Category: Ceramic Page 1 of 9

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.

Heloisa Promfret @ N’Namdi Center for the Arts

By Ron Scott

On November 22, 2024

In Ceramic, Drawing, Installation, Paintings, Sculpture

Heloisa Pomfret, Installation image, and image of the artist in a black dress. All images courtesy of DAR

On November 1, 2024, the George N’Namdi Gallery opened a solo exhibition, “The Brain,” by Brazilian-American artist Heloisa Promfret. This collection of 45 artworks builds on her earlier work, including abstract paintings using the palimpsest process, where layers of paint are scratched into the surface, revealing further colors beneath. Despite lacking a specific context in contemporary art history, Pomfret’s work combines mysterious marks, multiple colors, and shapes executed on burlap, paper, and ceramic objects.

Helosia Pomfret, Untitled #7, Diptych 34 x 36″ 2024

Diptych, Untitled #7, displays a multicolored, organic, abstract composition in which the canvas is cut, re-arranged, and re-stitched. She says, “My work involves the transformation first from the idea of an impulse to scientific representation and measurement, and second, from scientific representation back to abstracted mark-making, color, texture, and re-purposed and re-constructed materials.” These plant-like shapes illustrate a new environment for the viewer to ponder.

Helosia Pomfret, Glimpse Series, #2, Oil on Stitched Canvas, 38 x 53″. 2024

In the painting Untitled #2, the artist confronts her audience with a wall of movement that contrasts these vertical panels against a sea of shapes and colors moving from right to left in the background. The small, dark shapes feel like microbes swimming over the scratched surfaces. It is a primitive dance, as energy, order, and chaos co-occur during the movement concert. Raised in Brazil and later relocated to Detroit for her study of art, one wonders if something in her South American DNA makes these compositions so unusually new and fresh.

Heloise Pomfret, Untitled # 6, Glimpse Series, 36×34″ 2024

The series of Mandala-like circular paintings located in the gallery provides a contrast to the horizontal compositions and flirts with the idea of scientific explosions on the planet. They are an entirely different kind of sensibility that occupies the artist’s conceptions, especially when making the transition from rectangle to circle.

She says in her statement, “My work involves the transformation first from the idea of an impulse to scientific representation and measurement, and second, from scientific representation back to abstracted mark-making, color, texture and re-purposed using re-constructed materials.” There is a mobile and versatile side of Heloise Pomfret’s work in the exhibition when you consider the paintings, the structures, and the ceramics.

Heloise Pomfret, Construction # 8, Burlap, oil, and Bamboo, 25 x 12″. 2024

In Bamboo, the relief construction uses oil to create a dark vertical grid that feels like something produced by native people of South America. Stitched onto burlap, it suggests some spiritual practice to this viewer. She says, “The philosophy of my work is about the energy, order, and chaos that occurs during psychological or physical stress, which serves as theoretical support to the mark-making and constructs of my work. The surface is often an analogy to the body and memory, in which experience occurs and is transformed.”

Heloise Pomfret, Clarity Series, Stoneware, 6 Pieces, 9×5″, 2023

It is not often that an artist whose primary work is two-dimensional will make drawings, prints, or photographs, but even less frequently will they create a ceramic body of work. Yet, in this exhibition, Heloisa Pomfret presents a series of 15 ceramic objects. Most are wall reliefs; she chooses stoneware with a black glaze to express her ideas. In the Clarity series, she scratches her motifs into the glaze, in keeping with the other bodies of work she has created for this exhibition.

Heloise Pomfret, Installation, small circular objects on plywood.

The work in this exhibition reflects the varied mediums and materials that Pomfret employs to explore her personal psychology in paintings, installations, and ceramic objects. A large piece of plywood displayed in the center of the gallery demonstrates yet another approach, reflecting the diversity of the artist’s aesthetic means. These circular stitched and scratched smaller pieces reflect the translation of her emotional impulses into physical form, “The Brain” is a delightful and multifarious collection of original objects, literally unlike anything this writer has seen.

