Detroit Art Review

Critical art reviews of Detroit galleries and museums weekly

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Susan Goethel Campbell’s Soundings and Ebitenyefa Baralaye’s Foundations @ David Klein Gallery

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On July 28, 2025

In Printmaking, Sculpture

An installation view of Susan Goethel Campbell’s Soundings at the David Klein Gallery’s new space in Ferndale. The foreground figures are from the companion show, Ebitenyefa Baralaye’s Foundations. Both will be up through Aug. 23. (All photos by Detroit Art Review.)

 The David Klein Gallery chose a knock-out exhibition to celebrate the opening of its new home in Ferndale, just down Livernois from the former Susanne Hilberry Gallery, which Detroit art-lovers will well remember. Within the new space, you’ll find eight breathtaking prints, each mounted about a centimeter from the wall, casting a small and essential shadow, that make up Soundings by Susan Goethel Campbell. Arrayed in front of these are three hulking, stylized ceramic sarcophagi by Ebitenyefa Baralaye — faceless figures that don’t appear much interested in the luminous prints surrounding them. Both shows are up through Aug. 23.

Taking the former first, Campbell’s color-drenched works on Japanese paper command this airy new space. The jewel tones employed here mark an interesting digression for a printmaker, videographer, and sculptor who’s mostly worked with natural dyes in muted earth tones. That palette always made sense, given Campbell’s visceral empathy for nature and its accelerating decline – a moral and philosophical outlook that underpins all her output, and one that Essay’d critic Sarah Rose Sharp termed Campbell’s “eco-connectedness.”

The artist, who got her MFA at Cranbrook and was a 2009 Kresge Artist Fellow, has spun out an oeuvre across her career ranging from elegant, walnut-stained abstract prints to Detroit Weather: 365 Days (2011), mesmerizing time- lapse videos that tracked Detroit cloud patterns over an entire year, recorded by cameras placed on a high floor in Detroit’s Fisher Building.

Susan Goethel Campbell, Aegean Narrative No. 2, Procion dyes, embroidery, collage, hand-cut perforations on Japanese paper, 38 ¼ x 58 inches, 2025.

With Soundings, Campbell explores the dazzling hues she encountered while on an artistic residency last summer in Greece on the island of Skopelos. Reached in England, where she’s currently visiting her daughter, Campbell emailed that she had indeed been inspired by the visual riot flourishing under the Mediterranean sun. “I wanted to use vivid, saturated color to reflect my experience of the Aegean and flowering plants in Greece,” she wrote, “so I worked with Procion dyes,” a cold-water type that yields intense color, “instead of natural muted dyes.” The results are striking abstracts — elaborate hand-crafted works on artisanal paper from Japan,  with repetitive perforations created by a Japanese drill punch, and small, sharp, geometric elements sewn delicately into the paper.

Susan Goethel Campbell, Aegean Narrative No. 2, (detail) Procion dyes, embroidery, collage, hand-cut perforations on Japanese paper, 38 ¼ x 58 inches, 2025.

In Aegean Narrative No. 2, Campbell fills the top half of the “canvas” with what appear to be radiant, abstracted sunflowers hovering above a sea-green lower half overlaid with a grid of small squares, many in dashing colors. These tiny geometric intrusions are ineffably beautiful, and read more like digital code than anything drawn from the living world. Campbell acknowledges such shapes are inspired “by patterns found in nature, data, and technology.”

Susan Goethel Campbell, Sounding No. 3 (Diptych); Procion dyes, embroidery, paper cuts on double-layered Japanese paper; 55 x 60 inches, 2025.

The grid Campbell’s embedded in some of these prints is most visible in Sounding No. 3 (Diptych), where just a scattering of aquamarine squares highlight an expanse of gridded sea-green, and work in sharp, if diminutive, contrast to the mauve and purple circular blobs that appear to be floating well under the water’s surface, like clouds of… something. There’s an undeniable suggestion, as with so much of Campbell’s work, of things elusive and unknowable.

