Category: Paintings Page 1 of 48

Peter Williams @ David Klein Gallery

On December 10, 2024

Peter Williams, Installation, David Klein Gallery Detroit, Nov. 2-December 21, photo courtesy of David Klein Gallery

As I entered the David Klein Gallery in Detroit this December, the intense face of an African American man confronted me from the middle distance of an enormous painting. Cathedral, by Peter Williams, from the artist’s series “Bent Word,” is now on view along with a dozen of his late masterpieces until December 21. Executed near the time of his death in 2021, the composition is crowded with lively figures, exuberant patterns, and minivans traveling inexplicably through outer space. The enigmatic central figure (possibly Williams himself?) dressed in astronaut’s gear (or are they pajamas?) floats, weightless, in a topsy-turvy environment. Silent behind his helmet, is he waving hello? Or goodbye? Or both? The brilliant white areas of primed canvas recurring throughout the composition create the impression that the painting is starting to shatter into brilliantly colored pieces.

Peter Williams, Cathedral, 2019, oil and graphite on canvas, 72” x 96” All photos by K.A. Letts unless otherwise noted.

Williams’s artworks throughout the exhibition are full of references to pop culture yet grounded in the artist’s deep understanding of Western art history. He created his own unique style by mixing pop culture imagery, geometric abstraction, pointillism, and pattern painting with his studies of Goya, Kandinsky, and Klee. Robert Colescott’s paintings, with figures from art history like St. Sebastian and Picasso’s demoiselles bumping up against pinup girls and Aunt Jemima, also come to mind. In a 2020 interview with the Artists’ Legacy Foundation, Williams explained, “Most people don’t have any kind of dialogue with the work of 500 years ago or even 100 years ago. I’m trying to talk in the language that’s available to most people. We live in a comic universe right now.”

Peter Williams, 2. As the Birds Fly, Another Planet, 2019, oil and graphite on canvas, 72” x 96”

Afrofuturist narratives make up an important part of Williams’s cosmology, particularly in the later paintings. The “Bent Word” series tells stories of imaginary African American colonists (and a character called “the N Word”) who depart earth, escaping environmental catastrophe. In his 2019 painting As the Birds Fly, Another Planet, Williams imagines a new world, strange yet attractively pastoral, where earth’s birds join aliens in paradisical leisure. A lone Black basketball player at the upper edge of the painting seems headed for the planet’s surface.

Peter Williams, Leon Spinks’ Salvation, 2020-2021, oil on canvas, 60” x 72”

Mortality was clearly on Williams’s mind when he painted Leon Spinks’ Salvation in 2020-2021. The world -famous boxer died in February 2021 after a long illness, only a few months before Williams was to follow him. The central, haloed figure in celestial blue seems headed upward, with crosses that might be stars anchoring the astral space. Two white vans (ambulances?) with discarded body parts float, left and right, over the blue planet below. An appalled astronaut mouthing the words “holy shit” expresses, perhaps, the stunned reaction we all share when contemplating mortality. The colorful but thinly painted imagery suggests, once again, the conditional quality of fugitive human existence. A smaller canvas on a similar theme, Leon Spinks’s Taxi, is devoid of figures, focusing instead on cosmic cars leaving earth’s gravity.

Peter Williams, Leon Spinks’s Taxi, 2021, oil on canvas, 31” x 40

NYACK, painted in 2013, makes a helpful comparison to the later work. The comic figures are arranged in a kind of rightward-facing parade, earthbound. The organizing compositional elements are vertical. But a brown figure moves right to left below, missing limbs but still swimming resolutely through the water.

Peter Williams, NYACK, 2013, oil on canvas, 60” x 132” (diptych)

Williams died in Wilmington, Delaware on August 19, 2021. He had recently retired as a senior professor in the Fine Arts Department at the University of Delaware. But before that, he had been an associate professor for 17 years at Detroit’s Wayne State University. Detroit-based Rotland Press published a monograph in 2016 entitled “The N-Word: Paintings by Peter Williams,” which included an interview between Williams and Detroit poet and playwright Bill Harris. A major exhibition of Williams’s work, “Black Exodus,” opened at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit in January of 2021, only a few months before his death, and featured a few of the paintings now on display at David Klein Gallery.

Peter Williams, Peter and Mike, 2019, oil and graphite on canvas, 60” x 48”

Born in Suffern, N.Y. in 1952, Williams grew up in Nyack, N.Y., where he had his first solo exhibition at the age of 17. He earned a B.F.A. from Minneapolis College of Art and Design in 1975, followed by an M.F.A. from Maryland Institute (College of Fine Art) in 1987. A life-altering car accident while Williams was in New Mexico as a young man resulted in lifelong disability. He lost his right leg and required crutches for the rest of his life.

Peter Williams’s paintings are housed in the permanent collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among many others. In 2020, he received the Artists’ Legacy Foundation Award, followed a few months later with a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Williams’s paintings defy categorization as they settle into their place in contemporary art history. They are funny, wild, sometimes terrifying, but always deeply human, combining abstraction, figuration, storytelling and racial advocacy in a persuasive worldview that takes into account not only the world as it is, but our future as it could become.

Peter Williams @ David Klein Gallery, November 2-December 21, 2024

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.

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.

Critical art reviews of Detroit galleries and museums weekly