Where do Black people go during times fraught with pain and sorrow?

Installation Image Peter Williams: Black Universe, MOCAD

Peter Williams’ query is one with a storied lineage within the Black community. Over the course of 45 years, Williams, a senior professor of painting at the University of Delaware with time spent in the Detroit arts community and as a professor at Wayne State University, has tackled problematic social structures of white supremacy and discrimination with uncensored perspectives. Curious and inquisitive, he is often in a state of mental travel and critical culture investigation within his practice.

These themes set the foundation of Peter Williams: Black Universe, an Afro-futuristic narrative that takes the viewer on a journey through consciousness and pursuit of a better life. Within this universe, Williams creates a melanated race who travels to outer space with hopes to discover new planet homes and an end to systemic constructs of oppression, racism and injustice.

Co-curated by Larry Ossei-Mensah and Rebecca Mazzei, Peter Williams: Black Universe exhibits at Trinosophes and Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (MOCAD) through January 21, 2021. The installation is experimental and actively fuses abstract strokes with contemporary figuration. Narration and Transitions at Trinosophes begins as a meditation. Its energizing colors, use of repetition and symmetric designs flirt with sensuality, sarcasm, spirituality and identity. Through use of abstraction, Mazzei notes that the viewer is experiencing a “painter’s painter” working through ideas and experiments that create space to sort through ideas.

Peter Williams, OWL, 2019, Oil on Canvas; 24×20 inches

Peter Williams, SQUEEZE II, Oil on Canvas; 24×30 inches

Bird Man closes Narration and Transitions. The active piece steers from the serene and transitions to dark humor and an evolving narrative. The larger canvas preludes Williams’ Black Exodus suite of paintings on view at MOCAD. The figurative composition is a self-portrait of the artist after a major surgery. A bit disoriented, the subject sits, appearing unbothered, in the middle of the frame with a dragon devouring his slumped body. Movement seems to be controlled by the wizardry figure in the lower right corner raising its wand. This sense of energy and twist on a thematic composition that could be viewed as defeat, may be informing what’s to come.

Peter Williams, BIRD MAN, 2019 Oil on Canvas; 48×60 inches

Peter Williams, SPECTACLE, 2019, OIL ON CANVAS, 48×48 inches

MOCAD’s Black Exodus gets to the gristle of the narrative using color as a luring factor toward bigger ideas and societal confrontations on large canvas. Here, Williams uses dark humor, allegory, art history, and witty satire as a way to challenge us to confront the truths about society and ourselves.

In Spectacle, blackness is on display. The tone is blunt and touches on the eerie and invasive feeling of being watched and observed. The figures are constructing the building blocks of their new alien planet. Wearing garments from historical myths, they have a heightened awareness of their surroundings but make no effort to perform, if you will, or oblige the onlookers’ expectation for something to happen. The last laugh, however, is owned by the “spectacle” with his sharp, hard gaze refocusing the lens by peering through a monocle implying a shared curiosity and the discomfort of surveillance.

Peter Williams, BLACK PEOPLE’S OIL, 2019, Oil on Canvas, 72×96 inches

Ossei-Mensah worked with Williams in 2018, for a show at the CUE Art Foundation, and speaks to the allure of Williams’ knowledge and experimentation with color theory. “It’s a common place to enter while suggesting that you spend more time not only looking at the full picture composition but paying attention to the details,” he says. “These are the little norms that I think make Peter such an incredible, not only artist but just a thinker reflecting on the Black experience.”

Peter Williams, ROCKETTRY, 2019, OIL ON CANVAS, 60×72 inches

The central element in Black People’s Oil  is the figure trudging through swamp-like oil in a spacesuit emblazoned with ‘Black Lives Matter’ on the front and the letters ‘B L M’ scrolled on the arm of the suit. A ‘BP Oil’ blimp flies above, likely referencing the 2010 oil spill that deeply affected the Gulf of Mexico and another flying car resembling the Pan African flag reads ‘Black People.’ A goggle lens frames the Black figure in the space suit. The piece is a complex visual suggesting routes of escape, but also questioning if that means something better or the type of desired difference that alleviates one from oppression and despair.