Ebitenyefa Baralaye, Standing Figure IV, Terracotta, slip, stain; 64 x 19 x 17 inches, 2025.

Detroiter Ebitenyefa Baralaye’s monumental, faceless figures read like wood or metal, but are actually ceramic constructions built using a coil method that’s traditional in Nigeria, where the artist was born. The figures were fired with glaze and assembled in three parts, since few kilns are large enough to accommodate five-foot-tall stylized human forms. So while this tripartite division is inevitable and practical, there’s also a pleasing suggestion of ancient statuary à la Greece or Rome, where figures were sometimes constructed of stacked, carved elements.

Baralaye’s family migrated first to the Caribbean, and then to New York City. A graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design, in 2016, he got his MFA at Cranbrook and now teaches at the University of Michigan’s Stamps School of Art & Design. The “standing figures” may invoke similar forms he knew as a child, says gallery director Christine Schefman, but are seldom rendered at such a grand scale.

Ebitenyefa Baralaye, Standing Figure III, Terracotta, slip, stain; 65 x 22 x 16 inches, 2025.

 

Susan Goethel Campbell’s Soundings, and Foundations by Ebitenyefa Baralaye, will be up at the David Klein Gallery through Aug. 23, 2025

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Diana Al-Hadid, unbecoming @ MSU Broad Art Museum

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On June 29, 2025

In Fiber, Paintings, Printmaking, Sculpture

Diana Al-Hadid, unbecoming, Installation view

To be “unbecoming” is to be something of an embarrassment, a disappointment to one’s peers and betters — a failure who couldn’t rise to certain standards and expectations. But if you didn’t sign on to those expectations in the first place, getting tarred as “unbecoming” could be considered a kind of success. To be unbecoming is not the same as to be coming undone. The latter implies dissolution and defeat; the former, with a little linguistic license, can suggest the first steps toward reinvention, a re-becoming.

Sculptor Diana Al-Hadid’s art seems to be in the process of “un-becoming” as well, physically speaking. Her mixed media works are smeary and obscured, cluttered with marks, in low-contrast color schemes that force close observation to discern their subjects. Her paintings appear to have been corroded by some caustic substance, or else by neglect, leaving streaks of muted colors clinging to a lath foundation, but also revealing glints of gold leaf. The works seem fragmentary, perhaps partially lost to time. On the other hand, they could also pass for recently unearthed artifacts, newly discovered evidence that reshapes our thinking about the past and the present.

Much is made in the catalog for unbecoming about Al-Hadid’s use of space, or rather the way she and her work take up space in a world where women are discouraged from doing so. In that sense, it’s appropriate that the exhibition is hosted at the MSU Broad Art Museum in East Lansing, in Zaha Hadid’s jolting stainless steel edifice — a Bowie-esque lightning bolt upon the placid face of the Michigan State University campus. Like the Broad itself, Al-Hadid’s art simultaneously works with and against the environment it occupies: framed prints are suspended in midair by cables rather than hung against walls; a polished bronze disc casts reflections that become part of the artwork; and an arch of made up of Renaissance-inspired figures seems to dissolve and drip down from the top of one gallery entrance, encroaching on the visitor’s space. Then there’s the six-foot model of a Gothic cathedral, inverted so its spires seem to have been driven forcefully into the ground. The placement of the overturned church is such that the diagonals of the room’s windows, like cartoon speed lines, enhance the sense of its catastrophic descent.

