Category: Mixed Media Page 1 of 8

Seen/Scene @ The Shepherd

On November 5, 2025

Installation, Seen/Scene, Installation, curated by Nick Cave and Laura Mott, The Shepherd. Amalgam (inflate), virtual sculpture by Nick Cave in right foreground, photo courtesy of the Shepherd

For those of us who missed the landmark city-wide event “Here Hear” in 2015, the original creators have staged an exhibition at the Shepherd in 2025 that is both an anniversary and a debut. In the newly opened exhibition “Seen/Scene,” Nick Cave, master of the kinetic wearable and Laura Mott, Chief Curator of the Cranbrook Art Museum, celebrate the ten-year anniversary of a seven-months-long art fest that created a living portrait of the city in motion and in performance. Seen/Scene revisits some of the same themes, while also re-examining Detroit’s identity, present and future, with work from artists (many of them with Detroit connections) from the collection of Jennifer Gilbert.

The human figure is the focus of “Seen/Scene” and through that lens we examine the act of looking and seeing itself. Reflective and refractive surfaces abound, adding conceptual complexity and introducing questions of perception and distortion. We, the audience, are challenged to observe the community and our neighbors as we have changed over the previous decade, with particular attention to the Little Village neighborhood surrounding the newly opened Shepherd.

Akea Brionne, Last Communion, 2023, jacquard textile, rhinestones, thread and poly-fil, photo courtesy of The Shepherd

Just inside the front door of the gallery, Akea Brionne’s fiber piece Last Communion succinctly describes the parameters set by the curators. A solitary bedazzled figure, masked, looks sidelong out of the picture frame, flanked by two walls that angle onto a surreal beach. On the right side, a framed face emerges, and three more framed selves recede into the distance, where the silhouette of the foreground figure is repeated. On the left, we see that same figure through an open window. The self and the process of looking and seeing, in both the optical and spiritual sense, are thus neatly encompassed.

Barkley Hendricks, Yocks, 1975, acrylic on canvas, photo courtesy of the Shepherd

Jammie Holmes, Wearing Fur Coats in America, 2021, acrylic and oil pastel on canvas, photo courtesy of The Shepherd

Mario Moore, It Can All Be So Fleeting, 2024, oil on linen, photo courtesy of The Shepherd

In the first gallery, three large paintings pinpoint the psychological states of African American men past and present. Yocks a 1975 painting by Barkley Hendricks, shows a pair of well-dressed men self-presenting as cool and confident against a blank white background. We are only allowed to know what they choose to tell us. By contrast, the man in the adjacent 2021 painting Wearing Fur Coats in America, by Jammie Holmes, shows the subject set in a domestic scene that clearly shows him within his cultural milieu, and describes his social position. His direct gaze is matter-of fact, without the posturing of the subjects in Yocks.

An adjacent self-portrait by Mario Moore projects the anxiety of the newly successful. Elegantly dressed but uneasy, the artist gazes at the viewer from a gallery where he should feel at home. But the title of the painting describes his apprehension: It Can All Be So Fleeting. As if to drive home his point, Moore has inserted, on the gallery wall behind the subject, an image of a painting similar to George Bellows’ lithograph The White Hope(1921), in which Jack Johnson, the first Black American world heavyweight champion defeated a white opponent, James K. Jeffries. The 1910 event precipitated race riots in over 50 American cities.

Rashid Johnson, Untitled Anxious Audience, 2018, ceramic tile, black soap and wax, photo courtesy of The Shepherd

Across the room, Rashid Johnson’s 2018 white ceramic tile and black soap piece Untitled Anxious Audience (2018), augments the uncertain atmosphere. Fifteen goggle-eyed gargoyles, teeth clenched, telegraph scratchy comic panic.

