Detroit Art Review

Critical art reviews of Detroit galleries and museums weekly

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Searching & Finding Hidden Heritage: Work by Peter Bernal @ Marshall Fredericks Museum

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On March 27, 2025

In Paintings

The main gallery of the Marshall M. Fredericks Sculpture Museum in Saginaw is a forest of white plaster, packed with casts of the ubiquitous Michigan sculptor’s works in varying scales and levels of abstraction. The massive head of The Spirit of Detroit is flanked by similarly epic portraits of Churchill and JFK. Horizontal male and female figures titled Night and Day sail by at just above head height, not far from a row of attenuated figures representing Seven Saints and Sinners. (A long Satanic snake hangs from the hands of the female figure of Temptation.)

Stylized creatures — birds, otters, bears, gazelles — undulate and soar through the gallery, all watched over by an enormous crucified Christ, sans cross. Fredericks has been called “America’s Public Sculptor,” an epithet one doesn’t earn by being overly confrontational or controversial, and indeed there’s nothing much in Fredericks’s cute critters, children’s book scenes, patriotic and religious themes, and writ-large theatricality that might ruffle anyone’s feathers.

Head of The Spirit of Detroit, plaster, Marshall Fredericks, 1958

Frederick’s energetic figurative and narrative sculptures rhyme nicely with the similarly bold, muscular, allegorical works of Detroit-based painter Peter Daniel Bernal, whose exhibition Searching & Finding Hidden Heritage is on display now through May 24. In fact Bernal, who sometimes adopts the pseudonym “Perez,” is currently working on a mural commemorating Fredericks’ work. It’ll be interesting to see how much the mural celebrates the sculptor and to what extent it pushes back against his visions of American progress or benevolent religion. Bernal’s own work, after all, is hardly non-confrontational.

Bernal is Tejano — Mexican American born and raised in southern Texas. Since 2015, he’s lived in Detroit. In between, he studied art in Kansas City, Rhode Island, and Germany. If you want a fuller biography than that, I think you should just come see his paintings. Bernal’s relationships with family and friends, school and religion, art and politics, his health and that of his community, and above all his search for an understanding of his own complex identity, is on display here in vibrant color and vivid imagery.

The Night, oil on canvas, Peter Bernal, 2021

To begin in the middle: about halfway through Hidden Heritage, Bernal quotes, in title and composition, a brutal painting by Max Beckmann, The Night, a scene of home invasion, rape, and lynching. It can’t be a good sign of the times when a contemporary artist can directly reference art of the Weimar era and it resonates all too well with the current climate. (Bernal lived and studied printmaking in Weimar for five years.)

However, in Beckmann’s painting the victims and perpetrators are almost indistinguishable from one another but for their actions, whereas in Bernal’s The Night, the characters are more specific. A Native American man, whose shorn hair lies at his feet thanks to a scissor-wielding, hooded priest, is strung up by his neck by a modern-day policeman, while a conquistador twists his arm. The dying man is painted in realistic flesh tones, but his half-sized attackers are as uniformly tan as the earth they stand on, like plastic toy soldiers or clay golems, making them preternaturally monstrous. The only hopeful elements here are an Indian child who flees the scene in one corner and an emerald green quetzal bird, an ancient symbol of freedom, that flies off into the blood-red sky in the opposite corner. The collapsing of the temporal distance between conquistador and cop is, as the label for The Night bluntly states, Trumpism depicted not as an unusual historical blip but as an acute case of the authoritarianism undergirding so much of the American project.

Critical Thinkers, oil on canvas, Peter Bernal, 2016

Trump is specifically name-checked in Critical Thinkers, an image of two identical clones of an enraged white man, neck veins bulging, who was caught on video hollering racist comments at Latinos during a protest rally. Each of the two figures carries a mirror-image Trump campaign sign in one hand while thrusting a Nazi-style salute with the other (years before Elon Musk would do likewise after Trump’s victory). The two stand in front of a conspicuously orange backdrop. Contrary to the ironic title of the painting, the two men are depicted as mindless group-thinkers overwhelmed by manipulative rhetoric and blind rage.

