Category: Textile Page 2 of 5

Northwest Michigan Regional Juried Exhibition @ The Dennos

On February 8, 2022

In Assemblage / Collage, Ceramic, Drawing, Fiber, Installation, Mixed Media, Paintings, Photography, Sculpture, Textile

Installation image. All photos courtesy of the Dennos Museum Center

Visiting the Dennos Museum Center in Traverse City is an experience unique to Northern Michigan. Situated at the base of Old Mission Peninsula, since 1991 the Dennos served as a multipurpose art and science museum, and it houses one of the finest collections of Inuit art you’ll ever see. In 2018 it underwent a major expansion, and an impressively large suite of chic gallery spaces now allows the Dennos to show off much more of its permanent collection, and it really does have some good holdings. The museum has even just been awarded status as a Smithsonian affiliate. But while the focus of the museum is on the art within, the floor-to-ceiling windows of many of its exterior galleries offer visitors a commanding view of the pleasantly forested campus of Northwestern Michigan College. Through May 29, this emphatically northern space is the appropriate home to the annual Northwest Michigan Regional Juried Exhibition.

The show amply fills the museum’s spacious temporary exhibition space. It presents multimedia work by artists from 37 Michigan counties, including the entirety of the Upper Peninsula and much of the Lower Peninsula’s Northwest. Submissions were open to anyone, providing that the work was created during 2021. Juried by Vera Ingrid Grant, a curator and writer based in Ann Arbor and whose accomplishments include fellowships at Harvard and Columbia universities, the 90 works on view represent highlights from the show’s nearly 400 submissions.

Dennos Museum Center in Traverse City Installation image.

Any juried show is destined to be varied in scope and media, and these works are certainly diverse– there are 83 artists represented, after all. Painting, sculpture, photography, and illustration join forces with quilting, fabric art, wood art, and pottery, blurring boundaries between fine art, folk art, and handcraft. Nevertheless, some themes do emerge, such as our shared experience of Covid-19, here directly addressed in about half a dozen works. Several works offer social commentary on timely subjects like media saturation and information overload.

Many of these works take the landscapes, waterscapes, and textures of Northern Michigan itself as their subject. Ample views of Grand Traverse Bay and Lake Michigan’s sand-dunes firmly locate this show in Northern Michigan. Thomas Guback’s Northport Sailboat Race is a photograph that beautifully transposes the lucid diamond-tipped ripples of Lake Michigan’s waters into black and white, applying some of Ansel Adams’ magic to demonstrate that color isn’t necessary to give the viewer an arresting image. And Lynn Stephenson’s tightly rendered pencil drawing of a row of weathered, neglected dock pilings captures a sight common at any marina on Lake Michigan’s shoreline; Stephenson renders the texture of the mostly rotted wood and the ripples of the water with impressively photographic, illustrative detail.

Lynn Stephenson, Still Standing [detail]. 2021, Colored pencil on Paper.

Other artists engaged Northern Michigan’s geography in more playfully abstract terms. Susan Yamasaki’s Hieroglyphs applies perpendicular, geometric sections of birch bark and mixed media to create what could pass as Northern Michigan’s answer to Mondrian’s Broadway Boogie Woogie. And the Best of Show award went to Kevin Summers, a multimedia artist whose Michigan Shoreline is a conceptual installation comprising driftwood, electronic fans, and sound.

Susan Yamasaki, Hieroglyphs. 2021, Birchbark and mixed media on birch panel.

Kevin Summers, Michigan Shoreline. 2021, Driftwood, fans, and electronics.

Certain to be a highlight among visitors is the mural-sized bead tapestry by Marie Wohadlo, 10:23. Gently backlit, this work comprises nearly a million individual luminous glass beads. It’s a work that invites viewers to play the same game as one might play with a pointillist work by Seurat. Step up close, and the individual beads create a pixelated, abstract void. Step back, and they materialize into a photographic rendering of two distant faces. The planning and execution of a work on this scale is impressive, even allowing for photographic and technological assistance.

Marie Wohadlo, 10:23 [detail]. 2021, Glass bead tapestry.

Marie Wohadlo, 10:23 [detail]. 2021, Glass bead tapestry.

Shows like this have a leveling, democratizing effect on art. There’s nothing to differentiate the skilled amateurs from the seasoned professionals. And in the absence of any descriptive didactic panels, viewers are left to interpret these works entirely on their own. Perhaps this is a good thing; too often I find myself relying on an exhibition’s expository text to do much of the thinking for me. But here, viewers are given the opportunity to approach the work on their own terms, and the works on view are given the chance to speak for themselves.