Heloisa Pomfret is a Brazilian-American interdisciplinary visual artist. She earned an M.A. and an M.F.A in Painting/Drawing from Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan. She also earned a bachelor’s degree in journalism from Casper Libero College in Sao Paulo, Brazil.

The Helosia Pomfret’s exhibition is on display through the Christmas Holiday at the N’Namdi Center for Contemporary Art, Detroit Michigan.

Ethiopia at the Crossroads @ Toledo Museum of Art

By K.A. Letts

On October 8, 2024

In Ceramic, Paintings, Photography, Prints, Sculpture

House of Yatreda (est. 2021), Abyssinian Queen, 2024, 1/1 NFT single-channel video. “Beneath the dense canopy of an ancient forest that divides her realm and blurs the line between history and legend, the Abyssinian queen journeys from one kingdom to another within historic Abyssinia, carried with solemn grace by her devoted attendants.” All photo images by K.A. Letts unless noted.

Ethiopia’s long history as an important but often overlooked center of world art is getting a sweeping survey in the Toledo Museum of Art’s newly opened exhibition, “Ethiopia at the Crossroads.” From now until November 10, images and objects from the horn of east Africa illustrate the region’s importance as a point of contact for trade and cultural exchange beginning in the 7^th Century BCE. Myths and stories derived from a wealth of sources, from indigenous religions to archaic Judaism to Byzantine Christianity and Islam, form the basis for a composite culture that is uniquely coherent and remarkably complex.

In antiquity, the Nile provided Ethiopia’s traders and envoys with access to Egypt and the civilizations of the Mediterranean Sea. Contact with the Byzantine empire brought eastern orthodox Christianity, which then developed, in conjunction with other local mythic influences, its own idiosyncratic religious identity. Ethiopia was only the second country—after Armenia–to adopt Christianity as its state religion in the 4^th century CE.

(l. to r.) Cross with St. Blaise, 10-11 c., copper alloy (Walters Art Museum), Processional Cross, 10 c. – 12 c., brass alloy, (Dallas Museum of Art), Processional Cross, 13 c. bronze, (Institute of Ethiopian Studies Abbas Ababa)

“Ethiopia at the Crossroads“ can be described as two exhibitions in one, actually. One collection of artworks, along with extensive photo documentation, centers on the country’s rich and lengthy art history. Another strand of the exhibition, woven seamlessly into the historical record, presents the work of contemporary Ethiopian artists and makes a convincing case that these living creatives are successfully carrying their unique cultural identity into the 21^st century.

After entering through the circular rotunda at the beginning of the exhibition, museum visitors will journey through a complex narrative of the region’s cultural patrimony that includes more than 225 artifacts stretching over 1750 years. Devotional painted icons, manuscripts, coins, textiles and basketry, metalwork and carved wood crosses of various scales from periods from 7 century BCE through the 19^th century CE form a beautiful and emotionally resonant parade that marches down the center of the main gallery. The exhibition design features a long, purpose-built terracotta-colored display structure that organizes what could easily be a baffling collection of diverse influences and objects. On the outer perimeter of the central structure, smaller groupings of objects amplify elements of Ethiopia’s long and complex story. Included in these collections are small, glazed black terracotta figurines characteristic of the Ethiopian Jewish community and wooden Waakaa memorial figurines from the Konso people of South Ethiopia. Illuminated manuscripts of both Christian and Islamic provenance are represented as well as magic healing scrolls that illustrate the hybrid beliefs characterizing Ethiopia’s Orthodox Christianity.

