Category: Sculpture Page 1 of 28

Menagerie and Descriptive Intuition @ BBAC

On April 15, 2025

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 the 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, 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.**

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

Making Her Mark @ Flint Institute of Arts

By Sean Bieri

On February 1, 2025

In Ceramic, Sculpture, Uncategorized

Clay, of course, has been a fundamental material for both artistic and utilitarian objects for millennia. In Europe, ceramics had long been a masculine pursuit, maybe because digging up clay, feeding fiery kilns, and other physical aspects of the process were deemed too strenuous (or unseemly) for women. After the Industrial Revolution mechanized the manufacture of ceramics, women were employed as “china painters,” adding decorations to factory-made pottery, but weren’t involved in the actual creation of the objects. Once the ideals of the British Arts & Crafts movement — its revolt against industrialization and its emphasis on human-made objects — found their way to the U.S., studios began making ceramics featuring distinctively American designs. Some of these potteries were run by women, and some tutored and encouraged girls to take up ceramics as a vocation. After World War II, women artists emerged as important members of the Studio Ceramics movement, helping their male counterparts to bring the medium fully into the realm of fine art. Now, the Flint Institute of Arts, which boasts an impressive array of ceramics in its permanent collection, presents “Making Her Mark” (through September 28), a smallish but eclectic exhibition of ceramic artworks by women that proves that, released from any obligation to practicality, clay can be an almost endlessly versatile medium for expression.

Evelyn Cheromiah, Olla, Stoneware

Many of the objects in the show do at least nod toward the utilitarian vessels usually associated with ceramics. Evelyn Cheromiah’s Olla, a stoneware pot decorated with geometric earth tone patterns, is perhaps the most faithful piece here, sourced, fired, and painted according to the traditions of the artist’s Laguna Pueblo heritage. English innovator Clarice Cliff’s hand-painted Art Deco “Bizarre” ware is represented by two perfectly functional Fantasque Pitchers, adorned with colorful fruits and a country cottage. Sara Paloma’s jet-black Bottles, with their pencil-thin necks, and Eva Hild’s untitled white porcelain bowl (studded with nails) are at least nominally practical.

Ursula Morley Price, Fountain Plume Form, Stoneware, 2009

Some works demonstrate the medium’s ability to mimic other materials. Ursula Morley Price’s Fountain Plume Form(2009) is a vase-like object made up of thin vertical vanes that resemble a rusting turbine, while Anne Marie Laureys’ Clay-e-Motion looks like a supple, bundled scarf. You’d be forgiven for mistaking Mary Roehm’s porcelain Tea Bowl #1 at first for translucent glass with a metal rim and base, and Lucie Rie’s small conical piece, its thin walls punctured with ragged holes, could pass for a crudely made metal sieve.

Carol Gouthro, Aurlia gouthroii Barnaclette, Porcelain, 2012

Clay lends itself to some delightfully odd biomorphic creations as well, such as Bonnie Seeman’s untitled stalk of rhubarb-like vegetation, its leaves cut away to reveal ruby red pith; the piece recalls similar vegetable- and fruit-shaped teapots and pitchers from the 18th and 19th centuries. Debbie Weinstein’s Vessel is crowned with purple polyps that could be writhing undersea creatures, and Carol Gouthro’s Aurlia gouthroii Barnaclette depicts a weird fictional organism — scientifically named for the artist — with mouth-like pods sprouting from an orange stem, anchored to a mass of purple seashells. More subtle is Chieko Katsumata’s untitled flower-like form, a fleshy, bright yellow blossom, both vivid and ponderous.

Irina Zaytceva, Twins, Porcelain, 2013

Magda Gluszek, Small Pond, Ceramic, 2013

Ceramics can, of course, be figurative, even narrative. Ruth Duckworth’s Black Angel is an elegantly abstracted figure with blunt “wings” and a slender neck supporting a half-circle head that’s part helmet, part halo, with just a suggestion of a face. It recalls both early modernist works and ancient Cycladic sculpture. Irina Zaytceva’s Twins is a small porcelain vessel decorated with delicate, meticulously rendered images of mermaids and other mythical sea creatures, with a stopper resembling branching red coral. Magda Gluszek contributes Small Pond: a pale female figure in a translucent green swimsuit reclines in a sort of kiddie pool made of transparent plastic and what looks like floral upholstery off a 1970s sofa. She’s blowing a party noisemaker, and her blushing skin, hairless eyebrows, and large pointed animal ears suggest she’s some sort of puckish faerie creature, up to some mischief in the human world.

Sara Lisch, Lion’s Journey, Stoneware, 2002

Another fairytale-looking piece, Sara Lisch’s Lion’s Journey, is rich with details that hint at a narrative. A woman dressed as a swimmer, with a monkey seated in front of her, rides astride a lioness wearing a blue collar and a bracelet on one paw. The big cat’s body is perforated to reveal small animals inside its belly. Who these characters are remains mysterious, but the tableau is a beautiful one, painted in blues and browns over a white glaze.

Viola Frey, A Pile of Figurines and Masked Man.

Mariko Paterson, Willow Bago, Porcelain, 2014

Mariko Paterson, who says her works “range from pretty to political,” contributes Willow Bago, a humorous porcelain sculpture with perhaps some serious commentary about imperialism and cultural exchange. It depicts a cartoonishly tall and narrow Winnebago RV, with a cut-n-paste image of Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, smiling from behind the windshield. The white body of the vehicle is decorated with cobalt blue Chinese-inspired images of pagodas, boats, and trees — the “Willow pattern,” as it was known when it became popular in the late 1700s. The RV is made even more precarious by the tourist luggage and Chinese loot piled high on its roof. Britain’s misadventures in China are notorious, so it’s easy to read Willow Bago as a critique, despite the plaque on its roof claiming it commemorates “100 wonderful years” of the Queen Mum.

Viola Frey, A Pile of Figurines and Masked Man

Viola Frey, whose imposing 10-foot tall Arrogant Man stands watch over the FIA’s main ceramics gallery, is represented here by a chaotic bricolage sculpture called simply A Pile of Figurines and a Masked Man that gloms together multiple kitschy ceramic collectibles along with original creations. Among the clutter are what look like a Dutch girl, a bunny, and possibly the Virgin Mary and one of the three wise men, all colored in bright splashes of red, yellow, and blue. Trying to make his way through the jumble is one of Frey’s signature men in suits, either placing a Roman bust on his head or trying to remove it. In Frey’s work, the commercial and fine art traditions of ceramics collide to make an appropriate centerpiece for this wildly varied exhibition.

Making Her Mark on display at the https://flintarts.org through September 28, 2025.

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.

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.

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