The 2022 Northwest Michigan Regional Juried Exhibition runs through May 29, 2022. Views of the evergreens on the NMC campus are available all year round.

Olga de Amaral @ Cranbrook

By Clara DeGalan

On February 1, 2022

In Fiber, Textile

Olga de Amaral: To Weave a Rock at the Cranbrook Art Museum

Bogotá-born and based fiber artist Olga de Amaral is now receiving her first U.S. retrospective at the Cranbrook Art Museum in a joint curatorial venture with the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, the institutional hotbed of Latin American scholarship, primarily driven by well-researched exhibitions. This current show, which traveled here from Texas, is a rare treat since Latin American programming does not feature centrally in the Michigan cultural agenda.

By way of introducing the non-utilitarian textile practice of this Colombian artist to an audience mostly unfamiliar with her rich practice from the last five decades, the Cranbrook Art Museum commissioned a short video displayed in the entrance space, directed by Andrew Miller. Filmed in close-up in what appears as a single take, the artist directly speaks to the viewer about the essential role that color, texture, and structure, alongside the simplicity of a geometry of squares, circles, and triangles, play in her woven, braided, and knotted fabric “constructions” in space.

Such concerns are perfectly in keeping with the principles of an abstract artist whose series of works are distinguished by permutations in technique accompanied by a plethora of intricate color, texture, material, and shape variations developed throughout her career. In the 1960s, the planar tapestry-style weavings, often featuring a fringe above or below, allowed the viewer to look through the existing wool threads onto the support, the white wall.

Installation shot, Olga de Amaral: To Weave a Rock, Cranbrook Art Museum, Photo credit for all images except noted: PD Rearick

Amaral first encountered a loom at Cranbrook, even taking one back to Bogotá. Most countries where abstraction was central between the 1940s and late 1970s were immersed in lengthy periods of dictatorships during those decades. Whether despite or because of the political situation, Amaral’s frequent years abroad, always returning to Bogotá, heralded an international career. After initial training in architectural drafting at the Colegio Mayor de Cundinamarca in Bogotá before coming to the U.S. to briefly study English at Columbia University in New York, she transferred to Cranbrook in 1954. During her two years in Michigan, she accomplished the most conspicuous of her transformations as a non-degree seeking student trained by the Finnish-American textile designer Marianne Strengell. Back in the 1940s, artists such as Strengell and Anni Albers at Black Mountain College began to pave the way for a more experimental approach to weaving, opening it up to integrating concerns from the “other” arts of painting and sculpture.

Amaral’s iconic Carretón negre (Black Clover), 1973, reminding us of the sculptural work of Eva Hesse, is displayed prominently as a signature work to be seen immediately upon entry to the exhibition. As it sits on a low white pedestal, supported by a hook, the bulbous knot exudes a tremendous sense of weight. This sculpture is indicative of how in the wake of process-oriented soft sculpture many artists chose to make visible the fact that material behavior in space controls shape. It was appealing that this occurs beyond the immediate control of the artist as a force of nature.

A pictorial play with light and air as forces of transparency in the first tapestries gave way in the 1970s to a radical pursuit of free-standing and free-hanging objects suspended from the ceiling.

Installation shot, Olga de Amaral: To Weave a Rock, Cranbrook Art Museum

The weavings gain an unprecedented degree of volume in space driven by a sculptural monumentality that explores weight, mass, and gravity as form-giving forces. As a direct response to the developments of Minimalism and Postminimalism when artists became attentive to the architectural context, the behavior of the art material, and the bodily experience of the viewer in space as a mobile entity, fiber art as an independent art form was born in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and Amaral emerges on the forefront of it with the Muro tejidos (Woven Grid Walls.)

Made from wool strings and horsehair braided together, Muro tejido, 1972 (the second work from the left in installation shot 2), rejects the rigidity of the right angle that dominated the loom-based tapestries from the mid-1960s. As weighty and sagging dividers of space, these “physical structures” from the 1970s break with the order of the grid, often omitting the horizontal line of the weft in large sections in an emphasis on materiality as a force of expression. This is accompanied by hand-tying and wrapping increasingly tactile materials of coarse horsehair, broad straps of linen, and even bands of plastic directly into the constructions. Secondary to concerns with shape and volume, color in this period is somewhat subdued to greys and browns and bound to a traditional waving process of dying the thread before the weave. Increasingly, throughout the 1990s and 2000s, the color becomes a vital force when fabric works are made entirely off the loom.