There’s No High Road In Dealing With Monsters, oil on canvas, Peter Bernal, 2021

Not that Bernal is immune to rage. In one of the most astonishing paintings in the show, There’s No High Road In Dealing with Monsters, a skeletal, demon-like apparition wearing the severed head of Texas senator Ted Cruz as a necklace swoops down onto a desert landscape to snatch a police officer and a border agent. Though realistically rendered, the monster’s wings and headdress are flatly painted in the style of Aztec murals, and it carries a bomb wrapped in its long tail. It’s a violent image, created from anger in the wake of two violent acts — school shootings in Uvalde and Detroit — and while it’s not a prescription for violence, it does question when, as the accompanying label puts it, “complacency becomes complicity” with authoritarianism. One character in another of Bernal’s paintings seems to have decided his own complicity has gone too far; in A Policeman Disgusted With Himself, a uniformed officer vomits up a stream of blood, bones, and mutilated corpses, including one still wearing an orange prison jumpsuit. Lit red from behind, perhaps by the lights of his own cruiser, the officer sports a badge on his sleeve indicating his jurisdiction: “Doesn’t Matter Where,” it reads.

A Policeman Disgusted With Himself, oil on canvas, Peter Bernal, 2021

 

Deuteronomy 20:14, San Antonio, oil on canvas, Peter Bernal, 2024

Bernal’s narrative scenes sometimes evoke poppier artists of the Juxtapoze magazine school of painting, but only superficially. In his Deuteronomy 20:14, San Antonio, an indictment of biblically sanctioned conquest, a huge infant clasping a rosary and seated on a heap of skulls represents God. Its eyes are shut to the angel-winged cowboy types that flit around its head stealing babies while an Indigenous man burns at the stake in the background, but it raises its hand in blessing nevertheless. Something about the “all-seeing eye” on the baby’s red sash and the composition in general are reminiscent of Mark Ryden’s work. Elsewhere, Bernal’s paintings bring to mind the crazy scenarios of Robert Williams, but those artists’ polished pop wackiness have nothing on Bernal in the content department. Religion is a frequent target of Bernal’s work, specifically its role in indoctrinating and dismantling Native American cultures. In Cuauhtlatoatzin Having an Ocular Migraine, Bernal suggests that the Catholic church’s first Indigenous saint, who allegedly saw a vision of the Virgin Mary, might actually have been suffering from a painful optical disorder (Bernal himself has experienced such migraines). On the other hand, Bernal lays claim to Catholic imagery in two paintings, both entitled Santa Marta La Dominadora. In one, the titular saint, who devoted herself to caring for the sick and the poor, carries a large snake that plucks a combat drone from the sky. In this painting, she is shown in her native Dominican Republic; in an earlier version, she’s seen in hospital scrubs with the Detroit skyline behind her.

Santa Marta La Dominadora, oil on canvas, Peter Bernal, 2020

 

Firecracker, oil on canvas, Peter Bernal, 2021

There are moments of gentle respite in the show. One is a tender portrait of the artist’s wife, Ellen, seated before a dark backdrop with their black cat, Wilhelmina von Kratzleben, curled up on her lap. Another is Firecracker, in which a smiling Indigenous girl runs with a sparkler in one hand. Beside her runs a smaller figure, an animated sculpture of an Aztec warrior, flicking a lighter. Back in the main gallery, over the entrance, Marshall Fredericks depicts the march of progress in a plaster relief sculpture, a timeline of technology showing Native Americans on horseback inevitably supplanted by covered wagons, trains, automobiles, and airplanes. Bernal knows that technologies like the gunpowder in the child’s sparkler can be harnessed for good, though much of the rest of the work in his show reiterates that progress, to put it entirely too mildly, is a double-edged sword, and its history cannot be whitewashed.

Searching & Finding Hidden Heritage @ Marshall Fredericks Museum.  Work by Peter Bernal.  Through May 24, 2025.

Making Her Mark @ Flint Institute of Arts

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On February 1, 2025

In Ceramic, Sculpture, Uncategorized

Clay, of course, has been a fundamental material for both artistic and utilitarian objects for millennia. In Europe, ceramics had long been a masculine pursuit, maybe because digging up clay, feeding fiery kilns, and other physical aspects of the process were deemed too strenuous (or unseemly) for women. After the Industrial Revolution mechanized the manufacture of ceramics, women were employed as “china painters,” adding decorations to factory-made pottery, but weren’t involved in the actual creation of the objects. Once the ideals of the British Arts & Crafts movement — its revolt against industrialization and its emphasis on human-made objects — found their way to the U.S., studios began making ceramics featuring distinctively American designs. Some of these potteries were run by women, and some tutored and encouraged girls to take up ceramics as a vocation. After World War II, women artists emerged as important members of the Studio Ceramics movement, helping their male counterparts to bring the medium fully into the realm of fine art. Now, the Flint Institute of Arts, which boasts an impressive array of ceramics in its permanent collection, presents “Making Her Mark” (through September 28), a smallish but eclectic exhibition of ceramic artworks by women that proves that, released from any obligation to practicality, clay can be an almost endlessly versatile medium for expression.

