Category: Mixed Media Page 1 of 7

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.

The Tyranny of Small Decisions @ Galerie Camille, Detroit, MI

By Dennis Nawrocki

On November 15, 2024

In Drawing, Installation, Mixed Media, Paintings

Galerie Camille, Exhibition – The Tyranny of Small Decisions Installation (photo by R Standfest)

Houses loom, and factories downsize at the Galerie Camille in a two-person exhibition of new work by Detroiters Jeanette Strezinski and Ryan Standfest. Enigmatically titled “The Tyranny of Small Decisions,” each artist homes in on a familiar structure redolent of domesticity, work, harmony, catastrophe, safety, loss, reminiscence, oppression, and so on. Entering the gallery, one quickly senses the heady frisson generated by the installation of diametrically divergent works on opposite walls. Stark differences in size and palette, from Strezinski’s monumental black and white paintings to Standfest’s small-scale, multicolored compositions of muted pink, magenta, blue, yellow, and green, draw the visitor back and forth across the space. Media differentiates the work of each artist as well: her tactile, mixed media surfaces (oil, stain, resin, fabric, and construction materials on canvas) and his nubby, textured acrylics on wood panels.

Jeanette Strezinski, Crevices, 2023, Oil paint, stain, resin, fabric, mixed media on canvas, 8 x 9 ft.

Strezinski’s outsize images might be described as documentaries of houses in evolving states of being. Initially, they appear abandoned and ruined, but in reality, several discernible structures overlap one another. In Crevices, at least three gables are superimposed and combined with an unfurnished room at the left. Perhaps renovation is underway with multiple options sketched in by an architect. Like other of her compositions on view, Crevices is built up through a layering of building materials that yield a scratchy, corrugated surface, while its evocative title implies a hint of danger lurking within.

Jeanette Strezinski, Come Home, 2024, Oil paint, stain, resin, fabric, mixed media on canvas, 7 x 7 ft.

Another sizable image on view is labeled Come Home, its titular overtones expressing a plea to return to the traditional, double-gabled house seemingly floating in space. Also visible, however, is a gridded skylight addition at right and deck at left that suggest remodeling and/or deconstruction, as well as an overlapping horizontal ranch house stretched out at the bottom of the white outline that envelopes the artist’s centralized image.

Jeanette Strezinski, Leave The Light On, 2024, Oil paint, stain, resin, fabric, mixed media on canvas, 36 x 48 in.

Leave The Light On, a smaller canvas by Strezinski, is the darkest of her paintings, in which an illuminated window at left glows with yellow light. It alludes affectingly to other iterations of the title in songs and texts that likewise refer to a lighted window as a beacon of home, hope, human presence–or absence.

Ryan Standfest, A System of Love, 2024, acrylic on wood, 16 x 20 in. (photo by artist)

Unlike the frontal impact of Strezinski’s looming houses, Standfest’s modestly sized, framed, precisely rendered images on the other side of the gallery feature the factory as the potent focal image. Presented from a bird’s eye point of view, A System of Love depicts an industrial complex of identical structures topped with identical smokestacks rendered in magenta, pink, green, red, and blue. The tidy, rust-free environment is abuzz with blank speech balloons linking various buildings and workers therein. Are they textless because the workers have nothing to say to one another or because they uniformly echo the prescribed messages of an industrialist’s point of view?

Ryan Standfest, A Perfect Engine of Longing, 2024, acrylic on wood panel, 14 x 11 in. (photo by RD Rearick)

As the series develops, Standfest’s silent, anonymous factories are personified, enlarged, and activated, becoming engaged in capitalist machinations. In A Perfect Engine of Longing, the smokestack, like a dagger, pierces a green hillside, further despoiling the surrounding landscape of wizened shrubs and trees.

Ryan Standfest, A Personification of Romantic Fiction, 2024, acrylic on wood panel, 14 x 11 in. (photo by RD Rearick)

And in A Personification of Romantic Fiction, an agile, upside-down factory births another. The newborn, white-hued “infant,” devoid of a full complement of windows and doors like those of its green and blue factory “mother,” connotes the future. More such birthings will produce X number of manufacturing centers ad infinitum. In his artist’s statement, Standfest warns that these “terrible buildings manifest our capacity for creation and catastrophe.”