Installation shot, Olga de Amaral: To Weave a Rock, Cranbrook Art Museum

This stellar show of about fifty works shines a light on those terrific leaps into space and color by Amaral, so that viewers can study the formal changes in a mostly chronologically organized lineup from 1965 to 2017. The five curatorial themes of “Rebel Warp,” “Radical Materialism,” “Alchemy,” “Space Odyssey,” and “The Line” cut through an artistic oeuvre characterized by series that often carry associative references to the landscape of Antioquia dominated by the Andes Mountains and prehistoric Colombia.

Of special note in this regard is a series of luminous golden plaques begun in 1996, the Estelas; the title is the artist’s creative composite of the Spanish words for star and fabric. Tightly grouped together in a black niche, about a dozen items hang from the ceiling on transparent nylon wires. The crusted surfaces shimmer brilliantly in the light, strongly enhanced by their contrast to the surrounding black wall paint.

Installation shot, Estela Grouping, 2007, linen, gesso, and gold leaf, Olga de Amaral: To Weave a Rock, Cranbrook Art Museum, Photo credit: Nadja Rottner

Ancient cultic monuments, stone tablets, or gravestones come to mind that brings ideas of ritual, commemoration, memory, and the passing of time on a cosmological scale to the fore. All the while, the double-side sculptures items float precariously in space with changing impressions of light and color lending a quality of impermanence and fragility to the Estelas that seems contradictory. Color is no longer the result of a fabric dye but added onto a linen ground with a tool, stabilized by gesso in the manner of a painter. Words such as off-stretcher painting, free-hanging sculpture, or off-loom weavings characterize her objects as Amaral continues to abandon the fundamental concept of weaving—the opposition between the warp and the weft—entirely in the most recent decades of her practice.

One such example hangs to the left of the Estelas. Suspended from the ceiling and about two feet away from the wall, a black and dark green curtain-like item leaves a strong but unstable and fluctuating cast shadow with a wave pattern behind it.

Olga de Amaral, Entorno Quieto 5 (Quiet Environment 5), 1993, Wool and horsehair, 86 ½ x 86 ½, Courtesy: Case de Amaral.

In Etorno Quieto 5 (Quiet Environment 5), 1993, we encounter an alternative conception of surface and support from the Estelas. Two superimposed planes of differently colored fabric celebrate the freedom of the vertical line from its horizontal imprisonment, creating a wave like vibration of shape reminiscent of the illusionism of optical art when an artwork sets in place shape and color oscillations subject to the viewer’s eye-brain response. Then there is the fact that the fabric threads literally move in infinite ways by circulations of air.

Extending this push toward opticality into a room-spanning environment, the viewer encounters the impressive installation of the Brumas (Mists), 2013, made from acrylic, gesso, and cotton on wood, toward the end of the gallery. Hung off four black rectangular panels (each about 75 x 35 inches in size), myriads of colored threads hang loose. Cut at different lengths, the impression of triangular shapes is only upended when the moving viewer comes in closely.

Installation shot, Olga de Amaral: To Weave a Rock, Cranbrook Art Museum

This work, among others from the last three decades of her practice, is directly inspired by two forms of geometric abstraction, known as Optical (or Op art), a style of abstract art based on patterns and optical illusions, and Kinetic art (objects that have moving parts). Both became popular in Venezuela in the 1950s and 1960s represented by artists such as Carlos Cruz-Diez and Jesús Soto. Their works included small and large-scale abstract sculptures in bright colors and industrial materials that promote the experience of color by the viewer, through his or her own subjectivity, in an individual, emotional and virtual way, changing the way we perceive space, light, and movement.

Behind the Brumas in the last room on the left, three recent tall knots from 2016-2017 are suspended from the ceiling, all the while touching a floor pedestal. Nudo 19, 27, 25 are colored in non-naturalistic turquoise, yellow, and magenta (made from linen, gesso, acrylic.) They stand in front of two vibrant tapestries titled Lienzo en dos colores (Canvas in Two Colors), featuring a blue and green color combination and one in red and magenta that matches the knots. These works recall an artist’s statement from the video, namely that mixing colors in fabric art is like painting, except that paint is replaced by died threads that are interwoven, be it on a machine or by hand.

