Author: Sean Bieri Page 1 of 3

Lynn Galbreath starts off her exhibition at the BBAC with a painting that seems at first like an outlier from the rest of the work in the show. It depicts a stack of books — surveys, essay collections, and textbooks — authored by artists, critics, and academics that will likely be familiar to any student of art history: Arthur Danto, Robert Hughes, Lucy Lippard, Marcel Duchamp, the ubiquitous Gardner and Janson. Atop the stack is a bouquet of white tulips. The painting is titled 1000 Missed Dialogues, an odd opener perhaps for a show called Conversations. But the artist explains via email that this painting is just one of several that comprised a 30-foot-long linear installation, “created after chaperoning university students to Italy.” Included in that piece were portraits, still lifes, scenes from Italian piazza life, and more. The books depicted are, Galbreath says, “representative of the study of studio art at the university level,” and run the gamut from basic drawing and art history, to academic disciplines and theory, before arriving at Fairfield Porter’s collection of criticism Art On Its Own Terms. For Galbreath, art itself is the conversation, one that “has been going on since the beginning of mankind.”

Juxtaposing objects puts them in conversation with one another, like one book on top of another, or one image next to another. It’s a technique Galbreath uses often in her quest to engender communication. “Today, no one talks enough,” she says. “Everyone is in a hurry. Everyone is constantly online checking social media.” Her art seeks to remedy this: “Conversations with opposite points of view are very healthy. Diptychs, triptychs (any multi-panel piece) are great platforms to address conversation. They can portray varying views and feelings.”

 

Conversations features 17 paintings from three different bodies of Galbreath’s work. An accomplished representational painter, she often tinges her work with a sense of intrigue by overlaying incongruous elements within her scenes. For instance, in one large painting a cascade of lemons, cherries, and blueberries flies up (or tumbles down) across a blue sky full of fluffy white clouds. That this cheerful image is given the warlike title Damn The Torpedos, Full Speed Ahead is a jarring juxtaposition indeed! (Perhaps this bracing burst of edible primary colors is a rallying cry to artists to rise and shine and get to work?) Another piece here with the curious title Can You Hear It Now is similar in concept: a column of tumbling rosebuds, succulents and sea anemones (!) in a range of pinks, reds and violets, rises in the foreground before what might be a blooming southwest landscape, painted with loose brushstrokes in a pink-and-green palette that Monet would have approved of.

Three paintings grouped together on one wall of the gallery represent Galbreath’s series Working Hard For A Living. On either side are images of workers preparing food for sale. Only their torsos and their hands are visible; their heads extend off the top of the canvas, and their legs are obscured behind outsized heaps of foodstuffs. The image on the left is Unsustainable Living – Bruna, in which the titular worker cuts open fish with a pair of scissors, revealing the pink flesh inside. She’s based on Galbreath’s photos of a Portuguese fishmonger. Her counterpart on the right is a kale seller at Detroit’s Eastern Market, shown bundling up leafy greens in a painting called Sustainable Living – Waylon. The central, largest painting is a Mexican beach vendor who lends his name to the painting’s title, Javier. He turns his head to peer at the viewer, his body all but obscured by the jumble of colorful woven baskets he’s carrying. Taken as a whole, the triptych almost feels like an altarpiece, dedicated to hard-working individuals the artist has encountered in her travels.

The most compelling of Galbreath’s paintings are the diptychs in which she pairs scenes of roads and freeways — mostly “widescreen” images emphasizing the far-off horizon — with swatches of flat color sampled from the color schemes of the paintings. For instance, Dusk On Cleveland Street, in which car headlamps and streetlights glow under a light-polluted night sky, is accompanied by a rectangle of deep midnight blue. In Pontiac Morning Fog on Main Street, the city’s downtown recedes into the haze until skyscrapers and even traffic lights are all but invisible; next to this is a square of misty pinkish-gray. A smaller work, Chelsea Grey, depicts cars parked outside a New York emissions testing site; its swatch is the hue of concrete, pigeons, and smog. Galbreath describes these as “atmospheric” studies depicting “the color of heat, humidity, time of day and year. They are compositions of location and materiality.” The color swatches might be seen as a sort of summing up of those conditions, a shorthand description of the atmosphere.

“Aesthetically,” she says, the road diptychs are “visual responses to extraordinary light characteristic and specific to a location.” Indeed, Michiganders will recognize the cold, clear conditions depicted in some of her highway paintings. The largest of the diptychs, Marlette Road, may appeal to the poetically inclined viewer, as it recalls nothing so much as Robert Frost’s most famous work. On a crisp bright day somewhere in Michigan’s thumb, two roads diverge in a wood, one paved, salted and plowed, the other almost indistinguishable from the snow on the shoulder. A yellow sign with a black arrow urges motorists to the left, while a diamond-shaped sign seems to warn them off from the riskier path on the right. Here as elsewhere in this series, Galbreath’s brushwork is deft and sketchy, impressionistic; closer inspection reveals splatters and drips of white, yellow and pink paint in the thickets of leafless trees in the background. The accompanying color swatch is a noncommittal light violet-gray, picked up from flashes of purple on the snow, a neutral statement with no advice on which path to choose. The relative merits of each road might be a worthy topic for conversation.

