Detroit Art Review

Critical art reviews of Detroit galleries and museums weekly

Author: Michael Hodges Page 1 of 9

Ron Teachworth – Artist Series: Art Appropriation @ BBAC

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On April 6, 2026

In Paintings

The installation of Ron Teachworth’s – Appropriation: Artists and Their Work, is currently at the Birmingham Bloomfield Art Center, through April 30. (All photos by Detroit Art Review except where noted.)

Artistic appropriation is a distinguished 20th-century practice, going back at least to Marcel Duchamp’s presentation of a porcelain urinal as an objet d’art, a metamorphosis famously extended by Andy Warhol to Campbell’s soup cans. With Appropriation: Artists and Their Work, up through April 30 at the Birmingham Bloomfield Art Center, painter Ron Teachworth gives this transformational practice a literal and engaging twist, with portraits of artists in front of prints of some of their most famous works.

Stylistically, these watercolors get much of their punch from juxtaposition: Teachworth renders the artists themselves, from Frida Kahlo to Picasso to Georgia O’Keeffe, in naïve, almost primitivist fashion, while their artworks behind them are actually tiny giclée prints – high-quality, inkjet reproductions of images – using archival adhesive, attached to the canvas surface.

Appropriation is hung in BBAC’s Ramp Gallery, an inclined corridor that, because of its intimacy, works particularly well for this show. You can spin around from Frida Kahlo to confront Wassily Kandinsky, just four feet away on the opposing wall. It all makes for an excellent compare-and-contrast exercise in an exhibition that, at heart, is an extended homage from a local artist to some of the great creative forces of the 20th century.

Ron Teachworth, Diego & Frida, Watercolor, 22 x 30 inches.

Diego & Frida turned out to be the catalyst for Appropriation’s other artist portraits, though at the time he executed it, Teachworth had no inkling it would turn into a series. “I wasn’t thinking about art appropriation or anything,” he said. “I just liked that show at the DIA, went to it a couple of times, and wanted to celebrate the two of them.”

Frida Kahlo, Henry Ford Hospital, Oil on metal, 12 x 15 inches, 1932. (Courtesy of Dolores Olmedo Museum, Mexico City.)

Teachworth, who taught art and film for years in the Utica Community Schools and later at Oakland Community College, is something of a creative polymath, with several books to his credit and a 1983 feature film, Going Back. His artwork has been in any number of shows locally as well as in Pennsylvania and New York, and he also had an exhibition of paintings from Christ’s life that showed at Detroit’s Marygrove College and St. Mary’s of the Hills in Rochester. Additionally, in 2014, Teachworth got into the publishing business by founding the Detroit Art Review

Ron Teachworth, Picasso, Watercolor, 22 x 30 inches.

Pablo Picasso in a black-and-white striped shirt stares out at the viewer from one of the most colorful canvases on display, framed by lime-green walls and a dark-blue and dark-green checkerboard floor. To the right on the wall is a black-and-white picture of the young Picasso (when he still had hair), and, on an easel, sits a large canvas, Seated Woman (Marie Therese), a Cubist portrait of the Spaniard’s lover.

Ron Teachworth, Andy Warhol, Watercolor, 20 x 30 inches.

Pop-art celebrity Andy Warhol inhabits another color-filled frame, sitting astride a chair turned backward, his arms resting on its curved back. Red and pink dominate here, making the figure of the artist, with his white-blond hair, red vest, and red sneakers, pop out against the rosy wallpaper behind him. Continuing this theme on the left is the famous painting of the 10 Campbell’s soup cans, with their crimson-and-white label, and to the right, one of his portraits of Marilyn Monroe with incongruous red eye shadow and a red background.

Teachworth’s other artistic subjects include Georgia O’Keefe, Romare Bearden, Edward Hopper, William DeKooning, Andrew Wyeth, and Basquiat. In a helpful nod to the fact that not everyone will be familiar with every artist, Teachworth has added short biographies to the labels accompanying the works.

 

Ron Teachworth, Lipstick, Watercolor, 22 x 33 inches

Ron Teachworth, Interference, Watercolor, 22 x 30 inches.

The one exception to this parade of artists is also one of the show’s most enigmatic works. In Lipstick, a pretty young brunette wearing a black skirt but no top sits on the edge of a bed covered by a colorful quilt, peering at a hand compact and applying ruby-red lipstick. The bedroom, which appears to be in the tropics judging by its slatted-glass window and a hint of aqua water beyond, reads like a set from some 1950s film noir.