The show brings out beautifully how the work as a whole oscillates semantically, formally, and procedurally around artistic and intellectual concepts of opposition such as opticality versus gravity, the industrial and the indigenous, the hand and the machine. Air, movement, gravity, and water evoke ideas of natural change and impermanence. They stand in a productive dialogue with concepts such as universality, the cosmological, and the monumental. It is those tensions, among others, that animate the work from within.

Olga de Amaral: To Weave a Rock at the Cranbrook Art Museum through March 20, 2022

With Eyes Wide Opened @ Cranbrook Museum of Art

By K.A. Letts

On July 9, 2021

In Ceramic, Design, Furniture, Jewelry, Mixed Media, Paintings, Photography, Printmaking, Sculpture, Textile

Cranbrook Museum of Art, With Eyes Opened, Sculpture Court and Mixing Chamber, installation, photo: PD Rearick

With Eyes Opened: Cranbrook Academy of Art since 1932 has just opened at the Cranbrook Museum of Art in Bloomfield Hills, to great acclaim and national attention. Covered by the New York Times Magazine with a spiffy video tour and ample media attention both local and national, it’s a hydra-headed beast of a show with many sponsors but no single curator. Objects and images from every period of the Academy’s history compete for space and attention, with no fewer than ten dueling accounts threaded throughout the museum’s seven galleries.

The organizers seem to have had difficulty settling on a single narrative for this exhaustive survey of the Academy’s history–and no wonder. The tapestries, sculptures, paintings, prints, photographs, product prototypes and mass-produced products tell a kaleidoscopic story of the many creative minds whose vision and creativity have emanated from the school over time.

The history of this premier American art institution is told through objects in only piecemeal fashion in the physical exhibit; the accompanying printed volume, a 624-page doorstop of a book, contains a more complete narrative of the school’s history, along with one-page profiles of many (though not all) of the artists and designers represented in the show.

Untitled (Aluchair) by Christopher Schanck (MFA, 3D Design 2011), 2019, aluminum foil, resin Collection Cranbrook Art Museum

At the entrance to the main gallery, visitors can watch American Look. Commissioned in 1958 by Chevrolet, this cold war artifact celebrates many of the post-World War II designed amenities that were newly available to middle class consumers of a certain limited demographic. Throughout the celebratory video, the “American-ness” of the consumer lifestyle is promoted relentlessly. Even though the uncritical materialism may seem cringe-worthy to a modern viewer, the optimism and can-do mentality expressed in the video amply show why the period beginning in 1950 is often called the American Century. The film provides a good starting point for With Eyes Opened, which takes us on a visual tour not only of the mid-century American esthetic, but also, by implication, through a consideration of how those perceptions and values have grown and changed over time to include contemporary preoccupations with equity, diversity and sustainability.

Model 1601 Stacking Chair by Don Albinson (Cranbrook Academy of Art Sculpture, 1940-1941), 1965, aluminum, nylon, molded plastic. Photo PD Rearick

The video serves as an introduction to one of the more successful elements of the exhibit, which celebrates the modern chair. Designers like Charles and Ray Kaiser Eames and Don Albinson were uniquely successful at conceptualizing and producing practical, relatively inexpensive and attractive mass production chairs, many instantly recognizable today as fixtures of modern life in home and office. The chair as a concept unifies this display; in addition to the mass produced chairs there are a number of hand-crafted, one-of-a-kind examples such as Chris Schank’s Alufoil Chair and Terence Main’s Queen Anne, Queen Anne doubled chair. Here, as throughout the exhibit, the organizers have decided to mix the mass-produced and the hand-crafted, without comparing or contrasting the purposes and philosophies involved.

Cranbrook Museum of Art, Sculpture Court, installation. Photo: DAR

The physical and esthetic center of the exhibition, which brings the concept of design and art to a satisfying apotheosis of the handmade and the mass-produced, comes in the Mixing Chamber. There, the room-sized mural of black and white figures by Cleon Peterson suggests the sensibility of a 21^st century Egon Schiele. Tortured, semi-nude bodies surround the wittily conceived bench by Vivian Beer, whose automotive-painted red drape on the slipper shape is at once modern and baroque.