Rockettry doesn’t answer that but serves as a call to action. Here, Williams paints a community of people working together to build their mode of transportation and way out of a corrupt and disastrous planet. Car parts and tools are scattered, men and women work individually and collaboratively on vehicles. There’s a lot of  movement on canvas that offers commentary on the inventiveness that can be birthed within a confined environment. The details are pivotal as Ossei-Mensah references. Notice the brown man slumped over holding cans of fuel cell,  another holding his Cuba identification card, and a  community member wearing a shirt that reads: Roses are red/violets enjoyable/don’t blame the Mexicans cause your unemployable. In the upper right corner, a burnt orange, sun-like shape overlooks the community working to create a way out, but this is not a beam of light. The words: Fascist, Pigs, KKK, FBI, Lies, Bitch, Ice, Trump with multiple HaHas are carved on the figure. The community continues on their mission.

I Fell From the Sky references the history of painting the human form. We see astronauts floating in a “suspended state of consciousness” and uncertainty regarding their future – a testament to the present day in the midst of a global health pandemic,  hyper-visible racial and political tensions. The astronauts hands are  covered with white gloves, referencing the minstrel show and television shows illustrating Black people as cartoon buffoons. The visual statement traces a traumatic past that has seeped into mainstream consciousness in various forms from  — some of which holding such an aesthetic appeal the foundational roots have been obstructed from memory or a desire to know. But Williams doesn’t paint frivolously. History is significant even while the artist deciphers thoughts and colliding worlds.

The figure at the core of the canvas is flying in a space suit designed with stitches of Kente cloth – an homage to Ghana in West Africa. The symbolism here is communication. Gold articulates status and serenity; yellow is fertility; green speaks to renewal; blue aligns with spirit and harmony; red is passion and black represents a union with ancestors and spiritual awareness. These elements arrive in the conscious state, perhaps serving as a guided language for Williams while conceptualizing the series and dialogue that discusses the Black experience.

Peter Williams, I FELL FROM THE SKY, 2019, OIL ON CANVAS, 72×96 inches

Peter Williams is an educator and artist with the condition of Black lives always at the forefront of his creative transport. In Black Universe, we journey along an experiential thinker and conversationalist en route to another world within and beyond the known. He extends the invitation to use your imagination when digesting the complexity of his works and exploring how to come to terms with the world that presently exists. The solution does not rest in escapism that suggests something new is better, but the power to choose and decide how to make the lives we lead on this planet our version of utopia.

Peter Williams at MOCAD (Museum of Contemporary Art – Detroit) and Trinosophes.

*Writer’s Note: Thank you to Rebecca Mazzei,  Larry Ossei- Mensah  and Zeb Smith for conversation and insight.

Installation image, courtesy of the David Klein Gallery, photo by Samantha Schefman

Both exhibitions delayed their openings this spring because of the Covid 19 pandemic, but now, each are on display separately at the two galleries. The new exhibition of oil paintings at David Klein downtown, Palimpsest, is a collection of eleven works of art by Elise Ansel.

You ask yourself where do artists get their ideas for a painting?  Is it from observation, photographs, events, setting up objects, imagination or from the depths of the collective unconscious?  The answer is usually all or a mix of the above. Artists bring their own experience to the creation.

Elise Ansel finds motivation in historical works of art from which she reconstructs a realistic representational work of art using abstract expressionism as her vehicle. The work in this exhibition bases its reconstructions on Old Master paintings from the Detroit Institute of Arts collection.

She says in her statement, “I create by translating Old Master paintings into a contemporary pictorial language. I mine art historical imagery for color, structure, and meaning. Thus, my paintings use the Old Masters as points of departure. They move into Abstraction by transforming the representational content, which is obfuscated and ultimately eclipsed by my focus on color, gesture, and the materiality of paint. I interrupt linear, rational readings so that the real subject becomes the substance and surface of oil paint, the range of its applications, and the ways in which it can be used to celebrate life. My work deconstructs both pictorial language and authorial agency to excavate and liberate meanings buried beneath the surface of the works from which my paintings spring.”

Elise Ansel, Hybrid 1, Oil on canvas, 48 x 36, all images courtesy of the David Klein Gallery

Rachel Ruysch, Flowers in a Glass Vase, Oil on canvas, 33 X 26, 1704, Image courtesy of the Detroit Institute of Arts

The work Hybrid 1 draws on the Ruysch still life and attracts the viewer in a multitude of ways. Set against a black background, the textured strokes, color palette,  Miro-like delicacy and  expressive linework renders a kind of feminine harmony. Hybrid 1 plays off Rachel Ruysch’s Flowers in a Glass Vase, 1704,  and leaves the experience wide open to interpretation.  The most profound concept here is that we all bring our own personal experience to a work of art. So when I view the Ruysch still life, where do I go?  Handsomely composed and decorated, like the photograph of an apple, it leaves little room for interpretation.