Diana Al-Hadid, unbecoming, Installation view Blue Medusa, Mixed Media, 2023

Mythological or art-historical women are often Al-Hadid’s subjects, and her work attempts to complicate or rewrite their stories. The large mixed media wall-hanging Blue Medusa eliminates the face of the gorgon of Greek myth entirely, leaving only a halo of hair — not snakes — writhing around a cut-out void. Minus a face to scrutinize, we’re left wondering what else we got wrong about this “monster.” Three works here are derived from a Northern Renaissance painting called The Allegory of Chastity, in which a woman, hands folded and eyes downcast, is sealed from the waist down inside a gown-like rock face, guarded jealously by two lions. In Deluge of the Allegory Al-Hadid depicts this “protection” of feminine virtue as the prison it is; the mountain is even hemmed in by walls, but from its peak a flood of angry lava flows forth. In the triptych Hindsight, the woman stands flanked by a smoldering volcano and the imposing peak. In Lionless, the woman has banished her feline escorts and stands free and autonomous. (I’ve listed the artworks this way to create a hopeful narrative arc, but Lionless is earlier than the others by seven years, suggesting some rethinking of the subject by Al-Hadid.)

Diana Al-Hadid, unbecoming, Hindsight, Hand-Drawn ballgrain plate, Lithography on Essex paper, 2020

Diana Al-Hadid, unbecoming, August, after The Seventh Month, Polymer gypsum, fiberglass, steel, plaster, metal leaf and pigment. 2025

Motherhood is a subject Al-Hadid visits and revisits here as well. One painting derives from a previous work of hers, from 2015, now at the Toledo Museum of Art. Though obscured and fragmentary as is her style, the Toledo painting appears to be inspired by icons of St. Catherine; a female figure rests one hand on her belly and holds a sword in the other. As the title, The Seventh Month, suggests, Al-Hadid was pregnant with her son when she made the work. In the 2025 follow-up painting, August, after The Seventh Month, Al-Hadid stands just behind her 10-year-old son, and rests a hand on his shoulder. She has passed her protective sword down to him, and if that wasn’t a warning enough, his t-shirt slogan reads “Do Not Disturb.” The world around them is no less in a state of “un-becoming” than before — incomplete, in flux — but together the two seem resolute.

Diana Al-Hadid, unbecoming, Untitled, Bronze, 2014-21 Bronze

The most unusual piece in the show is an untitled disc — more like a puddle — of bronze, looking like a patinated hand mirror that fell, shattered, and then melted in the sun like a forlorn ice cream cone. The polished, fragmented surface casts tangles of reflected light on the wall above it. It was inspired by a sculptural group by Jean-Joseph Perraud representing lyrical drama, part of the facade of the Napoleon III-era Palais Garnier opera house in Paris. In the sculpture, a fallen man is shown his reflection in a mirror by a woman standing to one side, as a winged female figure holding a torch aloft steps over his body. In Al-Hadid’s version, the broken mirror replaces the broken man, and the flickering reflections stand in for the victorious angel, creating a sort of condensed, perhaps lyrical version of the original. (A wall text describing the piece as “a metaphor for deconstructing standards of beauty and conduct” is on-point with the theme of the show, but it’s an unsatisfying explanation of an intriguing piece, especially minus an explanation of the original Perraud piece.)

Diana Al-Hadid, unbecoming, Smoke Screen 2015, Polymer, gypsum, fiberglass, steel, gold leaf, plaster, and pigment

Diana Al-Hadid, unbecoming, Spun of the Limits of my Lonely Waltz Wood, polystyrene, plaster, fiberglass, and pigment, 2006

That drippy veil of fiberglass and gypsum that hangs down across the entrance to the show’s final gallery is entitled Smoke Screen. Amidst the drips are the subtle outlines of multiple figures, inspired by Northern Renaissance artworks, that mingle and intertwine, congregating around the entrance and reaching into the visitor’s space. Beyond the veil is the epically-titled Spun of the Limits of My Lonely Waltz, Al-Hadid’s imposing model cathedral made of plywood, plastic, and plaster. Inverting the structure reveals its foundation (visible from the museum’s second floor), which was formed by the pattern of the artist’s footprints, made as she danced a one-person waltz around her studio. This personal ritual, performed in the sanctity of Al-Hadid’s art-making space, has superseded those of the traditional church, overturning its authority in favor of her own autonomy. The piece is a dramatic exclamation point at the end of an intriguing show.