Untitled (Asthma, High Blood Pressure) by Beverly Fishman (Artist-in-Residence, Dept. of Painting 1992-2019) 2018, urethane paint on wood. Photo: PD Rearick

In the adjacent North Gallery, 34 paintings, works on paper and photographs hang floor to ceiling, with abstraction as the ostensible unifying theme. The hanging of contemporary art salon style is a fraught strategy that calls for sensitively selected and carefully coordinated curation and enough space around each piece to allow the work to breathe. Here the disparate artworks compete visually, like guests at a crowded cocktail party shouting to be heard. Beverly Fishman’s brightly colored, sharp-edged geometric polygons (almost) hold their own, and McArthur Binion manages to succeed simply by installing a painting, DNA: Study (Lake St. Clair), too large to share the space with other artwork. As worthy as each piece in the gallery may be, a little editing would have been welcome.

Untitled by Rebecca Ripple (Artist-in-Residence, Dept. of Sculpture, 2017-present) 2016, plastic, aluminum brass, photocopy, pencil, hair, champagne foil. Photo: K.A. Letts

In the Sculpture Court, through the Mixing Chamber ‘s other doorway, Nick Cave’s exuberant SoundSuit (2012) holds the floor, with a recessive companion, Flamer, by Mark Newport, hanging on the adjacent wall. Duane Hanson’s provocatively banal figure lounges nearby, unimpressed. Other strong work in the sculpture court includes several fiber pieces which seem to have wandered in, perhaps to provide space between the large and diverse 3-dimensional works–not a bad idea as it turns out. The white-on-white tapestry Montana 30, by Colombian artist Olga de Amaral, made up of small squares of white painted canvas relieved with touches of red, is especially welcome here. Sculptures by artists of the past such as Marshall Fredericks and Carl Milles share the space, more or less peacefully, with artworks by younger artists like Tyanna Buie and Kate Clark. Toward the back of the gallery, James Surl’s spiky mobile floats in its own private galaxy, next to a terrific assemblage by Rebecca Ripple that radiates an ad hoc starburst of Miro-esque energy.

Auburndale Site, Detroit MI (#4) by Object Orange, 2006, archival color photograph, 1/25 Cranbrook Museum of Art. Photo: K.A. Letts

In a small side gallery near the elevators, three photographs by the art collective Object Orange deliver a moment of surreal surprise. From 2005-2007, these (anonymous) Cranbrook graduates undertook a conceptual project called Detroit, Demolition, Disneyland which involved painting–in “Tiggerific” Orange– derelict structures in the city as a form of both public performance and protest. The photographs, brilliant orange structures against bleak gray backgrounds, are arresting, unexpected and a bit melancholy.

Cranbrook Museum of Art, With Eyes Opened, Object Islands, installation, Photo: PD Rearick

The Wainger Gallery, last stop on the main floor galleries, features a clever installation of “object islands,” table height circular plinths that subtly guide the viewer through a broad array of fairly small- scale ceramics, metal objects and product design prototypes. Many of the objects in this gallery are one-of-a-kind art objects in a variety of media, often in unusual combinations, such as Iris Eichenberg’s untitled brooch made of porcelain, silver and linen.

With Eyes Opened takes on a lighter tone in the museum’s lower level gallery with The Menagerie, a whimsical collection of figures and objects inspired by the natural world, from Marshall Frederick’s chunky Two Bears to Stephen Malinowski’s photograph Cafeteria, a surreal bison-in-a-dining room. The playful theme of The Menagerie is echoed nearby with a small collection of toy and playground designs that, while welcome, seem like an afterthought.

In the adjacent hall gallery, prints and posters highlight Cranbrook’s influential graphic design program. Installed next to printed media that feature collage, photomontage and progressive typography, several unique works hint at the endless formal potential of paper as a medium. Elizabeth Youngblood’s elegant, silvery process drawing is tucked into a corner near Laurence Barker’s more exuberant hand-made paper piece. Layers from the Disemboweled Series by Winifred Lutz takes the medium into the realm of expressionism.

Yet Untitled by Elizabeth Youngblood (MFA Design, 1975) 2018, paint, mylar. Photo: Glenn Mannisto

And last–but not least–some of Cranbrook Academy’s most recent graduates inhabit the lower level deSalle Gallery with distinction. Many of these young artists currently live and work in Detroit and continue the Academy’s tradition of excellence in both craft and conception. The growing diversity of the school is on display here, pointing to a more inclusive future, now enabled by the recent $30 million gift from Dan and Jennifer Gilbert to support student diversity. Ricky Weaver’s gray and white photo-apparitions emanate spirituality, across from Ebitenyefa Baralaye’s Portrait II, a comic-sinister stoneware head. Around the corner, Marianna Olague’s painting El Pleno Dia seems to emit its own light. The emerging artists in this gallery demonstrate the continuing influence of the Academy’s alumni on the Detroit art scene and beyond.