Studio, Elise Ansel

Elise Ansel, Judith lll, Oil on Canvas, 72 x 56″,

The same concept applies to the reconstruction of Artemisia Gentileschi’s Judith 1. Ansel goes to great lengths in the interpretation by writer Mary Garrard with references to her book, Reclaiming Female Agency: Feminist Art History After Post Modernism, in which she writes, “The cultural habit of seeing woman as an object-to-be-looked-at, the site of scopophilic pleasure” is denied and replaced with a focus on the artist hand.  What exactly is being killed in Gentileschi’s painting: toxic scopophilia and the myth of white supremacy.” Forgive me, but there aren’t too many psychiatrists who use Sigmund Freud in their practice these days.

Ansel’s paintings are vibrant and compelling in their execution.  Using an extra-large brush stroke of vibrant colored oil paint against these mostly dark backgrounds without reference to Caravaggio or Rembrandt would work just fine.  Some paintings retain images from Old Master works she has dissected, while others are pure abstractions whose relationship to any source is invisible. The visit to the museum feels more like contrivance and is not needed for this viewer as the paintings stand on their own and express their own individual form of abstract expressionism.

Elise Ansel, a native of New York City, is a graduate of Brown University and earned an MFA from Southern Methodist University. Her work has been exhibited widely in the United States and abroad and is in multiple private and public collections, including the Museum of Contemporary Art Krakow, Poland, Brown University, Providence, RI, and Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Brunswick, ME. Elise Ansel lives and works in Portland, Maine.

Al Held @ David Klein – Birmingham

Al Held, Installation, All images courtesy of David Klein Gallery

For this exhibition, David Klein draws on the Al Held Foundation for a modest show of Al Held watercolors from the early 1990s, which were painted mostly near Rome, Italy, at his studio on Janiculum Hill sometime after his residency at the American Academy (1981-82) where he spent time creating his watercolors and studying what some would call the Renaissance vision.

Born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1928, Al Held grew up in the East Bronx, the son of a poor Polish family thrown into the stresses of welfare during the depression. He showed little interest in art until leaving the Navy in 1947, where he enrolled in the Art Students League of New York. In 1951, with support from the G.I. Bill, Held traveled to Paris for two years to study at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière. In Paris, he decided that realism was not for him and moved into Abstraction and worked alongside the early 50s abstract expressionists. The single major retrospective of his career remains the survey curated by Marcia Tucker at the Whitney in 1974, which traced his development from his heavily pigmented, gestural Expressionist paintings in the 1950s, to his pioneering of flatly rendered geometric Abstraction in the context of post-painterly Abstraction in the 1960s, to his veering off on his own path in his reintroduction of illusionism into abstract painting in the early 1970s.

Installation image

Al Held, Tesoro 14, Watercolor on Paper mounted on board, 31 x 40″, 1993

The watercolors are dominated with geometric shapes, often either suspended in space or moving backward in perspective.  The use of primary color played against secondary color creates a convergence of color and shape.  Some of these paintings have horizontal windows, reminding me at times of Diego Rivera without the use of the figure.  These futuristic landscapes defined by complexly organized architectural scaffolds are not grounded nor do they pay attention to an outside light source; instead, they darken the interior of a cube or box. Inspired by Renaissance conceptions of the universe, one could see classical compositions that are topless or bottomless, juxtaposed to Mondrian, firmly planted on earth. These works on paper are stretched on stretcher frames and float in their picture frames, much like an oil painting.

Al Held (1928-2005) was one of the last and best of the big-impact abstract painters to emerge from the postwar era.  My personal favorite in this exhibition is Tesoro 14  that moves horizontally, right to the left, in a circular motion like a giant cog in a wooden windlass that harnesses and transfers energy.  The use of color complements is dominated by primaries and a centered composition that generates its densely packed strength.

In 1962, Held was appointed Associate Professor of Art at Yale University in 1962. He was awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship in 1966. He has also been included in exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and the Art Institute of Chicago, to name a few. His work is in the public collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden.

At David Klein Galleries, both exhibitions are on display through August 22, 2020.

Installation Image, James Chatelain: Home is in My Head at paulkotulaprojects

“Home is in My Head” is the intriguing, tantalizing title of Jim Chatelain’s display of recent paintings at paulkotulaprojects. Delving into Chatelain’s concept of home is well-nigh irresistible given his usual reluctance to discuss the meaning and sources of his art. Linked to Detroit’s Cass Corridor artists of the 70s and 80s, Chatelain has worked in both abstract and figurative modes throughout his career.