Diana Al-Hadid, unbecoming @ MSU Broad Art Museum

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Work from Mexico @ Flint Institute of Arts

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On July 9, 2024

In Ceramic, Printmaking

Installation image of FIA exterior

The Flint Institute of Arts is not an enormous museum, but it delivers a big experience. One of the wonders of the FIA is how they manage to do so much in a relatively small space. The museum boasts a dozen galleries featuring a spectrum of objects from across the ages and around the world; notable contemporary glass and ceramics galleries; a showcase-lined corridor devoted to decorative arts; a theater and a sculpture court; and a small gallery between the obligatory gift shop and cafe that sells work made by students from the adjacent art school. At the very back of the building is the Sheppy Dog Library (named for philanthropist Dr. Alan Klein’s golden retriever), a warm, welcoming reading room stocked with reference books and comfy chairs in which to peruse them.

Installation, From Earth To Sky: Ancient Art of the Americas

Of course, there’s generous space given over to large headliner exhibitions, but there’s also a tiny media arts gallery — a “black box” theater designed to show video works. And just in front of the library is the FIA’s graphics gallery, a dark-walled room with subdued lighting, just big enough to comfortably showcase a dozen or so prints or drawings. All three of these spaces are currently hosting art created by Mexican artists, featuring work that spans two millennia. In the main galleries is the exhibit From Earth To Sky: Ancient Art of the Americas, showcasing ceramic figures and objects from the collection of a Texas oil magnate. The graphics room offers Mexicanidad, a portfolio of twelve prints created by El Taller de Gráfica Popular, a progressive-minded, Mexico City-based printmaking collective founded in 1937. And in the Security Credit Union Media Arts Gallery, they’re showing Pocha Dream, an eleven-and-a-half minute excerpt from the Dream Machine Archive, a “psychodynamic audio and video tool” designed by artist Natalia Rocafuerte to help immigrant women interpret their dreams. (Rocafuerte grew up around the Mexico/Texas border, and became a naturalized US citizen in 2019.)

Ted Weiner was a second-generation oil man who threw himself and a chunk of his fortune into art collecting in the 1950s. He acquired an impressive array of modernist works, as well as a large collection of indigenous Mexican sculptures, which were experiencing a vogue at the time. He was noted for his “catholicity of taste” — which could be taken as a backhanded compliment. But Weiner’s collection of pre-Hispanic ceramics was of such quality that when his daughter offered the complete set to the FIA after his death, the museum (after doing due diligence) gladly accepted it.

Jalisco, Ancestor Pair, ca. 200 BCE – 200 CE Ceramic

Many of the pieces on display here are smallish terracotta figures or vessels from the Nayarit, Jalisco, and Colima regions of western Mexico, created to be buried along with deceased members of elite families, in underground tombs beneath a family’s home. The tombs were accessible by shafts, and often contained the remains of several of a family’s ancestors. To modern eyes, the figures depicted by the sculptures might seem enviably relaxed and relatable: seated on stools, sitting arm-in-arm, smoking, or leaning back with legs spread as if lounging on the beach. But the elaborate jewelry, scarifications, tattoos, headwear, and other features on these figures indicate prestige and authority handed down through ancestral bloodlines. Male-and-female couples sitting side by side are thought to represent the ancestral progenitors from whom a family’s elite status flowed. Some figures have abstracted features to emphasize rank over individual likenesses. Elsewhere in the exhibit, other walks of life are represented; most dramatic are the shaman warriors, dressed in cylindrical armor and outsized helmets, and brandishing clubs. Everyday activities such as playing ball, preparing food and medicines, and giving birth are depicted as well.