With Eyes Opened is multi-faceted, rich and a little chaotic, more of a class reunion than a retrospective. What comes through loud and clear in this exhaustive–and sometimes exhausting–survey, though, is the Academy’s continued vitality and its ongoing relevance to any discussion of the 21^st century designed environment. And really, that’s enough.

Cranbrook Museum of Art, With Eyes Opened, deSalle Gallery, installation, Photo: P.D. Rearick.

Eyes Wide Open at Cranbrook Museum of Art through September 19, 2021

Shapeshifters @ Cranbrook Museum of Art

By K.A. Letts

On January 13, 2021

In Paintings, Performance, Sculpture, Textile

Frank Stella, Takt-i-Sulayman Variation I (Protractor Series) 1969, acrylic and fluorescent acrylic on canvas

It has always seemed to me that the most magical thing about art objects in a gallery is that they exist at the same time and place, in the same now, no matter when they were created. An archaic vase, a classical Greek sculpture and a minimalist painting can rest side by side, in a kind of eternal conversation that illuminates how humans think and perceive, and what they value over time. This thought re-occurred to me with some force as I walked into the main gallery of the Cranbrook Art Museum last week, to see Shapeshifters, an eclectic exhibit that draws from the museum’s collection of over 6000 artworks. It covers a broad range of modern and contemporary artists and esthetic philosophies, all in lively conversation with each other and with us. Much of the work on display is by international artists with big reputations, but voices and visions of many younger, less established, artists have also found their way into Shapeshifters. Often these artists are from the Detroit area, many of them graduates of Cranbrook Art Academy’s M.F.A program; to my mind they provide the most interesting pieces in a wide-ranging survey of artists’ methods and mindsets.

The entry gallery of the museum announces the ambitious nature of the exhibit with a forceful collection of minimalist and post-minimalist artists. Paintings and sculptures by art historical heavyweights like Donald Judd and Frank Stella ring the gallery. These self-referential abstract objects and images hark back to a brief moment in art history, 1960’s and 1970’s, when the methods and formal objectives of contemporary art seemed clear. These confident–and also mostly white, male–artists seemed to say they had found the endpoint of modernism, after which no further progress was possible–or necessary. Even Agnes Martin, whose (usually) much smaller pieces seem more interior and meditative, is represented in Shapeshifters by a large canvas, Untitled (1974) that shows her to be a member in good standing of the minimalist club.

Ato Ribeiro, Home Away From Home 2, 2017, repurposed wood, glue

Ato Ribeiro, Detail

But even as these monumental, even grandiose, pieces stake their claim to dominance in this room and in art history, the show’s curator Laura Mott, slyly introduces an artist who says, quietly, “yes, but…”

Ato Ribeiro, a 2017 graduate of Cranbrook’s print program, has created a wood assemblage that superficially resembles many of the pieces in the main gallery, but suggests alternative cultural references that speak to more private, idiosyncratic aims. Home Away from Home 2 is a pieced quilt of a sort, made of discarded wood, re-cycled and re-assembled into an elaborate composition that references hieroglyphs, Kente cloth, traditional African symbols, and signals a turning away from minimalist generalities and toward more particularized personal references.

Ebitenyefa Baralaye, Dupp Dup, 2016, plaster, burlap, sisal rope wood

This insistence by young artists on private processes and meanings continues in the next gallery, with the awkward yet elegant and slightly comic Dupp Dup by Ebitenyefa Baralaye. A 2016 M.F.A. graduate of the ceramics program at Cranbrook, Baralaye has re-purposed the process of ceramic casting in a literally heartfelt way. The shape of the plaster cast is reminiscent of a human heart, signifying both a physical state of being and an emotional state of desiring. Its implied weightiness is animated and supported by a spindly wooden tripod. In the adjoining gallery, Sonya Clark’s scratchy ziggurat of a headpiece, assembled from hair curlers, is both humble and regal. Clark re-imagines these everyday materials using processes familiar to her from her background in fiber art; the result is both surprising and satisfying.