For starters, he plucked the title of his latest display from the 1971 Jackie Lomax album and song whose lyrics describe a loner who discovers, after searching far and wide, that he only feels “at home” when living in his head. Hence, the dozen plus canvases in the show, dating from 2018 – 2020 (with one 2016 exception), focus on the “head” (for the most part) represented frontally or in profile, in bold, eccentric color ways and dark, emphatic contours.

Jim Chatelain, “Untitled,” acrylic and collage on paperboard, 20 x 15” 2019

Moreover, Chatelain’s visages, ranging from life-size to monumental, may be figurative or semi-abstract, as in Untitled from 2019 and Starfish, 2020. In the former, the actual-size head, wrapped in a vine of yellow leaves, is bound with both a crown of thorns and metallic chains. Large teardrops of blood, a recurring motif of the artist, surround the head silhouetted by a greenish aura, while an imprisoning grid offers a partial view of roiling forms within. This unsettling view inward is countered by the liberating, spiraling whiplash of Starfish, whirling out of watery depths (like a waterspout, dancer on toe, or—to stretch a point—the birth of Venus?) while enclosing within its black, red, and yellow contours a chockablock mash-up of fragmented forms.

Jim Chatelain, “Starfish,” acrylic on linen, 35 x 25” 2020

Trunk (2018), another small scale, life-size image, similarly bares Chatelain’s predilection to peel away an exterior surface to expose what is concealed. Here, the “trunk” (of a tree) is also, and primarily, the torso of a human body from armpit to groin, beneath which, after cutting away the bark, a phantasmagoria of staring eyes and layered lengths of wood in yellows and reds is exposed.  Flanked as well by grasping, finger-like nerve endings (or lightning, electrified tendrils?), both body and nature reveal more than meets the eye.

Jim Chatelain, “Trunk,” acrylic on canvas, 26 x 18” 2018

Layers of imagery also dominate the lurking, looming, twice life-size specter of 2018’s Untitled. The large, bristling head, with curling, upturned braids, appears to be wearing a balaclava, but one with a peak reminiscent of a loose-fitting stocking cap. Apparently attired in a black turtleneck, fingers extending downward and upward near the mouth or chin evoke a worrisome gesture. On the picture plane, a delicate white form, perhaps referencing a hat or boat, floats lightly and elegantly in front of the frightening, masked presence behind. The eerie Prussian blue, grass green, sky blue, and luminous white hues reinforce the impact of a stunning, double-take image composed of disparate elements.

Jim Chatelain, “Untitled,” acrylic on linen, 34 x 26” 2018

Four monumental images of 2020 (each 53 x 40 in.) dominate the show and confirm the ongoing importance of Chatelain’s “home in my head” variances. (Additional examples reside in the artist’s studio.) Two currently on view illustrate again the artist’s dichotomous figurative/abstract models that heighten the pictorial dynamic of the exhibition. And since both are untitled, Chatelain leaves us somewhat on our own to ferret out their mysteries. In Untitled, the sharply incised profile of a little over four foot tall head with wide open, saw-toothed maw ingesting tiny circular morsels startles. The spine-like tree trunk on the right curls around and into the brain that, subdivided into numerous chambers, is replete with multifarious shapes surging through the cavity, including several droplets of blood. Sentient life, in an ominous, darkling universe, seems rife with blood, sweat, and tears.

Jim Chatelain, “Untitled,” acrylic on canvas, 53 x 40” 2020

Untitled, however, is vessel shaped rather than head-like, with vaguely hieroglyphic or alphabetic shapes inscribed on black tablets/slabs crowned with several eye-like roundels. The flattened shapes and bold black, white, and red color scheme are regally enhanced by a wavy fringe of filaments (a cape, robe, or drapery?) that vivifies the perimeter of the composition. Of particular note, a surreal, floating hand stabilizes the composition and adds a human touch, perhaps suggestive of a stabilizing hand or the positioning of hands in a traditional half-length portrait.

Jim Chatelain, “Untitled,” acrylic on canvas, 53 x 40” 2020 (All images courtesy of paulkotulprojects)

All told, Chatelain has presented a discombobulating compound of heads (primarily) whose chameleon-like extremes present an ambitious, many-faceted hunt for Home. His dozen plus “homes” or dwellings encompass and express contradictory states of mind, moods, personas, temperaments, identities, attitudes, fears, and emotions, basically what we sum up as the human condition. Uncozy and unruly as his findings may be, all are ultimately revelatory re the universal quest to “know thyself.”

Jim Chatelain: Home is in My Mind is on view at paulkotulaprojects through April 4, 2020