Evelyn Cheromiah, Olla, Stoneware

Many of the objects in the show do at least nod toward the utilitarian vessels usually associated with ceramics. Evelyn Cheromiah’s Olla, a stoneware pot decorated with geometric earth tone patterns, is perhaps the most faithful piece here, sourced, fired, and painted according to the traditions of the artist’s Laguna Pueblo heritage. English innovator Clarice Cliff’s hand-painted Art Deco “Bizarre” ware is represented by two perfectly functional Fantasque Pitchers, adorned with colorful fruits and a country cottage. Sara Paloma’s jet-black Bottles, with their pencil-thin necks, and Eva Hild’s untitled white porcelain bowl (studded with nails) are at least nominally practical.

Ursula Morley Price, Fountain Plume Form,   Stoneware, 2009

Some works demonstrate the medium’s ability to mimic other materials. Ursula Morley Price’s Fountain Plume Form(2009) is a vase-like object made up of thin vertical vanes that resemble a rusting turbine, while Anne Marie Laureys’ Clay-e-Motion looks like a supple, bundled scarf. You’d be forgiven for mistaking Mary Roehm’s porcelain Tea Bowl #1 at first for translucent glass with a metal rim and base, and Lucie Rie’s small conical piece, its thin walls punctured with ragged holes, could pass for a crudely made metal sieve.

Carol Gouthro, Aurlia gouthroii Barnaclette, Porcelain, 2012

Clay lends itself to some delightfully odd biomorphic creations as well, such as Bonnie Seeman’s untitled stalk of rhubarb-like vegetation, its leaves cut away to reveal ruby red pith; the piece recalls similar vegetable- and fruit-shaped teapots and pitchers from the 18th and 19th centuries. Debbie Weinstein’s Vessel is crowned with purple polyps that could be writhing undersea creatures, and Carol Gouthro’s Aurlia gouthroii Barnaclette depicts a weird fictional organism — scientifically named for the artist — with mouth-like pods sprouting from an orange stem, anchored to a mass of purple seashells. More subtle is Chieko Katsumata’s untitled flower-like form, a fleshy, bright yellow blossom, both vivid and ponderous.

Irina Zaytceva, Twins,  Porcelain, 2013

 

Magda Gluszek, Small Pond, Ceramic, 2013

Ceramics can, of course, be figurative, even narrative. Ruth Duckworth’s Black Angel is an elegantly abstracted figure with blunt “wings” and a slender neck supporting a half-circle head that’s part helmet, part halo, with just a suggestion of a face. It recalls both early modernist works and ancient Cycladic sculpture. Irina Zaytceva’s Twins is a small porcelain vessel decorated with delicate, meticulously rendered images of mermaids and other mythical sea creatures, with a stopper resembling branching red coral. Magda Gluszek contributes Small Pond: a pale female figure in a translucent green swimsuit reclines in a sort of kiddie pool made of transparent plastic and what looks like floral upholstery off a 1970s sofa. She’s blowing a party noisemaker, and her blushing skin, hairless eyebrows, and large pointed animal ears suggest she’s some sort of puckish faerie creature, up to some mischief in the human world.

Sara Lisch, Lion’s Journey, Stoneware, 2002

Another fairytale-looking piece, Sara Lisch’s Lion’s Journey, is rich with details that hint at a narrative. A woman dressed as a swimmer, with a monkey seated in front of her, rides astride a lioness wearing a blue collar and a bracelet on one paw. The big cat’s body is perforated to reveal small animals inside its belly. Who these characters are remains mysterious, but the tableau is a beautiful one, painted in blues and browns over a white glaze.

Viola Frey, A Pile of Figurines and Masked Man.

Mariko Paterson, Willow Bago, Porcelain, 2014

Mariko Paterson, who says her works “range from pretty to political,” contributes Willow Bago, a humorous porcelain sculpture with perhaps some serious commentary about imperialism and cultural exchange. It depicts a cartoonishly tall and narrow Winnebago RV, with a cut-n-paste image of Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, smiling from behind the windshield. The white body of the vehicle is decorated with cobalt blue Chinese-inspired images of pagodas, boats, and trees — the “Willow pattern,” as it was known when it became popular in the late 1700s. The RV is made even more precarious by the tourist luggage and Chinese loot piled high on its roof. Britain’s misadventures in China are notorious, so it’s easy to read Willow Bago as a critique, despite the plaque on its roof claiming it commemorates “100 wonderful years” of the Queen Mum.