Ryan Standfest, Company n. 2, 2024, Mixed media, 14 x 9 x 5 in. (photo by RD Rearick)

Detail of Company n. 2, (photo by RD Rearick)

Standfest’s oeuvre also includes a series of miniaturized sculptures of industrial buildings, as in Company n. 2, one of four displayed in the show. Each is composed of a rectangular enclosure and tall exhaust element, appears to be abandoned, and exhibits worn, mottled surfaces of various hues, as in the black and rusty red patina of n. 2. One also discovers in the empty window and door apertures, tiny, prone figures, perhaps resting, exhausted, or comatose.

In short, Strezinski and Standfest’s fraught, complicated depictions of vital human habitats, such as homes and factories, address mutual concerns despite their quite distinctive styles of art. As Strezinski observes, in a statement pertinent to both, “My paintings represent dwellings designed for safety and comfort that eventually break down.”

“The Tyranny of Small Decisions” featuring Ryan Standfest and Jeanette Strezinski” remains on view at Galerie Camille through Nov. 29, 2024. The gallery is located at 4130 Cass Avenue in Midtown Detroit.

Echoes from the Rust @ Elaine L. Jacob Gallery

By K.A. Letts

On October 29, 2024

In Drawing, Installation, Mixed Media, Paintings

Echoes from the Rust @ Elaine L. Jacob Gallery, Wayne State University

“Echoes from the Rust,” Elaine L. Jacob Gallery, Exhibition installation. All photos by K.A. Letts

It’s a tall order to ask a few to speak for the many, as these six artists from Detroit and Pittsburgh have been chosen to do in the exhibition “Echoes from the Rust,” on display at Elaine L. Jacob Gallery until January 10, 2025. The expansive theme of resilience in the face of hardship and of the importance of ethnic identity, immigration, labor, and location in the region’s artistic production could easily encompass the stories of 60 artists…or six hundred. But these half-dozen accomplished makers of images and objects, selected by independent curator Kemuel Benyehudah, describe as well as anyone can how midwestern values are shaped by personal experience, geographic displacement, and economic adversity.

Hubert Massey, Cityscape of Detroit, 1999, charcoal drawing on paper.

Narrative art enjoys exceptional credibility in the Midwest, where the ghosts of Thomas Hart Benton and Diego Rivera lurk in the consciousness of several of the exhibition’s artists. Eminent Detroit muralist Hubert Massey’s reverence for the craft of drawing is evident in the two semi-circular charcoal works on paper displayed on the gallery’s main floor. In these preparatory drawings for his frescos in the Detroit Athletic Club, carefully rendered architectural features of Detroit form a backdrop for monumental figures that would be at home in a depression-era WPA mural. N.E. Brown, of Pittsburgh, likewise traffics in the archetypal, with meticulously painted scenes of workers that range from the miniscule “Blue Collar” to “The Mill,” in which a masked and gloved worker rendered in burnt wood to graphically evokes the heat and dim light of an industrial environment.

N.E. Brown, Blue Collar, 2024, oil on canvas.

Like several other artists in the exhibition, Adnan Charara is an immigrant delivered in 1982 to Detroit by political upheaval in his native Sierra Leone. Charara’s family of Lebanese descent found a home in the Middle Eastern diaspora of Dearborn, while the artist himself found a vocation in fine art after completing his education in environmental studies and urban planning. Charara is that odd combination of a highly educated, yet self-taught, artist. Through his extensive self-guided studies, he has arrived at a style of expression that seamlessly combines a variety of art historical styles with his comic sensibility.

Adnan Charara, Unconscious, 2006, oil on canvas.