Kerry James Marshall, Untitled (Painter), 2010, acrylic on pvc panel, photo: K.A. Letts

In Gallery 2, reclining figures sprawl across the walls and engage in dialog with each other, starting with Untitled (Painter) by Kerry James Marshall. As the ebony-toned, camo-clad subject peers out from the left side of the picture, the painted-by-numbers double on the right mirrors the shadowed entity in a pastel-pink decorative reflection. Mickeline Thomas’s Clarivel #5 is created by combining collaged modes of image production: photographic screen printing and painting, decorated with glittering strings of rhinestones. The self-possessed and stylish woman confronts us in a head-on direct gaze. Curator Laura Mott aptly describes the painting as a time-honored art historical trope rendered in “a 1970’s funk and soul aesthetic.” Tom Wesselmann’s Great American Nude #9 (1961) operates within the same aesthetic meme but strips the identity of the reclining female figure down to its constituent parts: an anonymous collection of shapes, lines and colors, visually appealing but devoid of identity.

Mickelene Thomas, Clarivel #5, 2023, rhinestones, acrylic and oil paint on canvas mounted on wood panel, photo K.A. Letts

Tom Wesselman, Great American Nude #9, 1961, oil, fabric and painted paper on collage board, photo K.A. Letts

The formerly sacred interior of the church’s nave, still richly adorned with stained glass, mosaic and gilded marble, allows color and pattern ample interplay with the art installed there. Gold and green checkerboard patterned Pewabic tiles surround and complement the black and white beading of Jeffrey Gibson’s punching bag sculpture Love is the Drug, its heart shaped charms recalling religious ex votos. The richly colored church windows resonate beautifully with the intricate colored metal filigree and delicate floral patterns of Nick Cave’s wall-hung Grapht, and on the altar, a 2011 neon text artwork by Anthony James brightly proclaims HEAVEN.

Jeffrey Gibson, Love is the Drug, 2017, repurposed vinyl punching bag, glass beads, found and collectd mixed metal charms, cotton, artificial sinew, tin jingles and acrylic felt, photo K.A. Letts

Nick Cave, Grapht, 2024, vintage metal serving trays, vintage tole and needlepoint on wood panel, photo courtesy of The Shepherd

The center of the nave is occupied (virtually) by Cave’s two-story sculpture Amalgam (inflate) (2025), a proposed new iteration in the artist’s series Amalgams (2025). The previously fabricated Amalgam bronzes feature the lower part of a human body (Cave’s) fused with elements of the natural world above. In this case, Cave tops the bent legs with some rather puzzling nets, pouches and plates that purport to represent “the bags we carry.” This artwork, as it currently exists, is a virtual draft of a future public monument, and is viewable exclusively through a virtual reality headset.

In preparation for the current exhibition, Nick Cave asked each artist to answer a question: “What strategies or tools do you use to see deeply or share greatly?” That question provides a useful frame for the audience as well, asking us to examine our own experience as members of the Detroit community in dialog with the works in the exhibition.

The past ten years have brought enormous financial, cultural and political changes in Detroit. No doubt the next decade will bring more. It is to be hoped that when we look back on the years between 2025 and 2035, we will find that the city has weathered the current uncertain times with the same resilience and creativity that characterize the art and artists in today’s “Seen/Scene” exhibition.

Seen/Scene,” installation, curated by Nick Cave and Laura Mott, The Shepherd, photo K.A. Letts

Seen/Scene Artists: Nina Chanel Abney, Doug Aitken, Hernan Bas, McArthur Binion, Amoako Boafo, Akea Brionne, Davariz Broaden, Marcus Brutus, Nick Cave, Jack Craig, Arthur Dove, Conrad Egyir, Olafur Eliasson, Beverly Fishman, Helen Frankenthaler, Jeffrey Gibson, Barkley L. Hendricks, Jammie Holmes, Anthony James, Lester Johnson, Rashid Johnson, Fidelis Joseph, Ewa Juszkiewicz, Kerry James Marshall, Tiff Massey, Tony Matelli, A.H. Maurer, Allie McGhee, Mario Moore, Sara Nickleson, A.F. Oehmke, Anders Ruhwald, Henry Taylor, Mickalene Thomas, Matt Wedel, and Tom Wesselmann.