And here, Teachworth the artist exploits his own artwork. Hanging to the left of the half-dressed woman intent on her cosmetics is a painting of a prop plane seemingly about to land on a sunny beach – a miniature giclée replica of Interference, Teachworth’s canvas hanging immediately to the left. It seems only fitting, and rather witty, that if the author is going to appropriate from others, he ought to dish out the same treatment to himself as well.

 Ron Teachworth – Appropriation: Artists and Their Work, will be up at the Birmingham Bloomfield Art Center through April 30.

 

Mel Rosas: La Frontera @ N’Namdi Center for Contemporary Art

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On October 18, 2025

In Paintings, Stain-glass

An installation image of Mel Rosas: La Frontera at the N’Namdi Center for Contemporary Art in Detroit. Also on view are two other shows — Darcel Deneau: Remnants, and Omo Misha: Whatsoever Things Are Pure. All three exhibitions are up through Jan. 23.

Detroit’s N’Namdi Center for Contemporary Art is hosting three separate exhibitions by Detroit artists – Mel Rosas, Darcel Deneau and Omo Misha – very different practitioners of their craft, and yet each an undeniable colorist with a strikingly personal intensity. Gallery director Izegbe N’Namdi says she brought these three together at the same time because she likes the dialogue they set up with themselves, as well as with the other two artists.

Longtime Wayne State University art and art-history professor Mel Rosas takes us once again to a mostly imaginary Latin America in La Frontera, where his eye generally lands on street scenes defined by deeply saturated colors and, not uncommonly, a solitary pedestrian passing across the canvas, as with Primo Textura, below.

Mel Rosas, Primo Textura, Oil on panel, 24 x 36 inches, 2024.

Rosas’ life, as he tells it, has been an exercise in straddling various lines or divisions. Much of this runs bone deep, perhaps springing from his experience growing up as a half-Panamanian, half-American kid in homogenous Des Moines, Iowa. (He overcame in part by becoming a high-school baseball star.)

This neither-one-side-nor-the-other philosophical orientation plays out in his artistry as well. He’s particularly drawn, he told the Detroit Art Review in 2023, to opposites, as with his highly realistic painting style that, counterintuitively, all the same often manages to convey dreaminess and uncertainty.

As critic Matthew Piper put it in a 2016 Essay’d, “With their luscious surfaces, painstakingly lifelike textures, and subtly surreal depictions of almost-possible places, Rosas’ paintings are portals that offer the artist passage into his Latin American ancestry, and the viewer into a lush and evocative dream world.”

Indeed, passages and openings nearly always figure in Rosas’ work, sometimes framing an impossibly verdant landscape, or the immensity of the ocean itself. But with this show, La Frontera – easily translated, and, you’ll note, yet another line or division – the doorways are mostly closed, as with Primo Textura, or open into an impassable hellscape as in The Four Elements (Fire).

Mel Rosas, The Four Elements (Fire), Oil on board, 8 ½ x 11 inches, 2008.

It’s something of a departure for Rosas. Generally in the past these glimpses through doors and windows pull us into beguiling natural landscapes, but with The Four Elements, this aperture is full of threat and menace. Not to wax too psychological, but if these portals are in their way windows into the unconscious, Four Elements offers up a troubled and troubling vision, indeed.

Rather more enigmatic and possibly hopeful is The Need for Angels, in many ways the most surreal piece that Rosas has in this show. We’re presented with what appears to be a freestanding blue wall that also acts as a film strip with holes for sprockets at top and bottom, all framing black-and-white ads for movies set in large, deep squares. To the left, a giant pink arrow points at the classic image from filmmaker Wim Wenders’ 1987 “Wings of Desire,” with a trench-coated Peter Falk sporting angel wings, standing on the edge of a rooftop. Yet to his left, in case we thought this was all mysticism and reverie, a fire is in full and violent eruption from within a metal garbage bin.

Mel Rosas, The Need for Angels, Oil on canvas, 48 x 72 inches, 2024.

Izegbe N’Namdi says the first time she saw work by Rosas, she was immediately sucked into the piece at hand, landing in her a deeply meditative frame of mind. It’s a judgment the artist might well treasure.