Lynn Galbreath –   Conversations,    Birmingham Bloomfield Art Center, Birmingham, MI Through September 18, 2025

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If you’re local to the Detroit area, it’s well worth making the shortish trek north to visit the Saginaw Art Museum and Gardens. Located in the grand former home of a local lumber magnate, the SAM boasts a collection of European and American artworks from the last 200-plus years, plus a few pieces from elsewhere in the world. One gallery is devoted to the work of Saginaw native E.I. Couse, who studied under Bouguereau, and a rotating selection of prints from the museum’s collection is displayed in their library room. Of course, they feature special exhibitions as well. Two shows are up now; both are by local women artists, and both address family matters, though from different angles. Sabrina Nelson: She Carries runs through May 23, and Melissa Beth Floyd: Now What is on display through September 6.

“Now What” sounds like it could have been the cheeky title of a mid-century survey show at MoMA. It definitely sounds like the exasperated grumble of a mother who just heard a loud crash come from her kid’s room — a mother who might rather be visiting MoMA, or working on her own art. Many of Cranbrook grad Melissa Beth Floyd’s paintings feature women dressed and coiffed in the style of archetypical white 1950s housewives, each having her dreams and desires thwarted, often by small armies of rambunctious children. Kicking against the chirpy idealism and starchy conformity of the ‘50s has been popular in America since… well, since the ‘50s. Humorists have frequently lampooned the century’s squarest decade, maybe to the point of cliché. But now that many of the retrograde attitudes of that age seem to be enjoying renewed popularity— the “trad wife” trend, the gross “pronatalist” movement, etc. — maybe the time is right again to evoke the imagery of the 1950s in order to comment on the current cultural climate.

One harried mother in a painting entitled The Good Life sits exhausted at her easel, beset by kids with toothy, mewling maws demanding her attention; on her canvas is a sketch of a scene not unlike the painting itself. The would-be artist wears a round red nose and eye makeup like the clowns in the pictures that decorated so many mid-century rec rooms. Floyd’s images are a sort of revisionist version of the ads and illustrations found in the Saturday Evening Post or similar magazines. Norman Rockwell might come to mind first, but Floyd’s work, with its lively compositions and deft brushwork, more closely resembles that of other members of the Famous Artists School, such as Ben Stahl or Al Parker.

When Floyd’s women aren’t being mobbed by kids, they’re often being harassed by angry, Hitchcockian birds, as in Feeding Frenzy, in which a flock of seagulls descends upon a woman in a blue dress and broad-brimmed hat. Unlike in the horror movie, the birds’ motives here are obvious — they’re after the sandwich their victim is holding. Food is another recurring theme here, as Floyd’s women attempt to eat donuts, hamburgers, ice cream cones or, in one innuendo-heavy image, a large sausage. As aggressively hungry as her birds are, Floyd’s women can be just as ravenous, defiantly indulging their appetites when there are no avian threats to interfere with them. In Binge, a blonde woman digs into a spread of candy-colored pastries with a furious gusto, and the character in Brontosaurus Burger seems about to unhinge her jaw snake-style to swallow her supersized sandwich.

Men show up in Floyd’s paintings here and there, too. In Far Enough, a Brylcreemed, lantern-jawed guy in a pinstripe suit looks up at a looming mountain range from the puddle of mud he’s sitting in; Nature itself seems to have finally gotten tired of his nonsense and knocked him on his ass. And in Untitled (After Magritte), a bearded academic type with a red clown nose puffs away at six “ceci n’est pas une pipes” simultaneously, a humbling image that reminds this, ahem, arts writer to mention the wry humor that runs throughout this wonderful show.

 

Sabrina Nelson takes on issues of female resilience and resistance as well, specifically regarding Black women, but in a more personal way — quiet, earnest, and no less powerful. Using watercolor, gel pens, and colored pencil, Nelson creates thoughtful and tender portraits of friends and family, multilayered images that include not just her subjects but their family members and ancestors — pictures within pictures in the form of framed photos, t-shirts, or sculptures worked into the compositions. (Paying tribute to loved ones in her art is an impulse Nelson has passed along to her son, the painter Mario Moore.)

Plant life appears in many of Nelson’s portraits, lending another level of warmth to the images, but also gesturing to cultural or personal symbolism as well. For example, one portrait depicts a musician friend surrounded by Western and African instruments (she even wears a tambourine for a hat). The background is patterned with outlines of hibiscus flowers, a.k.a. the Rose of Sharon, as mentioned in the biblical Song of Solomon that lends the portrait its title. In a particularly beautiful drawing entitled The Gardener, a young woman cradles a bundle of collard greens, while okra blooms in the background; both vegetables are staples in traditional Black American cuisine. The subject of another portrait holds a sprig of St. John’s wort, a plant used in traditional medicine. Many of Nelson’s portraits are drawn onto black paper, making the jewel-like colors glow even more intensely. Others, such as 2022’s She Carried Her Sons, are drawn on white paper in muted tones that suggest old sepia or black-and-white photos; these are embellished with three-dimensional corsages made from doilies and dried flowers.

In her opening remarks on the show, Nelson describes a trip to Zimbabwe, during which she observed women, even quite elderly ones, carrying things — firewood, water, food, and children. The experience prompted her to consider what she and other women carry, in every sense — physically, but also emotionally, psychologically, and spiritually. (A short video recording of her remarks, as well as a longer one in which Nelson explains the show in more depth, are both available on the Saginaw Art Museum’s YouTube page.) It’s something Nelson wants museum patrons to contemplate as well. In the center of the room — near a collection of suitcases containing baby clothes, aprons and gloves, antique medicine bottles, and other traces of family history — is a small box with a sign asking, “What Do You Carry?” Visitors can write their responses on slips of paper and add them to the growing collection in the box — or, perhaps, keep them and carry them away, a souvenir of a day well spent at a fine Michigan museum.

 

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.)

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.

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.)

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.

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.

 

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.

 

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.

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