Seen/Scene @ The Shepherd October 5, 2025- January 10, 2026

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Contemporary Anishinaabe Art: A Continuation @ DIA

By Sean Bieri

On October 28, 2025

In Costume Design, Drawing, Jewelry, Mixed Media, Paintings, Sculpture

Cressandra Thibodeaux, Fever Visions I ,2023, Infrared photograph

If anything, the photos included in the press kit for the Detroit Institute of Arts’ latest exhibition, Contemporary Anishinaabe Art: A Continuation, don’t do the show justice. To be sure, the kit does include some of the most striking artworks in the show: Cressandra Thibodeaux’s photographic image Fever Visions I, for instance, a color field-like composition of five turquoise discs on a red background, superimposed onto cylindrical hay bales lined up in an actual field. As the title suggests, the piece was inspired by hallucinations experienced by the artist during an illness. Also visionary is Jonathan Thunder’s painting called Basil’s Dream, in which rival spiritual beings — a Thunderbird and a lynx-like Mishibizhiw — shoot some pool while a DJ spins tunes and Ojibwe storyteller Basil Johnston records the scene on a typewriter. Painted all in shades of magenta, the image’s dreamworld atmosphere and cast of enigmatic characters (as well as its “widescreen” format) feel almost Lynchian, though the scene is more good-natured than creepy.

Thunder, Basil’s Dream, 2024 – Acrylic on canvas

Gordon M., 1868: Remember Our Relatives 2022 Annigoni paper, cedar smoke

Also in the press kit: Washita 1868: Remember Our Relatives (2002) by Gordon M. Combs, a sepia-tone tableau of rearing horses, teeth bared and eyes flashing, that seem seared into the paper (it was created using cedar smoke). This harrowing image of terror and pain commemorates the massacre of the Native Americans and the subsequent slaughter of the horses and mules of Washita, Oklahoma by George Custer’s 7th Cavalry. The creatures evoke the horse bellowing at the center of another visual chronicle of military cruelty, Picasso’s Guernica.

Morriseaux Punk, Norval Morriseaux, Punk Rockers, Nancy and Andy 1989 Acrylic on canvas

And naturally, the press materials for the exhibition include a work that’s become something of a signature image for the show (it’s on a lot of the gift shop merch): the irresistible Punk Rockers Nancy and Andy, a vivid acrylic painting from 1989 of a big-haired, leather jacketed couple in profile against a bright red background by the late Norval Morrisseau. A member of the Bingwi Neyaashi Anishinaabek First Nation (the DIA cites the tribal nationalities of the artists on the wall labels), Morrisseau was Canada’s best known contemporary Indigenous artist, in part because his biography is marked by the sort of pitfalls, comebacks, and eccentricities that the popular press enjoys latching onto when reporting on artists. However, it’s Morrisseau’s bold, compelling, often narrative paintings — influenced by ancient petroglyphs, 20th century modernism, Anishinaabe, Christian and Eastern spiritual traditions, and more — that justify his status as the “grandfather” of contemporary Anishinaabe art.

George Morrison, Totemic Column, 1995 (fabricated 2024-25), stained redwood, granite base; Jim Denomie, Untitled (Totem Painting), 2016, Oil on canvas, wood

To be fair to the DIA’s publicity department, no handful of images could entirely do right by such a large, rich, and wide-ranging exhibition, which is fine — it just means there are wonderful surprises awaiting visitors throughout Contemporary Anishinaabe Art: A Continuation. The spirit of the show is encapsulated outside the entrance by two contemporary takes on the totem pole. George Morrison’s beautiful Totemic Column is constructed like a puzzle from wavy, interconnected pieces of redwood; the effect feels a bit like looking down into a flowing river. Jim Denomie’s Untitled (Totem Painting), a tribute to his mentor Morrison, is both more traditional than Column — it features the animal heads one might expect to see on a totem pole — and very modern, as the faces of the creatures are painted onto the column in an expressionistic, cartoon-like style (and anyone who knows my love of comics will know that’s high praise coming from me). Harking back to tradition, forging varied paths forward, integrating old and new influences, commenting on past and current events, honoring predecessors: these threads run throughout the exhibition.