Colima,  Dog, ca. 200 BCE – 200 CE Ceramic

Dogs were a favorite subject of these sculptures, and ceramic canines were common in the tombs. They’re undeniably cute; one small dog on display here is flopped with its legs splayed out, and another boasts a rotund belly, toothy grin, and even an anatomically correct backside that will charm any dog person. For ancient Mexicans, these dogs held spiritual significance as well; they may have acted as guides for the deceased into the underworld, valued companions in death as they were in life. The chubby “Colima Dog” has since become iconic of the region, and its image has been adopted by contemporary Mexican artists such as Guillermo Ríos Alcalá, whose monumental version of a pair of the dogs dances over a traffic circle in Colima, part of an ongoing process of re-establishing connections to pre-Hispanic culture.

Mexicanidad, Installation view

The concept of Mexicanidad (essentially, “Mexican-ness”) links the ancient works in the main gallery with modern ones in the FIA’s print gallery via the post-revolutionary nationalist movement by that name. Most often associated with the mural projects of “Los Tres Grandes” — Orozco, Siqueiros, and Rivera — the Mexicanidad movement had an important printmaking aspect as well, rooted in the social commentary of predecessors such as José Guadalupe Posada. While the “Big Three” educated the people on progressive issues with large-scale public wall paintings, the printmaking collective El Taller de Gráfica Popular (TGP) took the opposite tack: creating small, accessible, and affordable artworks, though still with powerful leftist political messaging. The portfolio displayed here, simply titled “Mexican People,” comprises a dozen lithographs produced in 1946 by TGP for the purpose of promoting Mexican products in the United States. 

Alberto Beltrán, The Sugar Mill, 1946 Lithograph

 

Alfredo Zalce, Lumber Workers, ca. 1945 Lithograph

American ex-pat artist Pablo O’Higgins (FKA Paul Higgins before becoming an assistant to Diego Rivera) contributes two prints, one of a man and child stacking bricks, and another of an older woman selling her wares at market. O’Higgins employs heavy, sinuous lines that lend his subjects both muscularity and grace. Alberto Beltrán’s image of a man feeding sugar cane into a donkey-driven mill is as elegant as it is diagrammatic, concisely describing the process in a masterfully composed image. Alfredo Zalce’s litho of a lumber operation is similarly beautiful, the arc of a precariously balanced worker’s saw echoing that of reddish logs, splayed like fingers and bobbing in blue-green water. Francisco Mora depicts a silver miner, hunched and approaching the viewer in a claustrophobic tunnel, but not alone — his companions are visible laboring in the background. Though the prints in the “Mexican People” portfolio were intended for a US audience, they nevertheless evince the TGP’s populist concerns; for a campaign promoting export products, the images here pointedly privilege the laborers, their tools and their environments over the products themselves (in much the way Rivera emphasizes the auto manufacturing process over actual cars in his Detroit Industry murals).

Natalia Rocafuerte Pocha Dream, 2021 Lithograph

Inspired by Jungian analysis, which posits that dreams are the way the unconscious communicates with the conscious mind, artist Natalia Rocafuerte set up a hotline, complete with ads featuring cheesy late-night infomercial style graphics, encouraging immigrant women from Detroit and South Texas to call in and answer a survey about their dreams. From these reports, Rocafuerte created short films interpreting the dreams, done in a chaotic, disjointed video collage technique that echoes dream logic: overlapping images, snippets of random advertisements and social media videos, computer games, songs and other pop ephemera.

Natalia Rocafuerte Dream of Emma and Tony, 2021 Lithograph

The eleven-and-a-half minute clip featured at FIA is entitled Pocha Dream, a reference to a (somewhat joking) slang term for Mexicans who’ve lost their Spanish, and perhaps their culture — who have “changed color,” like a rotting fruit (so explains the robotic voiceover that opens the video). The clip includes Dream of Emma and Tony, a short that got Rocafuerte named Best Michigan Filmmaker at 2021’s Ann Arbor Film Festival. In Emma and Tony, Rocafuerte recounts a dream encounter with her normally reclusive (and deaf and blind) grandmother. As she talks, home movies of the older woman are intercut with a face-constructing computer program from the Sims game, as if Rocafuerte’s mind was casting about trying to build a memory of her Abuela. Nostalgic TV ad jingles and graphics from news programs occasionally interrupt the story. The scene somehow segues to an elevated train, traveling first through a Chicago-esque cityscape, then into the desert of west Texas. Along for the ride are an annoying white tourist, and SnapChat denizen and self-described “ladies man” Tony Johns, who hoots and drops inane life advice. Obnoxious as Johns seems, Rocafuerte finds herself admiring his self-confidence. The desert gives way to a meadow just before the dream abruptly ends.