Charara’s three black and white silkscreen prints of workers, created in 2014, are reminiscent of Diego Rivera’s DIA murals, but represent less an homage to Rivera than Charara’s direct observations of industrial workers from the same source materials. Two large canvases, more typical of his current style, are wiggly, jittery masses of small figures crawling over and across a more-or-less undefined, yet urban, space. Hieronymous Bosch might recognize and approve of the anxious yet optimistic citizens of this no man’s land.

Omid Shekari, Is there a way Out, 2023, acrylic on industrial canvas.

Omid Shekari, another global transplant, arrives at the gallery from Iran by way of Pittsburgh. Displaced by the political upheavals in his native country, Shekari vividly remembers his experience as the victim of an oppressive regime, a past that continues to shape his art practice. He says, “My work looks at power and questions the levels of violence that it causes, as well as possibilities to resist such a phenomenon.”

Shekari’s musings on questions of political power and its oppressive use take form as imaginary architecture, metaphors for the cultural and political structures that imprison humanity. Seen as if from above, Body – Nation – State’s wall-mounted metal structure evokes a dream-like sense of displacement juxtaposed with a brutal reminder of human vulnerability. In the middle of this miniature built environment, a small piece of meat adds a jarring note of corporeality. Human fragility hangs suspended and displaced, surrounded by an edifice both shadowy and solid. The same aerial point of view shows up in Shekari’s painting Is There a Way Out, depicting a claustrophobic vision of a nation imprisoned. The same theme is revisited in his metal sculpture, Nation [government-bank-armed forces-prison] State, a seemingly impenetrable labyrinth for holding in –or keeping out–something. Is it information? Free thought? Free expression?

Halima Afi Cassells, Gold Cash Gold, 2024, paper cut.

Halima Afi Cassells views the state of the Midwest with guarded optimism through the lens of her deep cultural roots in the city of Detroit. Her carefully crafted paper cuts acknowledge the importance of technical mastery in a region known for making things. Three delicate artworks privilege the aesthetic over the political, but her strong social justice message is fully displayed in her 17-minute video, Detroit Future State. Composed of two parts, Detroit Future State is a polemic in which the ideal is contrasted with the real. In the first part of the video, an elegantly clothed and coiffed Cassells describes a utopian Detroit future as if it has already come to pass, with community gardens, abundant housing, and adequate healthcare. At the end of this blissful description, Cassell trades her fashionable costume for down-to-earth street clothes and delivers—in black and white–a wry description of things as they actually are in the city.

Josh Challen Ice, Held Together, 2024, plywood, plastic, construction lumber, ratchet strap, blue tape, inkjet print.

The exhibition’s underlying theme honors the importance of labor in defining the soul of the rustbelt, past and present. It finds its most elegant expression in constructions by Pittsburgh artist Joshua Challen Ice. Ice honors the value of beauty and the importance of craftsmanship in the making of things. He creates each object and installation, often from upcycled materials, with precision while leaving evidence of his labor in the form of clamps, stamps, and straps. His remarkable sculpture, Held Tight, is an impressive example; it replicates the shape of a strand of DNA beginning at ground level and traveling upward. Beautifully created in wood and wrapped around one of the gallery’s central pillars, the construct echoes the architecture of the spiral staircase nearby. Left on one of the crosspieces, as if by accident, is a workman’s jacket, a reminder that these unique and impressive objects are made by someone.

“Echoes from the Rust” is an exhibition in which superior technical and formal expertise serves the artists’ progressive vision. Each artist’s output reflects, in its own way, a shared ethic of hard work, craftsmanship, and social justice. There is an abiding optimism in the work that describes an often neglected part of America, brought together here in a celebration of resilience and grit.

“Echoes from the Rust,” Elaine L. Jacob Gallery, Installation. Background: Hubert Massey Cityscape of Detroit, 1999, charcoal drawing on paper. Foreground: Josh Challen Ice, Absent Hands, 2024, construction lumber, ink stamp, concrete.

Echoes from the Rust @ Elaine L. Jacob Gallery, Wayne State University, on display until January 10, 2025.

Lester Johnson @ Stamelos Gallery

By Sean Bieri

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?”

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