Author: Michael Hodges Page 1 of 8

Menagerie and Descriptive Intuition @ BBAC

On April 15, 2025

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 the 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, 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.

How We Make the Planet Move: The Detroit Collection Part I @ Cranbrook Art Museum

By Michael Hodges

On November 29, 2024

In Assemblage / Collage, Ceramic, Furniture, Installation, Mixed Media, Paintings, Textile

An installation photo of How We Make the Planet Move: The Detroit Collection Part 1 at Cranbrook Art Museum through March 2, 2025 (Courtesy Cranbrook Museum of Art, PD Rearick; subsequent photos by Detroit Art Review).

There was a time, decades ago, when Cranbrook held itself at a careful remove from the city of Detroit, only 18 miles distant, but light years away. Anne Morrow Lindbergh, who spent two happy years in the early forties at the Academy of Art while Charles helped Henry Ford convert the Willow Run plant from auto to bomber production, called it “the Ivory Tower sitting on the outside of the volcano of Detroit.”

In recent years, that relationship changed dramatically – a shift epitomized by the current exhibition, How We Make the Planet Move: The Detroit Collection I, at Cranbrook Art Museum through March 2. The museum has been energetically acquiring art by contemporary Detroit artists, and since 2014 has amassed over 300 works, of which 30-odd are currently on display. The show includes young artists like Sherri Bryant and Matthew Angelo Harrison, as well as the late, beloved Gilda Snowden, and Cass Corridor greats Michael Luchs, Nancy Mitchnick and Gordon Newton. “This was a substantial gear shift in our focus,” said chief curator Laura Mott, “to be a storyteller of Detroit art, and I think that’s an important role.”

Charles McGee, Play Patterns II, Fabrics, paper, the artist’s hair, paint and enamel on Dibond attached to wood frame, 120 x 240 inches, 2011.

Their biggest acquisition, both in price and size, was the late Charles McGee’s Play Patterns II from 2011, a dazzling, colorful canvas starring spindly, hieroglyph-like figures that’s a close cousin to the artist’s 1984 Noah’s Ark: Genesis at the Detroit Institute of Arts.

Over an 80-year career, McGee – named the Kresge Foundation’s first Eminent Artist in 2008 – produced a mountain of work ranging from the severely geometric to idiosyncratic figurative portraits and highly stylized abstractions, both in painting and sculpture, that formed much of his later work. A good example of the latter is the black-and-white United We Stand outside the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History. McGee died in 2021 at 96.

Joshua Rainer, The Flying Dream, Oil on canvas, 46 x 102 inches, 2023.

Mott says she first included a painting by Joshua Rainer at the Art Museum in Skilled Labor: Black Realism in Detroit, which closed last March, without knowing that he was an Art Academy student. Indeed, he’s the first enrolled student to appear in a non-student exhibition at the museum. Mott says artist Mario Moore, who co-curated Skilled Labor with her, “calls Rainer ’the human printer’ because his skill level is insane,” noting that the portrait of his grandmother in Skilled Labor was often mistaken for a photograph.

Rainer’s piece in Detroit Collection is The Flying Dream. It’s less photo-realistic and moodier, an evocatively colored work in grayish pinks and dull orange, in which a body – presumably the artist – is suspended horizontally in mid-air, face down. The unexpected hues give it an undeniable dream-like quality, an image halfway between believable and hallucinatory. But in ways that are hard to explain, the painting’s dominant impression is one of a profound, mesmerizing stillness.

Ed Fraga, 229 Gratiot, 35 x 35 x 3 inches, 1986.

Ed Fraga, a 2009 Kresge Artist Fellow, has produced a rich oeuvre that mostly wanders the subconscious, delving both into the psychological and the spiritual, with results that are enigmatic yet oddly beguiling. In considering the Wayne State University grad’s relationship to his audience, Steve Panton in Essay’d speculated that, “Perhaps at times it is closer to the artist as magician, encouraging the viewer to suspend disbelief, and see more mystery in the world.”

“Mysterious” is certainly the word for 229 Gratiot, a collection of small portraits a bit like a whimsical two-dimensional closet of curiosities. They range from an apparent saint whose halo divides into concentric circles, a luminous female fetus floating on an azure square, a palm bearing stigmata, and a tiny cameo of the kneeling Land-o-Lakes butter maiden. Typical of much of Fraga’s work, it’s a bit dizzying and elusive but an awful lot of fun to study.

Jack Craig, Molded Carpet Chair, Green; Molded carpet, wood, fabric; 32 x 22.5 x 21 inches, 2024.

Leaping genres, one creative endeavor the Academy of Art has always been known for is chair design, starting with Eero Saarinen and Charles Eames’ molded plywood chairs that took first place for seating in the 1941 Organic Design for Home Furnishings competition at the Museum of Modern Art. Along with other Academy designers of that era like Ralph Rapson, Florence Knoll and Harry Weese, Cranbrook’s output revolutionized the look of the American home and office, and made U.S. modernist design a world leader.

Continuing that grand tradition, but giving it a more artsy, less functional, spin is Jack Craig’s Molded Carpet Chair, Green, which was also exhibited at the David Klein Gallery in a solo show that closed in October, and included a number of other phantasmagorical pieces. Mott notes that the early Eames and Saarinen works went into commercial production, but with recent Academy alumni like Craig and Chris Schanck, “you see more of an art design. Molded Carpet Chair is not going into production,” she said. “These are exquisitely made art objects that suggest function,” rather than exhibiting it. In the case of Molded Carpet Chair, the result is a lush object that feels more organic than structural, with all sorts of exuberant, textured excrescences sprouting on it.

A companion show on the Art Museum’s first floor is Toshiko Takaezu: Worlds Within, which runs until January 12, 2025. One of the world’s most-celebrated ceramicists, Takaezu died in 2011 and had a most-astonishing biography. Born into an impoverished Japanese immigrant family on a remote part of Maui, Takaezu was the sixth of 11 children and had to quit school at 15 to work as a housekeeper in Honolulu to help support her family. But luck was on her side – when the family left during World War II, she got a job at the Hawaiian Potters Guild. Ultimately, she studied ceramics part-time at the University of Hawaii at Manoa under Claude Horan, whom Takaezu called the father of Hawaiian ceramics.

Toshiko Takaezu, Light, Porcelain, 1970.

The turning point in Takaezu’s life came when she saw pieces by Maija Grotell, who was the head of ceramics at the Academy of Art. Never having traveled to the mainland, Takaezu made her way to Michigan, applied to Cranbrook, and got in. That not only supercharged and refined her touch with clay, but also started her on an academic path that landed her eventually at Princeton University, where she was a longtime professor and inspiration to generations of ceramicists.

Takaezu’s artistic genius spanned numerous genres. She not only worked in ceramics, but also weaving, painting, bronze casting and printmaking, displaying remarkable finesse in each. Part of the pleasure of this career retrospective, organized by The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum in New York, is that there are examples from all these various disciplines on display.

But most remarkable are her signature creations, the “closed vessels,” like Light in the image above — essentially large pots that suggest a mouth or opening at the top but, on examination, turn out not to be there. This ability to both suggest a vessel while at the same time denying it is part of what gives the artist’s work its profundity. These pieces are, as the exhibition’s biographical panel notes, “abstract paintings in the round.”

Toshiko Takaezu, Gaea (Earth Mother), Stoneware, 1979-90.

How We Make the Planet Move: The Detroit Collection Part 1 – is at Cranbrook Art Museum through March 2, 2025. Toshiko Takaezu: Worlds Within will be up through January 12, 2025.