Aside from noting their common origins from Mexican artists, it might be a bit fraught to suggest there are common threads running between 2,000-year-old clay figurines, 78-year-old lithographs, and a Covid-era short film. Suffice to say that the artworks in each exhibit address, and dignify, the quotidian concerns of the artists and their subjects. Those concerns may be personal or political, practical or spiritual, and sometimes all of the above.

From Earth To Sky: Ancient Art of the Americas –   On view now through August 25

Mexicanidad  – On view now through September 8

Dream Machine Archive: Pocha Dream  –On view now through July 31

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Stan Natchez @ BBAC

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On March 16, 2023

In Drawing, Paintings, Printmaking, Video

Birmingham Bloomfield Art Center presents Stan Natchez, Brenda Kobs Russell, and Maria Balogna

Stan Natchez, BBAC, Install 3.2023

The BBAC opened its three galleries with new visual art exhibitions on March 10, 2023, presenting work by a Native American painter, Stan Natchez, a printmaker, Brenda Kobs Russell, and drawings by Maria Balogna.

Stan Natchez was born and raised in Los Angeles. Still, the indigenous artist now lives in New Mexico and brings his exhibit, Indian Without Reservation, to the BBAC with support from the National Endowment for the Arts and Arts Midwest. By taking the philosophies and techniques of both modern life and the traditional Native American heritage, Natchez achieves a complex harmony in his work by using a distinctive Neo-Pop style. He says in his statement, “I paint the life I live, and so every painting, in some way, is a self-portrait. My art is about the way I respond. And that is my experience…my experience is my art…and art is my life.”

Stan Natchez, Monopoly, 58 x 58″ Mixed Media

Natchez talks about his influences, Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, and Roy Lichtenstein, combined with artifacts from the Native American culture. They would be found in Monopoly, where he uses the popular board game as a compositional structure to combine the various corporate logos with Native figures and designs. (I know this writer has worked hard at eliminating the word Indian from my vocabulary to represent Native Americans, yet I find it ironic to see this in the title of this exhibition.)

Stan Natchez employs art appropriation in most of his work throughout the exhibition, where he uses pre-existing objects or images as an artistic strategy, intentionally borrowing, copying, and image transfer is a practice that is traced back to Cubism, Dada, and, more recently, Pop Art.

Stan Natchez, Medicine Crow Living in Two Worlds, 48 x 36″ Mixed Media

Medicine Crow comes from a warrior of the Crow tribe. He was a “reservation chief,” concerned with helping the Crow tribe “learn to live in the ways of the white man” as soon and as efficiently as possible. The subject for this painting is taken from an original black-and-white photograph. The crow symbolism represents messages from dreams or the sub-conscience, and the object he holds is a group of feathers attached to a wooden handle and is used in a variety of ceremonies. Natchez brings the three primary colors across the face to draw attention to the reservation chief.

Stan Natchez, Traveling Through Time, 48 x 66″, Mixed Media

Natchez travels across time, mixing the images of Picasso, Matisse, Marilyn Monroe, Piet Mondrian, and a section of the painting Guernica juxtaposed with several Crow tribal leaders. He is mixing famous western images with Native American icons across time, creating a grid that compares and contrasts. By doing this, he places his people on par with world-recognizable images.