Jim Denomie, Untitled (Totem Painting) 2016 Oil on canvas, wood

Jim Denomie, Untruthful 2014 Oil on canvas

As someone unfamiliar with his work previously, Denomie is a happy revelation for me. A large painting by the late Ojibwe artist greets visitors just inside the show. Depicting four figures on horseback, some with mask-like animal heads, it might be mistaken for some variation on the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. In fact, Four Days and Four Nites, Ceremony (2019-20) refers to the journey to the afterlife made by the souls of the dead in Ojibwe tradition. Denomie’s vivid colors and expressive brushwork give this spirit world a heightened, electric feeling. Denomie often brings a sharp, dark sense of humor to his examinations of historical injustices. His other painting here, Untruthful (2014), depicts the Lone Ranger and Tonto astride their steeds (the pair appear in a number of Denomie’s artworks). “You lied to me!” says Tonto in a cartoon word balloon. “Get used to it,” replies the ranger. Denomie said he used color and humor to draw a viewer in, then he was “able to zap ‘em” with the truth.

Heron Hill, Joe Kennedy & Daniel Collazos Baakaani-inaaddizi: Their Actions Are Different 2025

One room here is devoted to some amazing fashion designs. Victorian gothic meets East Coast and Great Lakes Native American influences in Ojibwe designer Delina White’s Woodland Elegance: Four Piece Evening Apparel Ensemble, a silky purple dress and black shawl, with gold embroidery, over a black lacy underskirt. Joey Kennedy and Daniel Collazos of Heron Hill Designs offer a melding of Indigenous and queer styles, including an enviable pair of embroidered Doc Marten boots and matching hat. And Jillian Waterman contributes the astonishing In Case of Emergency Bury Me and Watch Me Grow (2024), an ensemble complete with vest, purse, and gas mask, all beaded with red, white, and yellow corn seeds. Also check out Adam Avery/Naawikwegiizhig’s beautifully beaded hats in the next room, Blooming Hat (2020) and Flowering Moon (2024).

Jillian Waterman, In Case of Emergency Bury Me and Watch Me Grow, 2024

Much of the work on display here, in fact, is three-dimensional — furniture, sculpture, jewelry, and other handiwork, from two sturdy birchbark canoes built by Chippewa craftsman Ronald J. Paquin, to a delicate beaded veil with the phrase I Get Mad Because I Love You repeated across it in white and translucent beads, created by Chippewa artist Maggie Thompson as a commentary on psychological abuse. Dennis Esquivel contributes a beautiful cabinet of maple and cherry wood entitled Out of the Woodlands (2019); its legs are streamlined versions of Ottawa war clubs. A dress-shaped object hanging on a wall — Dress for Nookomis, (2023) — made of fabric and painted blood red with thick black and white outlines, is more than just a piece of Pop art; it’s a liminal thing that “exists between worlds — part textile, part memory, part protest,” as artist Nonamey describes it. The red dress is the symbol of the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Relatives movement, which raises awareness about violence committed against Native American women.

Maggie Thompson I Get Mad Because I Love You 2021-22 Beads, filaments, jingles

Dennis Esquivel, Out of the Woodlandds: Standing Cabinet 2019

Nonamey, Dress for Nookomis 2023 Acrylic on reclaimed fabric

I’m getting close to my word count here, and I see I’ve done not much better than the press kit at encapsulating the full breadth of this show. I haven’t mentioned the display discussing African American/Ojibwe sculptor Mary Edmonia Lewis’ friendship with Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, author of the fictional Song of Hiawatha. I haven’t discussed Rabbett before Horses Strickland’s sprawling battle scene Right of Consciousness, or Summer Yahbay’s beaded bandolier bag Nmamiikwendis: I Am Proud of Myself (2024), a traditionally male garment cast in shades of pink that makes a good case for the true strength of that color. There are a number of photo portraits of folks from tribal elders to Iggy Pop. (Why Iggy? Because photographer David Dominic, Jr. of the Little Traverse Bay Bands of Odawa Indians respects the rock star for building a diverse community through his music.) And then there’s the short film that closes the show, Happy Thanksgiving (2023), a comedic crime flick about an Anishinaabe youth who comes up with a creative way to get payback after being asked one too many times to celebrate the subjugation of his people. Suffice to say, Contemporary Anishinaabe Art: A Continuation rewards repeat visits. Museums often tend to seal Native Americans in amber, reducing their culture to a collection of artifacts in a vitrine, but this show leaves no doubt about the multiplicity of artistic voices and practices that live and thrive within the contemporary Anishinaabe community.