Darcel Deneau, Heading West, Stained glass and found objects on wood panel, 12 x 16 inches, 2024.

Detroit artist Darcel Deneau works in a rarefied medium – constructing large mosaics out of tiny shards of stained glass, as with the current show, Remnants. It’s painstaking, time-consuming work. Moreover, colored glass always runs the risk of being “too pretty,” thereby trivializing its subject, whether fair or no. Darcel nicely avoids this trap by working with urban vignettes drawn from Detroit streets – “throwaway” shots of cars and buses and traffic lights, what you could call your standard city-road view.

A particularly nice example of this is Heading West – looking down Warren Avenue from Woodward toward Old Main at Wayne State. A striped, mint-colored city bus taking up the right side of the frame is reflected in nearby puddles, while a sunset edges, convincingly, from yellow-orange to chilly blue and lavender overhead.

Omo Misha, Brotherhood (The Mother’s Garden Series), Oil on canvas, 48 x 60 x 1.5 inches, 2025.

The third exhibition on display is Whatsoever Things Are Pure by Omo Misha, aka Misha McGlown, a multifaceted artist and curator. (The title comes from a Biblical passage.) Among other positions, Misha – a Detroit artist with a large presence in New York City – is curator of the Windows on Amsterdam gallery at City College of New York. In Detroit, she’s worked with various groups, including the Irwin Gallery on West Grand Boulevard.

Her art ranges widely, but in this particular case Misha gives us a series of fairly realistic portraits of young people. Several canvases are bright and highly vivid. But Brotherhood: The Mother’s Garden Series is set in a landscape of soft green on the edge of a forest. Its subjects, however — little boys dressed to the nines in their Sunday best — are rendered in shades of brownlish-gray, setting them off from the rest of the canvas.

But the focal point of the painting is the doll the smallest boy, right there in front, is holding out in front of himself. The doll is a veritable technicolor feast with rich yellows, reds and greens that sets up a striking and otherworldly contrast with the monochromatic children.

Three shows, Mel Rosas: La Frontera, Darcel Deneau: Remnants, and Omo Misha: Whatsoever Things Are Pure, will up at the N’Namdi Center for Contemporary Art in Detroit through Oct. 30. Three artists’ talks are scheduled, each from 2 to 4 p.m. on Nov. 8 (Omo Misha), Dec. 13,2025 (Mel Rosas), and Jan. 10 (Darcel Deneau).

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System and Sequence: Pattern and Ornamentation in Contemporary Art @ Oakland University Art Gallery

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On September 24, 2025

In Paintings, Photography, Prints

 

An installation image of System and Sequence: Pattern and Ornamentation in Contemporary Art, up at the Oakland University Art Gallery in Rochester through November 23. (All photos by Detroit Art Review)

Repetition seduces the human eye, tugging on it with irresistible attraction. The power of endless duplication is explored at length in System and Sequence: Pattern and Ornamentation in Contemporary Art, which will be at the Oakland University Art Gallery through November 23. Curated by gallery manager Leo Barnes, the 35-odd works on display take us on a kaleidoscopic journey through forests and thickets of ornamentation, sometimes used as a framing device, at others the dominating element in a given painting or photograph.

Jocelyn Hobbie, Floating World, Oil on canvas, 24 x 24 inches, 2024.

Curator Barnes said he’s always admired work by Brooklynite Jocelyn Hobbie, and how she “leans heavily on pattern and ornament in her work – I’ve always liked that. So I looked around for other artists who employ that theme in their work,” he added, “and that’s how the show grew.” As Barnes began to amass potential works, he was struck by how the artists, in one way or another, “were all having a similar conversation about family heritage or history that they were trying to portray with pattern as their work’s focal point, rather than just as background.” What’s striking about Hobbie’s work generally, and certainly with Floating World, above, is the juxtaposition of the subject’s expression – blank and possibly troubled – with the giddy patterns that surround her. It’s this sharp edge that Barnes zeroed right in on, the “contrast between this beautiful thing and a not-happy person.”

Nearby you’ll find Rachel Perry’s large Lost in My Life (Price Tags Reclining), which looks to be right in synch with Floating World with a female subject and dense ornamentation. But Perry’s taken these elements and pushed them about as far as they’ll go, in ways both captivating and amusing. In Lost in My Life, a woman’s head, turned away from us and apparently asleep, pokes out from beneath a comforter on a very large sofa.  Every single surface, her hair being the sole exception, is covered in a red, yellow and white repeating pattern of photographed receipt slips that the artist has turned into both fabric and wallpaper.