Viola Frey, A Pile of Figurines and Masked Man

Viola Frey, whose imposing 10-foot tall Arrogant Man stands watch over the FIA’s main ceramics gallery, is represented here by a chaotic bricolage sculpture called simply A Pile of Figurines and a Masked Man that gloms together multiple kitschy ceramic collectibles along with original creations. Among the clutter are what look like a Dutch girl, a bunny, and possibly the Virgin Mary and one of the three wise men, all colored in bright splashes of red, yellow, and blue. Trying to make his way through the jumble is one of Frey’s signature men in suits, either placing a Roman bust on his head or trying to remove it. In Frey’s work, the commercial and fine art traditions of ceramics collide to make an appropriate centerpiece for this wildly varied exhibition.

Making Her Mark on display at the https://flintarts.org  through September 28, 2025.

Lester Johnson @ Stamelos Gallery

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On September 27, 2024

In Mixed Media, Paintings, Prints

Four: Lester Johnson’s Selected Works,  September 12-December 8, 2024, Stamelos Gallery Center, University of Michigan Dearborn

Lester Johnson, Four: Lester Johnson’s Selected Works, Installation View

Before visiting the exhibition Four: Lester Johnson’s Selected Works, give a listen to the 1954 jazz standard, performed by the Miles Davis Quintet, that lends the show its title (if you forget, there’s a QR code near the front of the gallery that will take you to it). Calling the tune “toe-tapping” is a little corny, but — see if you can resist. A wall plaque says the song celebrates “four cherished things in life: truth, honor, happiness, and love.” Those all seem to be in short supply of late, replaced instead by bias, expediency, dopamine hits, and heart emojis. But there’s plenty of all four on vivid display on the walls of the Stamelos Gallery, as venerable Detroit artist and educator Lester Johnson takes every opportunity to share his spotlight with a pantheon of family, friends, artists, ancestors, teachers, musicians, and personal heroes that have helped shape and inform his art over the course of his long career. Consider the second part of the show’s title: it’s not “Selected Works of Lester Johnson,” but “Lester Johnson’s Selected Works,” a subtle difference that shifts the focus more to the works, all of which are, to some extent, group efforts, even if only via musical inspiration. This is true of the work of many artists, but Johnson, in the titles of his art and in his commentary on wall labels throughout the show, foregrounds this communal aspect, never missing a chance to generously acknowledge his collaborators and muses.

Lester Johnson,   Elaine’s Gift, 2010  Fabric, fiberglass, paint, and tape.

Notice the number of titles that include the names of others: Marlene’s Gift; Elaine’s Gift; Claudia’s Choice, a nod to a friend who brought back printed cloth from a trip to Africa for Johnson to use in his art; Lynn’s Song, a multicolored work in cast paper dedicated to Lynn Forgach, director of the Exeter paper company in New York, with whom Johnson collaborated in the early ‘80s at the suggestion of another great Detroit creative, Al Loving. The tag for the piece even includes nods of gratitude to the student apprentices at Exeter for helping Johnson expand his abilities.

Lester Johnson,  Alma Thomas, Digital Print,  2018.

The painter Alma Thomas, whose mosaic-like abstractions share the bright hues used in many of Johnson’s works, is honored in a tapestry-like digital print. The print itself is mostly in muted browns and blues, a collage combining African motifs, a photo of women stitching a quilt, a gnarled glove holding an auto worker’s ID badge, and a picture of Thomas at work on a painting, suggesting a kinship across time and space between these various forms of the labor of Black hands.

Lester Johnson,  A Garland of Praise Songs for Rosa Parks, 2013  Fabric, wood, and paint.

A Garland of Praise Songs for Rosa Parks is dedicated to the storied civil rights icon, as well as to America’s longest-serving Black judge, Detroit’s Damon Keith. (The piece resides in the Damon J. Keith Center for Civil Rights at Wayne State University.) It’s the largest example on display here of Johnson’s “totems” — staff-like cylinders of wood or fiberglass, wrapped in twine, tape, reeds, digital prints featuring colorful patterns, or, more often and most strikingly, fabric printed with African designs. Attributed on Johnson’s website to his African and Native American spiritual heritage, the totems call for “a cross-cultural exchange of energy and vision.” Standing vertically in collections of eight, ten, as many as 26, most of the totems are a few feet tall, but even those made of paper that are no taller than one’s hand project an aura of strength, confidence, and authority. The totems appear again worked into Johnson’s multiculturally-inspired “kimonos” — robe-shaped wall hangings weaving together Japanese, African and Australian Aboriginal influences. Built into the kimonos like columns or spines, the totems lend the garment-like constructions an almost architectural stability. The kimonos displayed here are named in honor of Nelson Mandela, Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, and Egyptian queen Nefertiti.