Detroit Institute of Arts’, Contemporary Anishinaabe Art: A Continuation

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Menagerie and Descriptive Intuition @ BBAC

By Michael Hodges

On April 15, 2025

In Mixed Media, Paintings, Sculpture

An installation shot of Jackson Wrede’s Menagerie at the Birmingham Bloomfield Art Center. It and a companion show, Descriptive Intuition by James Kaye, will be up through May 1.

Two lively shows by Michigan artists at the Birmingham Bloomfield Art Center up through May 1 — James Kaye’s Descriptive Intuition and Menagerie by Jackson Wrede — offer up a refresher course in the relative power of abstraction vs. figurative art. Side by side, the two exhibitions make for punchy viewing. Passing from one into the other is both stimulating and invigorating.

On entering BBAC, you’ll find yourself descending several steps into Jackson Wrede’s Menagerie in the center’s airy and spacious DeSalle Gallery. The lighting design in the room is particularly dramatic, and singles out Wrede’s individual color-packed works in ways that make them pop off the walls. See if you can resist their pull – the betting is you can’t. Wrede, who lives in Grand Rapids and is a graduate of the Kendall School of Art and Design, has remarkable skills in the hyperrealist realm, but these are not soulless, technical exercises. The face of the young woman in Girl Wearing Fur, for example, conveys an almost palpable sense of emotional depth.

Jackson Wrede, Girl Wearing Fur, Oil on linen panel, 24 x 18 inches.

It has to be said that Wrede’s oeuvre is both wide and impressively ecumenical, ranging from the sensitive portrayal above to an equally compelling picture of electric-green iguanas sharing a very private moment. Or consider Wrede’s take on the Mona Lisa, sporting a pair of hyper-developed, Arnold Schwarzenegger arms. Truth be told, in Mona Lifta (note the distinction), she looks even more pleased with herself than usual. But credit Wrede with precision: Everything above the icon’s shoulders is exactly as it is in Da Vinci’s original, even down to the pastoral landscape behind the subject that appears to be happening at two dramatically different levels. Overall, the portrait is great fun, shot through with absurdity and humor. Bring the kids. They’ll love it.

Jackson Wrede, Mona Lifta, Oil on canvas, 20 x 14 inches.

In a 2023 interview with the online British magazine, “Behind the Artist,” Wrede said that despite the classical formality of many of his pieces, he pretty much goes on gut instinct.

“So many artists have rules or templates they think about when composing an image—the rule of thirds, the Golden Ratio, we’ve heard them all,” he said. “I don’t use any of those really. Perhaps they accidentally come out in my work sometimes, but I think the main question you have to ask yourself is, ‘Does this look cool?’” And certainly, in the case of the self-portrait below, with its cartoon aesthetic, the answer pretty much has to be “Yes.”

Jackson Wrede, Self-Portrait in a Cowboy Hat, Oil on linen panel, 24 x 18 inches.

Detroiter James Kaye plows a completely different furrow than Wrede. Most of Descriptive Intuition in BBAC’s Robinson Gallery falls into the abstract-expressionist basket, and these works are rendered with a certain, for lack of a better word, forcefulness. They certainly command attention. And the level of technical skill and detail the College for Creative Studies grad deploys is daunting. Consider Dissecting Escape, somewhat more monochromatic than many of the works on display here, with its dozen-odd horizontal canvas strips sewn together and then painted in highly textured relief. The acrylic and enamel are applied in seemingly slapdash fashion, built up in layers and punctuated by small dots of strong red. The upshot is the piece reads as both free form and, with all those parallel stitched lines, oddly structural at the same time. It’s a gratifying juxtaposition.

James Kaye, Dissecting Escape (detail), Canvas, foam, acrylic paint, enamel paint, steel.

Kaye, a College for Creative Studies graduate, has snagged one long wall for his Fingertips 1-24 series, a parade of two dozen identically sized abstracts clearly painted with gusto and starring strong splotches of color. The individual works are charming, but it’s the visual power of all 24, marching across the wall two by two, that makes it such a magnetic sight.

James Kaye, Fingertips 1-24, Enamel paint, glue, acrylic paint.