The issue at hand, says Barnes, is one of Bostonian Perry’s favorite themes – how consumerism overwhelms and envelopes all of us.

Rachel Perry, Lost in My Life (Price Tags Reclining), Archival pigment print, 36 x 26.25 inches, 2011.

 

Alia Ali, ‘Echo’ Glitzch Series, Pigment print with UV laminate mounted on aluminum Dibond in custom-built wooden frame hand-upholstered by artist with Dutch wax print sourced from Nigeria, 2024.

When Barnes came upon Alia Ali’s ‘Echo’ Glitzch Series, “it just clicked,” he said. “It embodied everything I was looking for, with a very much in-the-forefront, in-your-face pattern — yet there’s a human form there as well, making you focus on the pattern and what’s going on.” The human form Barnes refers to is completely wrapped in a strong, handsome pattern of what appear to be identical, stylized blue flowers on bright-yellow stems. In this case, no skin is visible – the fabric covers both face and head. The figure is silhouetted against another repetitive pattern that stars dark-blue, stylized spirals rather like nautilus shells. Growing up in Sana’a, Yemen, Ali writes that she got her passion for pattern on textiles from her grandmother, whose self-created fabrics, in Ali’s words, “documented our heritage.”

Spandita Malik, Noshad Bee, Unique photographic transfer print on khadi fabric, 64.5 x 47.5 inches, 2023.

Spandita Malik, originally from Chandigarh, India – the modernist state capital Le Corbusier created – works with an Indian organization that teaches abused women traditional, regional embroidery techniques, both to lend self-respect and give them an opportunity for a trade. New York-based Malik returns to India to photograph these survivors with their permission, and then transfers an individual’s image to fabric. That gets sent back to the woman in question, who then applies embroidery of her choice to round out the composition.With Noshad Bee, we have what almost looks like a wedding portrait, in which the apparent groom, but not his bride, has been partly obscured by a gorgeous pattern of maroon flowers and golden leaves that cover his entire frame. Given that these women have been abused, is it significant that the man’s face is half-hidden behind a flower? Perhaps. In any case, the woman who created the ornamentation appears to have utilized beautiful imagery to, as it were, blot out the man – a nice, ironic touch.

Antonio Santin, Momo, Oil on canvas, 63 x 86.6 inches, 2024

With some of the works on display in System and Sequence, the ornamentation is so complex and precise that one is almost tempted to imagine it must be digital one way or another. But no. Everything in the show, broadly speaking, is either painted or photographed. Antonio Santin’s huge work, Momo, calls up this question almost immediately. At roughly five feet by seven feet, this portrait of a furrowed Oriental carpet seems impossible to craft by hand. But if you look closely, paint has been applied in identical small, rounded spurts – squeezed from a syringe, according to Barnes – to create this hyper-realist canvas.

How many tens of thousands of syringe squeezes must have been involved dizzies the mind. But what floors Barnes is that the artist, having created this meticulous tapestry out of minute blobs of paint, then goes back with black spray paint and adds shadowing that gives the work its astonishing 3-D appearance. “Talk about nerve-wracking,” he says, “all this intricate work, and then at the end you come in with a black airbrush and just spray over it!”

System and Sequence: Pattern and Ornamentation in Contemporary Art, @ Oakland University Art Gallery in Rochester through November 23, 2025

Susan Goethel Campbell’s Soundings and Ebitenyefa Baralaye’s Foundations @ David Klein Gallery

By

On July 28, 2025

In Printmaking, Sculpture

An installation view of Susan Goethel Campbell’s Soundings at the David Klein Gallery’s new space in Ferndale. The foreground figures are from the companion show, Ebitenyefa Baralaye’s Foundations. Both will be up through Aug. 23. (All photos by Detroit Art Review.)

 The David Klein Gallery chose a knock-out exhibition to celebrate the opening of its new home in Ferndale, just down Livernois from the former Susanne Hilberry Gallery, which Detroit art-lovers will well remember. Within the new space, you’ll find eight breathtaking prints, each mounted about a centimeter from the wall, casting a small and essential shadow, that make up Soundings by Susan Goethel Campbell. Arrayed in front of these are three hulking, stylized ceramic sarcophagi by Ebitenyefa Baralaye — faceless figures that don’t appear much interested in the luminous prints surrounding them. Both shows are up through Aug. 23.