Lester Johnson, Kimono Nefertiti,  2009 Mixed media.

Johnson was born in Detroit in 1937; born that same year, just a few blocks from where Johnson would grow up, was the Blue Bird Inn, the legendary nightclub that hosted a stellar line-up of modern jazz players in the 1950s and ‘60s. Jazz music has greatly informed Johnson’s work through the years, particularly that of Miles Davis, who lived in Detroit briefly in the mid-‘50s. Davis and his music are mentioned a number of times in Four. An airbrushed painting from 1972 named for his influential 1959 album Kind Of Blue features arcs and angular shapes, leaning back to the right against a blue background. The shapes are striped with what look like tire tracks, as if pointing out the musician’s Motor City connection. As recently as this year, Johnson evoked Davis again with In A Silent Way Miles Davis and Wayne Shorter Tribute, an upward-pointing triangle of nine interlocking pyramids, painted a cool blue. The many facets of the structure cast shadows and catch the light, creating varying tones and intensities of color, perhaps even suggesting dignified facial features.

Lester Johnson, In A Silent Way Miles Davis and Wayne Shorter Tribute, Mixed media, 2024.

Johnson honors other musicians here as well. The woman known as “Mama Africa,” South African anti-apartheid activist and Afropop star Miriam Makeba, is commemorated with a collection of twelve richly patterned totems. Motown’s Gladys Knight inspired a 1974 print that comprises several panels of hard-edged black-and-white angles and stripes, like noir-ish depictions of urban architecture, countered by single red square with a record-like circle inside, a point of stability in a field of anxiety. John Coltrane Print from 1969 has the hip feel of jazz album graphic design. A 2005 abstract painting, showing colorful vertical stripes reminiscent of Johnson’s totems emerging from behind a green triangle, is named for the Luther Vandross song Never Too Much. A similarly vivid abstract work from the same year, named for the Thelonious Monk standard Round Midnight, features (ironically) areas of sunny yellow intersected by a purple field and a blue triangle, suggesting a passageway.

Lester Johnson,  Total Eclipse, Acrylic, 1971. 

One of the few works here that doesn’t bear someone’s name is Total Eclipse from 1971, an acrylic painting made up of 35 squares with circles inside, each intersected and subdivided by lines and angles like a pie chart. Despite the title, none of the circles is entirely occluded, and none are without shadow. Each “lunar” disc has some part shaded in, and each angular segment of the squares is painted in varying shades of blue and purple, or else white. It’s not a scientific diagram nor a mystical chart, but it looks like it could be either if you knew how to read it. As it is, the image seems to flicker like a multi-faceted gem, an ode perhaps to diversity and perpetual change.

There’s a lot of “cool” in this show — cool colors, cool music — but the overall vibe is a warm one, celebratory and grateful. Seen as a portrait of Lester Johnson, the exhibit is testimony to how any of us are, in many ways, collages of the people we’ve let into our lives — the ones who have informed and inspired us. It might be a fruitful and fun question to ask one’s self: “Whose names would appear on the wall tags if this was my show?”

Four: Lester Johnson’s Selected Works,  September 12-December 8, 2024, Stamelos Gallery Center, University of Michigan Dearborn.

Work from Mexico @ Flint Institute of Arts

By

On July 9, 2024

In Ceramic, Printmaking

Installation image of FIA exterior

The Flint Institute of Arts is not an enormous museum, but it delivers a big experience. One of the wonders of the FIA is how they manage to do so much in a relatively small space. The museum boasts a dozen galleries featuring a spectrum of objects from across the ages and around the world; notable contemporary glass and ceramics galleries; a showcase-lined corridor devoted to decorative arts; a theater and a sculpture court; and a small gallery between the obligatory gift shop and cafe that sells work made by students from the adjacent art school. At the very back of the building is the Sheppy Dog Library (named for philanthropist Dr. Alan Klein’s golden retriever), a warm, welcoming reading room stocked with reference books and comfy chairs in which to peruse them.

