibility in a psychological space.” Underlying all Harris’ work, she suggests, is the question of “how we in Detroit manage life in these United States.”

Austen Brantley, Watch Over Me, Ceramic, 28 x 12 x 12 inches, 2025.

The ceramic sculpture Watch Over Me by Austen Brantley, a 2023 Kresge Artist Fellow, is both whimsical and striking with its bust of a handsome young Black woman with an angel perched atop her head, wings framing the girl’s face. Given the craftsmanship (which actually reads like metal, not ceramic), it’s shocking to learn that Brantley, chosen last year by the city of Detroit to sculpt boxer Joe Louis, is an entirely self-taught artist.

Grant particularly admires a certain rough, unfinished quality to his approach. “Brantley’s developed an ability to stop work in the midst of something that’s still raw,” she says. “It just kind of lets you in, in a way that a fine-tuned, fully-refined sculpture emitting a kind of glossiness would not.”

Glanton Dowdell, Untitled, Oil on canvas, 40 ¼ x 24 ½ x 1 ½ inches, 1975.

Glanton Dowdell spent 12 years in prison for what Grant calls “a dead-serious crime,” i.e., second-degree murder. Before incarceration, however, he’d been formally trained in painting, but while behind bars, the Detroiter, born in 1924, refined this talent to a remarkable degree.

“Dowdell came out of prison in the midst of the 1960s with everything going on,” Grant says, “and I think he must’ve received a political education there, too,” because, among other things, he co-founded the Detroit branch of the Black Panthers. You can read activism and rage in this untitled portrait of three lynched bodies hanging from a tree, a tragic trio that includes a woman, which is a bit unusual, as well as a man with no trousers. Apart from its grisly subject, what makes this painting especially startling is Dowdell’s choice of pastels for background colors. You might think he intended the juxtaposition to shock, but the hues – a tender rose and soft green – almost read like the artist’s blessing upon the three unfortunate souls.

Eventually, like a number of Black radicals in that era, Dowdell abandoned the United States, in his case moving to Sweden, where he spent the rest of his life. Out of the blue in the 1970s, Dowdell mailed this canvas to the Wright Museum with a note saying, in effect, “Here – this is for you. This is what I’m thinking about in Sweden.” The painting has been in the Wright’s collection ever since.

Tylonn Sawyer, Royal, Charcoal, pastel, and gold leaf on paper, 50 x 36 inches, 2022

Tylonn Sawyer, a 2017 Kresge Artist Fellow, gives us one of the most magnetic portraits in the entire show with Royal. This painting of a young Black woman amounts to a high-concept composition, indeed. The subject may be wearing jeans and high-top sneakers, but her aura, as Grant notes, is anything but pedestrian. “He’s presenting her in her ordinariness,” she says, “but her stance is regal, and he’s given her this golden backdrop and a kind of asteroid behind her.”

That heavenly body streaks through a horizontal black band that divides the painting in two, framed above and below by textured, hard-to-take-your-eyes-off gold leaf. It’s a remarkable artistic conceit, one that lifts this work way beyond the expected.

“It’s a surprise,” Grant says. “What would you normally see in a royal portrait? You’d see the individual’s treasures, their symbolic pieces — but her backdrop is this kind of universal sky with a comet going by. That’s the disjuncture, right? It makes it startling.” Grant always saw this as one of the key works for the show. “It stands in for the things I’ve tried to share about joy,” she says, adding, “It captures the luminosity of Detroit.”

Luminosity: A Detroit Arts Gathering, will be up at the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History in Detroit through Mar. 31, 2026.

Menagerie and Descriptive Intuition @ BBAC

By Michael Hodges

On April 15, 2025

In Mixed Media, Paintings, Sculpture

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.