Taking the former first, Campbell’s color-drenched works on Japanese paper command this airy new space. The jewel tones employed here mark an interesting digression for a printmaker, videographer, and sculptor who’s mostly worked with natural dyes in muted earth tones. That palette always made sense, given Campbell’s visceral empathy for nature and its accelerating decline – a moral and philosophical outlook that underpins all her output, and one that Essay’d critic Sarah Rose Sharp termed Campbell’s “eco-connectedness.”

The artist, who got her MFA at Cranbrook and was a 2009 Kresge Artist Fellow, has spun out an oeuvre across her career ranging from elegant, walnut-stained abstract prints to Detroit Weather: 365 Days (2011), mesmerizing time- lapse videos that tracked Detroit cloud patterns over an entire year, recorded by cameras placed on a high floor in Detroit’s Fisher Building.

Susan Goethel Campbell, Aegean Narrative No. 2, Procion dyes, embroidery, collage, hand-cut perforations on Japanese paper, 38 ¼ x 58 inches, 2025.

With Soundings, Campbell explores the dazzling hues she encountered while on an artistic residency last summer in Greece on the island of Skopelos. Reached in England, where she’s currently visiting her daughter, Campbell emailed that she had indeed been inspired by the visual riot flourishing under the Mediterranean sun. “I wanted to use vivid, saturated color to reflect my experience of the Aegean and flowering plants in Greece,” she wrote, “so I worked with Procion dyes,” a cold-water type that yields intense color, “instead of natural muted dyes.” The results are striking abstracts — elaborate hand-crafted works on artisanal paper from Japan,  with repetitive perforations created by a Japanese drill punch, and small, sharp, geometric elements sewn delicately into the paper.

Susan Goethel Campbell, Aegean Narrative No. 2, (detail) Procion dyes, embroidery, collage, hand-cut perforations on Japanese paper, 38 ¼ x 58 inches, 2025.

In Aegean Narrative No. 2, Campbell fills the top half of the “canvas” with what appear to be radiant, abstracted sunflowers hovering above a sea-green lower half overlaid with a grid of small squares, many in dashing colors. These tiny geometric intrusions are ineffably beautiful, and read more like digital code than anything drawn from the living world. Campbell acknowledges such shapes are inspired “by patterns found in nature, data, and technology.”

Susan Goethel Campbell, Sounding No. 3 (Diptych); Procion dyes, embroidery, paper cuts on double-layered Japanese paper; 55 x 60 inches, 2025.

The grid Campbell’s embedded in some of these prints is most visible in Sounding No. 3 (Diptych), where just a scattering of aquamarine squares highlight an expanse of gridded sea-green, and work in sharp, if diminutive, contrast to the mauve and purple circular blobs that appear to be floating well under the water’s surface, like clouds of… something. There’s an undeniable suggestion, as with so much of Campbell’s work, of things elusive and unknowable.

Ebitenyefa Baralaye, Standing Figure IV, Terracotta, slip, stain; 64 x 19 x 17 inches, 2025.

Detroiter Ebitenyefa Baralaye’s monumental, faceless figures read like wood or metal, but are actually ceramic constructions built using a coil method that’s traditional in Nigeria, where the artist was born. The figures were fired with glaze and assembled in three parts, since few kilns are large enough to accommodate five-foot-tall stylized human forms. So while this tripartite division is inevitable and practical, there’s also a pleasing suggestion of ancient statuary à la Greece or Rome, where figures were sometimes constructed of stacked, carved elements.

Baralaye’s family migrated first to the Caribbean, and then to New York City. A graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design, in 2016, he got his MFA at Cranbrook and now teaches at the University of Michigan’s Stamps School of Art & Design. The “standing figures” may invoke similar forms he knew as a child, says gallery director Christine Schefman, but are seldom rendered at such a grand scale.

Ebitenyefa Baralaye, Standing Figure III, Terracotta, slip, stain; 65 x 22 x 16 inches, 2025.

 

Susan Goethel Campbell’s Soundings, and Foundations by Ebitenyefa Baralaye, will be up at the David Klein Gallery through Aug. 23, 2025

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

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On May 30, 2025

In Ceramic, Paintings

 

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.

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