Installation, From Earth To Sky: Ancient Art of the Americas

Of course, there’s generous space given over to large headliner exhibitions, but there’s also a tiny media arts gallery — a “black box” theater designed to show video works. And just in front of the library is the FIA’s graphics gallery, a dark-walled room with subdued lighting, just big enough to comfortably showcase a dozen or so prints or drawings. All three of these spaces are currently hosting art created by Mexican artists, featuring work that spans two millennia. In the main galleries is the exhibit From Earth To Sky: Ancient Art of the Americas, showcasing ceramic figures and objects from the collection of a Texas oil magnate. The graphics room offers Mexicanidad, a portfolio of twelve prints created by El Taller de Gráfica Popular, a progressive-minded, Mexico City-based printmaking collective founded in 1937. And in the Security Credit Union Media Arts Gallery, they’re showing Pocha Dream, an eleven-and-a-half minute excerpt from the Dream Machine Archive, a “psychodynamic audio and video tool” designed by artist Natalia Rocafuerte to help immigrant women interpret their dreams. (Rocafuerte grew up around the Mexico/Texas border, and became a naturalized US citizen in 2019.)

Ted Weiner was a second-generation oil man who threw himself and a chunk of his fortune into art collecting in the 1950s. He acquired an impressive array of modernist works, as well as a large collection of indigenous Mexican sculptures, which were experiencing a vogue at the time. He was noted for his “catholicity of taste” — which could be taken as a backhanded compliment. But Weiner’s collection of pre-Hispanic ceramics was of such quality that when his daughter offered the complete set to the FIA after his death, the museum (after doing due diligence) gladly accepted it.

Jalisco, Ancestor Pair, ca. 200 BCE – 200 CE Ceramic

Many of the pieces on display here are smallish terracotta figures or vessels from the Nayarit, Jalisco, and Colima regions of western Mexico, created to be buried along with deceased members of elite families, in underground tombs beneath a family’s home. The tombs were accessible by shafts, and often contained the remains of several of a family’s ancestors. To modern eyes, the figures depicted by the sculptures might seem enviably relaxed and relatable: seated on stools, sitting arm-in-arm, smoking, or leaning back with legs spread as if lounging on the beach. But the elaborate jewelry, scarifications, tattoos, headwear, and other features on these figures indicate prestige and authority handed down through ancestral bloodlines. Male-and-female couples sitting side by side are thought to represent the ancestral progenitors from whom a family’s elite status flowed. Some figures have abstracted features to emphasize rank over individual likenesses. Elsewhere in the exhibit, other walks of life are represented; most dramatic are the shaman warriors, dressed in cylindrical armor and outsized helmets, and brandishing clubs. Everyday activities such as playing ball, preparing food and medicines, and giving birth are depicted as well.

Colima,  Dog, ca. 200 BCE – 200 CE Ceramic

Dogs were a favorite subject of these sculptures, and ceramic canines were common in the tombs. They’re undeniably cute; one small dog on display here is flopped with its legs splayed out, and another boasts a rotund belly, toothy grin, and even an anatomically correct backside that will charm any dog person. For ancient Mexicans, these dogs held spiritual significance as well; they may have acted as guides for the deceased into the underworld, valued companions in death as they were in life. The chubby “Colima Dog” has since become iconic of the region, and its image has been adopted by contemporary Mexican artists such as Guillermo Ríos Alcalá, whose monumental version of a pair of the dogs dances over a traffic circle in Colima, part of an ongoing process of re-establishing connections to pre-Hispanic culture.

Mexicanidad, Installation view

The concept of Mexicanidad (essentially, “Mexican-ness”) links the ancient works in the main gallery with modern ones in the FIA’s print gallery via the post-revolutionary nationalist movement by that name. Most often associated with the mural projects of “Los Tres Grandes” — Orozco, Siqueiros, and Rivera — the Mexicanidad movement had an important printmaking aspect as well, rooted in the social commentary of predecessors such as José Guadalupe Posada. While the “Big Three” educated the people on progressive issues with large-scale public wall paintings, the printmaking collective El Taller de Gráfica Popular (TGP) took the opposite tack: creating small, accessible, and affordable artworks, though still with powerful leftist political messaging. The portfolio displayed here, simply titled “Mexican People,” comprises a dozen lithographs produced in 1946 by TGP for the purpose of promoting Mexican products in the United States. 