Kaye doesn’t confine himself just to painting. He’s also got a small collection of sculptures and vessels on display, which have every bit as much authority as the canvases. Intriguingly, his bowls are all crafted from turned wood, despite looking for all the world like they were highly glazed works created on a potter’s wheel. Consider Flying, a warm, maple vessel that features a wood-grained base partly painted over in strong gray, black and white circles. The aesthetics of the sharply outlined dots stand in contradiction to the veined wood, yet the combination of the two is both peculiar and pleasing – about the best any artist could hope for.

James Kaye, Flying, Spalted maple, enamel paint, epoxy.

**Two exhibitions will be at the Birmingham Bloomfield Art Center through May 1, 2025: Jackson Wrede’s Menagerie and James Kaye’s Descriptive Intuition.**

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The Reality Show @ Paint Creek Center for the Arts

By Ron Scott

On April 2, 2025

In Assemblage / Collage, Mixed Media, Paintings, Sculpture

Paint Creek Center for the Arts, Installation image Courtesy of DAR

The Paint Creek Center for the Arts opened its 2025 season on March 28^th, 2025. Two hundred twenty viewers came to the opening to see art by forty-five artists whose work was accepted into an exhibition titled The Reality Show.

In a statement by Julia Felts, gallery director, “In a time when reality television, social media and spam can shape our perceptions of everyday life, how do we know what is real? Whether you’re capturing your own reality through life’ pleasures, struggles, and monotonies, interpreting the reality of someone else or exposing pop culture’s simulated perfection, we invited artists to submit their artwork showcasing and defining what reality means in the modern world.”

Christine Heylett, Nature of Things, 48×48″, Board, Paint, Paper Courtesy of DAR

Awarded Best in Show, artist Christina Haylett’s large collage titled The Nature of Things, “48 x 48” creates a grid of symbols set over a large black imaginary animal. A montage of small squares provides the adhesive in this surreal fantasy of imaginary reptiles and objects. She says, “Climate change is part of our daily concerns and every day there are programs in our media about all of this.”

Calum Clow, Hindsight and 2020, 30×28″ Cardboard on Wooden Panel, Courtesy of DAR

This nearly square figure painting was created using Oil, Mixed Media, and Cardboard on a wood panel illustrates a female mom seated at the laundromat during the Covid-19 virus pandemic using a ¾ profile looking off to the left. In his notes the artist provides the audience with a story.

“In the Summer of 2020, our laundry machine broke. So we donned our masks and cleaned our clothes at the laundromat. The portrait is from a photo I took of my mother, watching another day of breaking news stories on multiple televisions while doing laundry. This painting documents our reality within this moment of a global pandemic, a civil rights movement, and a tumultuous political landscape. It questions how the perspective of our own reality is changed through reflecting upon the realities of the world around us.”

Eddie Checkings, Backstabber, 24×24″ Collage, Acrylic, on Wood, Courtesy of DAR

Eddie Checkings is an artist mostly recognized on Instagram with work that is more illustrative than, let’s say, traditional forms of painting. Backstabber’s square composition is a collage on a wood panel that might reflect a story. The surreal figure is set on a field of numbers that flattens out the facial expression, where the emphasis could be more dependent on an event. In looking at the artist’s other work, the range of subjects varies greatly, relying on line, color, and composition.

Installation image, Paint Creek Center for the Arts, Courtesy of DAR

The title of the PCCA exhibition, The Reality Show, provides a platform to call on artists to provide a tremendous range in personal subjects and experiences. The expressions of art in the show widely vary to include paintings, sculptures, photographs, drawings, and multimedia works of art.

Paint Creek Center for the Arts (PCCA) is a nonprofit art center in downtown Rochester dedicated to promoting the arts and artistic excellence through various cultural programs, including exhibitions, studio art classes, outreach programs, community involvement projects, and the Art & Apples Festival. PCCA programs reach many different segments of the region and serve as tools for community enhancement and economic development by improving quality of life and drawing visitors to the area. PCCA is an important cultural resource and destination and a vital presence in greater Rochester’s diverse and growing business and residential community. https://pccart.org 248.651.4110

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A View of Earth: The Architect’s Eye @ Paul Kotula Projects

By Michael Hodges

On December 31, 2024

In Ceramic, Mixed Media, Sculpture

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.

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