Sonya Clark, Curled, 1998, metal hair curlers, thread, wire

Two of Detroit’s art eminences occupy the middle gallery and are hung in proximity with two other artists who reinnforce and illuminate their importance as masters of their craft and figures of note in Detroit’s contemporary art scene. Allie McGhee’s folded and draped Window (2019) easily holds its own next to the much larger–and very lovely–Preface for Chris by Joan Mitchell, with which it is paired. McGhee is scheduled for an upcoming solo exhibition in the fall of 2021, and Windows provides a tantalizing foretaste of what we can expect and hope for. Carole Harris, whose work impresses me more each time I see it, is represented by In a Silent Way (2017). Harris is a textile virtuoso. Her work occupies the surprisingly capacious space between expressive quilting and painterly abstraction, and somehow manages to be more than the sum of the two mediums. The way in which she exercises complete control of flat or felted or lacy textures, of staccato stitched lines, of carefully dyed and rusted colors, adds a tactile element to her work against which the nearby untitled painting by Jose Joya struggles to compete.

Allie McGhee, Window, 2019, acrylic, enamel, vinyl

Carole Harris, In a Silent Way, 2017, quilt with rusted textiles

In the next gallery, photography –and related technologies–has its day as a means to revelation. The prosaic, descriptive reality of everyday photography gives way to the deeper truth of artists’ personal and subjective experience. A particularly beautiful example of this is Kottie Gaydos’s Unfixed, Fold #3, a dreamy, undulating field of deep blue in which a minimalist strategy yields a deeply romantic and poetic image. Matthew Angelo Harrison’s low-resolution replicas of African artifacts by way of his homemade 3-d printers are familiar to most of the Detroit art public by now, but they remain impressive, resonant in their expression of the African American diaspora’s sense of cultural loss from the trauma of enslavement.

Kottie Gaydos, Unfixed, Fold #3, 2016, archival pigment print, artist frame with unfixed cyanotype

The wan ironies of Andy Warhol’s Polaroids and Rosenquist’s lithographs are interesting as historical artifacts, but pale beside Kara Thompson’s polemical silhouettes and the robust immediacy of Maya Stovall’s dancers, doing their thing in the parking lot of a Detroit convenience store. Her video, Liquor Store Theatre, Vol. 4, No. 7, records the bemused reaction of bystanders along with the precise and angular movements of the black-clad performers.

Maya Stoval, Liquor Store Theatre, Vo. 4, #7, 2017, video still

The back gallery of Shapeshifters is devoted, appropriately for an exhibit about transformation and adaptation, to a short feature film entitled Upright: Detroit. Set in the ruins of the historic Michigan Theater, the film records a kind of initiation. Performers arrive, one by one, dressed in ordinary street clothes. Here, they are ritually transformed, with assistance from members of the Ruth Ellis Center for LGBTQ+ youth, into other-worldly beings by way of Nick Cave’s iconic Soundsuits. In the subsequent procession, initiates are accompanied by a choir of singers from Detroit’s Mosaic Youth Theater. With this performance, Shapeshifters brings us full circle, from the exuberant hubris of the minimalists to the joyous communality of the performers in Upright: Detroit, a thought-provoking journey from the general to the personal in search of our universal humanity.

Artist in Shapeshifters: Richard Anuszkiewicz, Jo Baer, Ebitenyefa Baralaye, Romare Bearden, McArthur Binion, Susan Goethel Campbell, Anthony Caro, Nick Cave, Nicole Cherubini, Sonya Clark, Liz Cohen, Conrad Egyir, Beverly Fishman, Kottie Gaydos, Sam Gilliam, Kara Güt, Carole Harris, Matthew Angelo Harrison, José Joya, Donald Judd, Agnes Martin, Allie McGhee, Marilyn Minter, Brittany Nelson, Kenneth Noland, Marianna Olague, Robert Rauschenberg, Ato Ribeiro, James Rosenquist, Beau Sinchai, Julian Stanczak, Frank Stella, Maya Stovall, Toshiko Takaezu, Carl Toth, Kara Walker, Andy Warhol, and Richard Yarde, among others.