Alberto Beltrán, The Sugar Mill, 1946 Lithograph

 

Alfredo Zalce, Lumber Workers, ca. 1945 Lithograph

American ex-pat artist Pablo O’Higgins (FKA Paul Higgins before becoming an assistant to Diego Rivera) contributes two prints, one of a man and child stacking bricks, and another of an older woman selling her wares at market. O’Higgins employs heavy, sinuous lines that lend his subjects both muscularity and grace. Alberto Beltrán’s image of a man feeding sugar cane into a donkey-driven mill is as elegant as it is diagrammatic, concisely describing the process in a masterfully composed image. Alfredo Zalce’s litho of a lumber operation is similarly beautiful, the arc of a precariously balanced worker’s saw echoing that of reddish logs, splayed like fingers and bobbing in blue-green water. Francisco Mora depicts a silver miner, hunched and approaching the viewer in a claustrophobic tunnel, but not alone — his companions are visible laboring in the background. Though the prints in the “Mexican People” portfolio were intended for a US audience, they nevertheless evince the TGP’s populist concerns; for a campaign promoting export products, the images here pointedly privilege the laborers, their tools and their environments over the products themselves (in much the way Rivera emphasizes the auto manufacturing process over actual cars in his Detroit Industry murals).

Natalia Rocafuerte Pocha Dream, 2021 Lithograph

Inspired by Jungian analysis, which posits that dreams are the way the unconscious communicates with the conscious mind, artist Natalia Rocafuerte set up a hotline, complete with ads featuring cheesy late-night infomercial style graphics, encouraging immigrant women from Detroit and South Texas to call in and answer a survey about their dreams. From these reports, Rocafuerte created short films interpreting the dreams, done in a chaotic, disjointed video collage technique that echoes dream logic: overlapping images, snippets of random advertisements and social media videos, computer games, songs and other pop ephemera.

Natalia Rocafuerte Dream of Emma and Tony, 2021 Lithograph

The eleven-and-a-half minute clip featured at FIA is entitled Pocha Dream, a reference to a (somewhat joking) slang term for Mexicans who’ve lost their Spanish, and perhaps their culture — who have “changed color,” like a rotting fruit (so explains the robotic voiceover that opens the video). The clip includes Dream of Emma and Tony, a short that got Rocafuerte named Best Michigan Filmmaker at 2021’s Ann Arbor Film Festival. In Emma and Tony, Rocafuerte recounts a dream encounter with her normally reclusive (and deaf and blind) grandmother. As she talks, home movies of the older woman are intercut with a face-constructing computer program from the Sims game, as if Rocafuerte’s mind was casting about trying to build a memory of her Abuela. Nostalgic TV ad jingles and graphics from news programs occasionally interrupt the story. The scene somehow segues to an elevated train, traveling first through a Chicago-esque cityscape, then into the desert of west Texas. Along for the ride are an annoying white tourist, and SnapChat denizen and self-described “ladies man” Tony Johns, who hoots and drops inane life advice. Obnoxious as Johns seems, Rocafuerte finds herself admiring his self-confidence. The desert gives way to a meadow just before the dream abruptly ends.

Aside from noting their common origins from Mexican artists, it might be a bit fraught to suggest there are common threads running between 2,000-year-old clay figurines, 78-year-old lithographs, and a Covid-era short film. Suffice to say that the artworks in each exhibit address, and dignify, the quotidian concerns of the artists and their subjects. Those concerns may be personal or political, practical or spiritual, and sometimes all of the above.

From Earth To Sky: Ancient Art of the Americas –   On view now through August 25

Mexicanidad  – On view now through September 8

Dream Machine Archive: Pocha Dream  –On view now through July 31

Doomscrolling @ Broad Art Museum

By

On April 22, 2024

In Digital Artwork

Kayla Mattes – Doomscrolling Exhibition at the  Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum, MSU, Lansing

Installation view, All works by Kayla Mattes. All images courtesy of Sean Bieri  2024

“Doomscrolling” is internet-speak for the online equivalent of a death spiral: the act of compulsively flicking at the screen of a smartphone and trolling for bad news, absorbing the steady stream of tragedy, atrocity, injustice, and outrage that the algorithm floats past our eyeballs until we’ve lost track of time, and possibly our grip on reality. (The corollary habit of compulsively seeking out tidbits of lightweight entertainment to counteract such horrors is an issue in its own right.) “Doomscrolling” isn’t just a buzzword; googling the term brings up pages on the National Institutes of Health’s website that associate the phenomenon with anxiety, depression, and other disorders. Textile artist Kayla Mattes’ exhibition Doomscrolling (open now through August 18 at the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum, Lansing) is an engaging and often humorous attempt to pull the viewer out of this virtual tailspin by transposing the web’s cacophony of video clips, headlines, memes, and emojis into the more tangible medium of woven tapestries, allowing us to examine them at a remove, the better to reflect on how the internet is rewiring our brains.