Stan Natchez, Guernica to Wounded Knee, 48 x 66″ Mixed Media

Part of this painting includes features of Guernica, the large 1937 oil painting by artist Pablo Picasso. Natchez spans time with imagery from events at Wounded Knee. It is one of his best-known works, regarded by many as the most moving and powerful anti-war painting in history. The painting here was made earlier in 2012 and then was sold and duplicated at a later date.

Stan Natchez earned his undergraduate degree from the University of Southern Colorado and his M.F.A. at Arizona State University. In addition to being a nationally known artist, Natchez has distinguished himself as a teacher, dancer, editorial advisor, and legal advocate for the Native American community.

 

Brenda Kobs Russell: Familiar Rhythms

Brenda Kobs Russell, Sequence, Etching Collage

Brenda Kobs Russell is a locally based artist whose work reflects an ongoing investigation connecting her inner life to natural phenomena. Given her time in school, you could look to the abstract influences of Pablo Picasso, Fernand Leger, or Paul Klee. During the 1920s, geometric abstraction manifested itself as the underlying principle of the Art Deco style, which propagated the broad use of geometric forms to influence abstraction. For example, Sequence is an etching with touches of white gouache, making it a monoprint that has been popular among printmakers recently.

She says, “As a whole, my work serves as a record, mapping an interior investigation of my surroundings and a practice of abstracting the familiar. I am interested in the congruities between organic cycles of transformation and artistic process, particularly how an image evolves through the erosion of an etching plate and is further translated by ink into paper.”

Russell is an art educator, having taught students across a wide range of ages and abilities in private schools, art centers, and as a lecturer on the faculties of Oakland University and Penny W. Stamps School of Art & Design, University of Michigan. She earned her B.F.A. at Michigan State University (1983) and her M.F.A. at Cranbrook Academy of Art (1985).

 

Maria Balogna: by His stripes

Maria Balogna, Darkness to Light III, Ink on Paper

“The Cost. The Wounds. The Enormity. Symbolic themes run throughout this collection of small drawings that outwardly express the salvific work of The Suffering Servant [ reference: Isaiah 53 ].” The abstract drawings of Maria Balogna contain undertones of Christianity without the weight of literary imagery.

The exhibitions will run through April 20, 2023.

The BBAC is open to the public. Masks are strongly recommended.

EXHIBITION GALLERY HOURS: Monday-Thursday 9 am-5 pm, Friday & Saturday, 9am-4 pm

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Printmaking in the Twenty-First Century @ DIA

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On March 6, 2023

In Printmaking

Exhibition view of Printmaking in the Twenty-First Century. All Images: Ashley CookPrintmaking in the Twenty-First Century at the Detroit Institute of Arts

Printmaking in the Twenty-First Century @ Detroit Institute of Arts

On view at the Detroit Institute of Arts is an exhibition that focuses on printmaking with over 60 works by local, national and international artists. Clare Rogan, who is the Curator of Prints & Drawings at the DIA, unpacks the magic of printmaking through placards that explain some of the most widely used processes and their history dating back to 700 AD in China. Since the first moment that ink was applied to a carved plate and pressed onto paper, it became evident that this new technology would change the trajectory of creative expression forever. Printmaking, unlike drawing or painting, allowed for the production of multiples, which gave artists a chance to produce more and reach a broader audience while still remaining true to their vision. Printmaking in the Twenty-First Century presents a plethora of practices including woodcuts, aquatints, linocuts, screenprints, lithographs, intaglios, relief collagraphs, letterpresses, monoprints, etchings, drypoints, spitbites, photo etchings and engravings. While the featured artists draw inspiration from a lineage over 1300 years old, the works in this exhibition span from the year 2000 until now.