Folding Processional Icon in the Shape of a Fan, late 15 c., tempera with ink on parchment, wood handles, 24 ¼” x 154 1/8” x 4 ¾” (Walters Art Museum) photo: Toledo Museum of Art

The gallery holds a particularly rich trove of religious artifacts from the liturgical history of Ethiopia. A standout is the rare Folding Processional Icon in the Shape of a Fan, created in the late 15^th century and one of only 6 known to exist. Illustrating the influence of European artists in icon painting are two side-by-side pictures representing the Madonna and Child. The two paintings demonstrate how European religious tropes were routinely translated into Ethiopian visual language. One is by Ethiopian artist Fare Sayon (active 1445-1480,) and the other is from the workshop of Venetian Bartolomeo Vivarini (ca. 1485.) Using the vivid colors characteristic of the Ethiopian palette, Sayon makes the image his own by adding two flanking angels important in Ethiopian Christianity, Michael and Gabriel, and interpolates elaborate textile patterns into the figures’ garments.

(l. – r), Fare Sayon (Ethiopian) Diptych (right panel) Virgin Mary and Christ Child with Archangels Michael and Gabriel, ca. 1445-1480, glue tempera on panel Workshop of Bartolomeo Vivarini, Venice, Madonna and Child, egg tempera on panel.

The co-location of work by contemporary Ethiopian artists alongside historical artifacts demonstrates how a coherent identity based upon shared myths and traditions has persisted over time. Of particular interest is work by the House of Yatreda, a family-based artist collective now in a year-long residence at the Toledo Museum of Art. At the entrance to the exhibition, a large photo portrait (Mother of Menelik) minted on blockchain combines the traditional folklore of Ethiopia with web-3 technologies. The House of Yatreda’s leader, Kiye Tadele, poses as Makadda, the legendary Queen of Sheba, pregnant with Menelik, the offspring of King Solomon and founder of Ethiopia’s Solomonid dynasty. In a large gallery towards the back of the exhibition, a series of large-scale black and white single-channel videos by the House of Yatreda, entitled Abbysinian Queen, is on display. Described as “in the style of tizita (nostalgia or longing for the past),” the narrative follows the journey of an imaginary Ethiopian queen traveling through mystical forests to new kingdoms.

House of Yatreda (est. 2021), Mother of Menelik, 2023, NFT single channel video, photo: Toledo Museum of Art

The many creatives in the exhibition are a testament to the ongoing vibrancy of the region’s visual culture. Elias Sime of Addis Ababa, London-born Theo Eshetu, and Helina Metaferia of Washington, D.C., among many others, showcase the ongoing cultural significance of present-day Ethiopian art. Their work demonstrates that the artists share a strong stylistic correspondence between their art’s historical antecedents and their own work. Elias Sime’s Tightrope, Zooming (2012), now in the collection of the Toledo Museum of Art, is an elaborate longitudinal mosaic made from discarded elements of digital technology—circuit boards, computer keyboards, and the like. Helina Metaferia has created her version of a traditional metalwork crown that carries a meaning that is both royal and religious. With it, she honors Empress Taytu Betul, a national hero of the resistance against the invading Italian army in 1896. The traditional crown installed next to it shows, once again, the common sensibility that unites these artists with their patrimony.

Elias Sime, Tightrope, Zooming (2012), reclaimed electronic components and assorted small ephemera on panel, 83 ½” x 313” photo: Toledo Museum of Art

The abundant and varied collection of artifacts that makes up “Ethiopia at the Crossroads” is deserving of multiple visits, but if you can make only one trip, the beautifully illustrated and scholarly catalog of the exhibition is highly recommended and available from the Toledo Museum. Ethiopia at the Crossroads, edited by Christine Sciacca, is a comprehensive introduction to this neglected yet significant sub-section of world art history.

(l. – r.) Crown, 18-19 c., brass (Peabody Essex Museum) Helina Metaferia, Crown (Taytu) 2023, brass sculpture with etching (Toledo Museum of Art).

Ethiopia at the Crossroads @ Toledo Museum of Art, on display through November 10, 2024. https://toledomuseum.org/exhibitions/ethiopia-at-the-crossroads

Work from Mexico @ Flint Institute of Arts

By Sean Bieri

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

Critical art reviews of Detroit galleries and museums weekly