Born in 1989, Mattes is a “digital native,” a child of the information age who can scarcely recall a time before the internet. Some of the individual memes she works into her tapestries have become classics of the medium; a few are golden oldies that may be as nostalgia-inducing for younger viewers as Saturday morning cartoons are for a Gen Xer. Many visitors will smile with recognition when they spot the “Awkward Look Monkey Puppet,” a synthetic simian who nervously shifts its gaze in response to some uncomfortable situation; the “This Is Fine” dog, a cartoon canine who smiles contentedly while the room burns down around him; and of course the iconic “Keyboard Cat,” a tabby pawing at an electric piano who “plays off,” Vaudeville style, the victim of some catastrophic personal failure in a series of memes that dates back to the primeval year of 2009.

Kayla Mattes, Fun Fact, 2023, Handwoven cotton, wool, and acrylic

It’s fun spotting these familiar characters within Mattes’ tapestries, though it’s a bit like being a soup enthusiast at a Warhol show — focusing only on such details misses the larger point. Mattes collages all this digital detritus carefully to give each tapestry a theme. For instance, Keyboard Cat appears in a piece called “Fun Fact,” surrounded by warning icons, error messages, and a rewind button. The phrase “The internet was once a fun place for watching cat videos instead of monitoring the real-time collapse of late-stage capitalism” appears over the musical feline’s head so that he seems to be “playing off” the failed promise of the World Wide Web and the remains of our collective innocence.

Kayla Mattes, Better Help, 2022, Handwoven cotton, wool, and polyester

“Better Help” borrows its title from an online mental health service and features various images suggesting tension and anxiety: a finger poised over two red buttons labeled “hope” and “nope” (aka, the “Daily Struggle” meme); an hourglass icon; a smiley face hovering over a black hole. The “This Is Fine” dog — originally from a comic strip by KC Green illustrating our masochistic ability to acclimate to any “new normal,” no matter how calamitous — appears in a tapestry called “5%.” Surrounding the dog are images of flames, a rising thermometer, and the exploding head of the “mind blown” emoji, along with a “low battery” warning, suggesting that even as the global situation becomes increasingly heated, our ability to respond is dwindling. Another piece called “‘the apps’ (iykyk)” is strewn with the iconography of various dating apps, along with an image of Sesame Street’s Elmo engulfed in flames, and a map of the freeways of Los Angeles (Mattes’ hometown), both of which provide analogies for the frustrating hellscape that is the online dating scene. Other works in the show address climate change, commerce, and astrology.

Kayla Mattes, 5%, 2023 Handwoven cotton, wool, mohair, and acrylic

The juxtaposition of all this info-ephemera with the centuries-old handicraft of weaving may seem like an odd pairing at first (not as jarring as seeing attack helicopters and rocket launchers woven into an Afghan war rug, maybe, but the disconnect feels similar). It isn’t really as strange as it seems. After all, as Mattes points out, both computers and looms utilize a binary logic of sorts: the intersection points of warp and weft in a tapestry correspond to the on-or-off state of pixels on a screen. Plus, it was an early attempt at automating the weaving process, by one Joseph Marie Jacquard, that produced the punch card technology that made the first proto-computers — or “analytical engines” — possible.

Mattes worked with a modern Jacquard loom to create the centerpieces of the show, three vertical banners that hang down one wall and scroll out onto the floor. Each banner features a list of automated Google search suggestions prompted by the questions “What is…?,” “When is…?,” and “Why is…?” Not entirely random, the suggestions were based on searches trending on the internet at the time; they were then curated and arranged by Mattes. The resulting questions range from the existential (“what is wrong with the world today?”; “when is it time to move on?”) to the trivial (“why is comic sans hated?”; “when is an avocado ripe?”). Taken together, they paint a collective portrait of the internet community that’s reassuringly “relatable” — both humorous and endearing for the humanity that shows through the cold logic of the algorithm.

On either side of the gallery entrance, vertical strings have been hung so visitors can write their own “searches” onto strips of paper, then weave them — and themselves — into the fabric of the show. There’s also a demonstration video showing Mattes at her loom; at one point the artist’s cat appears, batting at balls of thread while Mattes tries to work, because how would an exhibition like this be complete without its very own funny cat video?

Kayla Mattes – Doomscrolling Exhibition at the  Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum through August 18, 2024.

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