The Schwarz Galleries of Print and Drawing is where you can find this show. Depending on which door you enter, you will receive the body of work differently, however all guests will walk away having witnessed the breadth of concerns these printmakers have addressed. Experimentation is particularly evident in works like Shadows II by William Kentridge, Arise by Fred Wilson, Aerial #3 by Susan Goethel Campbell and Untitled by Tara Donovan. Each of these pieces participate in conversations of abstraction through investigations of material and process. Visually, experimentation by printmakers seems to have furthered aesthetic potential and often achieved deeply mystical outcomes. Many times the printmaker’s multi-step process of creating is mysterious; the informative literature throughout the show satisfies the curiosity a fascinated viewer may have.

Susan Goethel Campbell, Aerial #3, Monoprint printed in brown and black ink with hand punching on kozo paper, 2010

Kota Ezawa, X3D, Color aquatint on paper, edition 3/35, 2009.

 For those who prefer representation, this show also has what you’re looking for. While experimentation is still evident in pieces like Watermark by Nicole Eisenmen and X3D by Kota Ezawa, there is as much concern for producing a legible illustration as there is for exploring the different ways to do so. There are also impressively complex representations of birds in Dying Words by Walton Ford and bugs in The Bestiary of Museum Visitors Notable Bird Beaks of American Museum History Exhibition Paradise and Perdition Thorny Territory by Mark Dion. These two, however, utilize more traditional methods of printmaking to explore the possibilities of realism, which highlights yet another of printmaking’s many facets.

Further into the exhibition is On Press Project: Prints for Non-profits, organized by Detroit-based printshop Signal Return who invited local artists to produce posters for non-profits in the Detroit area. There are 24 linocut and letterpress posters that were made between 2018 and 2022 that bring awareness to organizations, including Detroit Hives, Black Family Development, Keep Growing Detroit, Freedom House, The Children’s Center, and Greening of Detroit. Amongst them are posters for Detroit Will Breathe, an activist group that represents and supports Detroit’s participation in the global Black Lives Matter movement. These simple yet powerful protest posters silently shout DEMOCRACY FOR ALL! and remind us of the essential role that printmaking has held in the realm of activism throughout time. Signal Return spent much of 2020 producing protest posters for Black Lives Matter activists free of charge, which have fueled the demonstrations in the streets. This gesture is not new; researching images of human rights marches throughout history, we see that mass-produced messages designed by artists and produced by printmakers have been critical.

Clinton Snider, Greening of Detroit, Linocut, 202

This exhibition does not shy away from themes of colonization and the oppression of marginalized groups. It confidently moves on to explore more ways in which printmaking can be a functional approach to critiquing such realities while honoring and supporting those who are challenged with underrepresentation. Curated into the show is a series of printed medical-grade masks by world-renowned political artist Ai Weiwei. They were created in 2020 and sold to raise money for Covid-19 relief programs like Human Rights Watch, Refugees International, and Doctors without Borders. Sultana’s Dream is a large-scale imaginative series that depicts the array of achievements by women who live in a world free from the laws and wars of men. The purpose of these images is to illustrate a short novel by Bengali writer and women’s rights activist Rokeya Sakhamat Houssain.

Ai Weiwei, Ai Weiwei MASK, Screenprints on polypropylene masks, unlimited edition, 2020.

 Additionally, the beautiful life-size works of artist Dyani White Hawk represent the dentalium dresses worn by indigenous women of North America. Roger Shimomura addresses anti-Asian racism through his depiction of childhood memories as a boy living in Japanese internment camps during WWII. Robert Pruitt illustrates the complexities of Black identities through an image of a female basketball player with the Black Panther Party slogan “Black is Beautiful” on her jersey. Hernan Bas presents the male characters of Hardy Boys mystery novels with fairy wings to challenge gender norms and the disparagement of homosexuality. It would be safe to assume that nearly half of the works on display in this exhibition were done as a product of material experimentation with something to learn, while the other half were done as a product of support with something to say. The common thread is that they all require a curious urge to explore and an open mind to appreciate.

Exhibition view of Printmaking in the Twenty-First Century

Printmaking in the Twenty-First Century is on view at the Detroit Institute of Arts until April 9, 2023, accessible with the museum general admission pass.

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