The museum is open with some restrictions. For more information, go to: https://cranbrookartmuseum.org/plan-your-visit/

Sarah Rose Sharp @ UM Institute of the Humanities Gallery

By K.A. Letts

On November 20, 2020

In Textile

Map of the Interior: Sarah Rose Sharp’s “Results or Roses” at UM Institute of the Humanities Gallery

Sarah Rose Sharp, Hand of Fate, 2019, screen print by Too x Nail, fabric, embroidery thread, charms, beads, etc., 11.5” x 6” x 2.5

During these Covid times, visual artists’ exhibitions have migrated to online locations, with mixed results. For some whose work is photographic or text-based in nature, the effect is hardly noticeable. But for artists making very tactile or three-dimensional work, like the artworks in Detroit artist Sarah Rose Sharp’s Results or Roses at UM Institute of the Humanities Gallery, much is lost in translation. I felt some guilty delight when the gallery curator, Amanda Krugliak, consented to open the gallery (now temporarily closed to the public during the pandemic) for my visit.

Sharp employs traditional needlework and sewing techniques to create a diaristic map of her interior life. The intimately scaled artworks illustrate several different trains of the artist’s thought and share the walls of the gallery and an adjacent vitrine, providing a virtual tour of the artist’s memories, observations and preoccupations. The overarching intention of the work seems to be located somewhere in the psychic territory between nostalgia and satire.

Sarah Rose Sharp, Immigrant Song, 2020, tablecloth by Rose Blaug, rice bag, embroidery thread, sequins, patches, beads, fake flowers, plastic table covering, etc., 24.75 x 24.75”

The modestly-sized but obsessively decorated wall hangings, flags, throw pillows–and some three dimensional assemblages too strange to name–add up to an untamed fantasia of tat and glitz. Sharp combines an improbable array of materials in her free-hand, free-associational compositions, some vintage, some newly minted. Found objects, beads, applique and embroidery seem to boil over the surfaces, threatening to encase the fabric ground entirely. Immigrant Song, perhaps the signature piece of the show, is a demented version of the Statue of Liberty, her single, oversized eye gazing out at the world and radiating energy. The surface is sequin-encrusted, and free-hand needlework decoration vies with store-bought embroidery patches for control of the surface. The fabric base for the artwork is part of a tablecloth that belonged to the artist’s great grandmother, which the artist cherishes as a meaningful collaboration with a woman she never met. Sharp has a real gift for the creative manipulation of materials, but is clearly more interested in their expressive potential than with conforming to any conventional notion of craft.

Sarah Rose Sharp, Target, 2020, fabric, arrow, handkerchief, t-shirt salvage, beads, sequins etc., 10” x 7.5”, arrow 29”

A native of California, Sharp devotes a number of her works for Results or Roses to both critiquing and humorously celebrating the Hollywoodized cultural signifiers of the West. In several pieces, she chooses mass market images of a heroic–and often imaginary–past: mustangs and buffalo, limitless deserts, child cowboys and cowgirls. In her flag-and–arrow assemblage Target, she deftly memorializes the near-demise of both Native Americans and buffalo herds, victims of America’s manifest destiny. In Native Daughter, Sharp makes a flag by embellishing a souvenir California handkerchief with appliqued and embroidered images that symbolize features of the state that may no longer exist. Jupiter Rising conjures an improbably limitless landscape of mountains, horses running free, a child cowboy and a pickup truck with a mysterious figure (Cowboy Jupiter?) presiding. From this work, it appears Sharp is still engaged in the unresolved process of locating her stance toward her childhood between appreciation and censure.

Sarah Rose Sharp, Detroit Patchwork IV, 2020, fabric, wool salvage, hem binding, corset wire, 32.5” x 15”

Sharp’s textiles referencing her more recent home, Detroit, are more straightforward appreciations of the substance of the city. She pieces together fabrics that describe architectural features, the voids and recent architectural additions, metaphorical renditions of the urban landscape as it stitches itself back together. Detroit Patchwork III is particularly evocative of the highways that span the city, while the fabrics she has chosen reference the ethnic diversity of its many neighborhoods. Detroit Patchwork IV may be the most formally satisfying of the series, a jubilant combination of oranges, browns and blacks that is slightly reminiscent of work by African American textile artist Carole Harris.

With each piece Sharp engages in an ongoing search for a legible reality from found bits and pieces of her life, past and present. Her question: are the symbols and images we get from mass media legitimate signifiers of some larger reality, or do the small, observed details painstakingly stitched together each day deserve equal weight in our construction of our own history and identity?

UM Institute of the Humanities Gallery

This review is re-printed with permission from Pulp, the Ann Arbor District Library’s online culture magazine.