It may be one of the smallest gallery spaces in the Detroit area. It’s virtually a pop-up. But the art by Karinna Sanchez Klocko hanging in the display windows at Image Works, a fine-art photo-printing shop in Dearborn, is both punchy and well worth a look. With “Memories,” the artist – a young graphic designer living in Commerce – takes a nostalgic look back at her childhood in Monterrey, Mexico, creating digital vignettes that, in the words of the artist’s statement, “capture the memories and dreams of the moment.”  “Memories” will be up through May 27.

What you find at Image Works is a handful of sunny, color-drenched interiors, all accented with sprays of tropical flowers. The mood is cheerfully nostalgic, not syrupy. The domestic subjects – among others, a hallway leading to a front door, a bureau partly covered by a floral tablecloth, and a kitchen corner with fruit hanging in baskets next to an old “Trimline” wall phone – are unremarkable in themselves, but radiate light and comfort and “home.” The point of view is highly personal, as if the artist were, indeed, trying to reassemble scenes once commonplace, but now far in the past and scattered.

 There’s a specificity to the images that’s engaging. The kitchen counter is guarded by a tiny, metal turtle. Flower pots on the bureau have highly particular designs that feel rooted in reality. So too with the blue, patterned-tile floor leading to the front door. These are digitally created designs, of course, not photographs. But there’s a distinct Kodachrome quality to Klocko’s color palette – a radiant spectrum that if not unique to Latin America, certainly typifies much of the art that’s blossomed in warmer and sunnier lands south of the Rio Grande.

Image Works owner Chris Bennett, who moved to Detroit from Portland, Oregon, five years ago, says he first got to know Klocko when she came in as a customer. A lot of artists, he says, bring work to him for digital reproduction. In Klocko’s case, Bennett liked what he saw, and invited the Michigan State graduate to do a show.

It may seem counterintuitive, but maintaining a gallery in a photo shop has long been Bennett’s habit and ambition. “I love exhibiting artists’ work,” he said, “and it’s a great way to build community as well. It adds another element.”

Bennett moved to the present Michigan Avenue location last July from his old shop in Dearborn. While he doesn’t have as much gallery space here as before, he’s got dynamite display windows fronting a major thoroughfare that seem design-made for his intentions: “I wanted to do large-scale pieces that could easily be seen from the road,” he said, “that would attract people’s attention without causing accidents.”

In another civic-minded gesture, Bennett leaves the window lights on all night long – offering a bright dash of color that’s bound to surprise west-bound drivers in the wee hours.

 Albert Kahn: Innovation & Influence @ Detroit Historical Museum

An outstanding new exhibition on Detroit’s most-famous architect, “Albert Kahn: Innovation & Influence on 20^thCentury Architecture,” is up at the Detroit Historical Museum through July 3. Organized by the new nonprofit Albert Kahn Legacy Foundation, with a mission to “honor, educate and preserve,” the show aims to broaden knowledge and capitalize on the recent uptick in the industrial architect’s reputation nationwide.

This is a handsome exhibition with a number of salient virtues — not too big, not too small, enlivened by smart, concise text, cool graphic design, and striking Lego replicas of some of the architect’s most famous buildings.

What’s not to like?

Start with the Lego structures. The eight-foot-tall model of the Fisher Building at the center of the gallery is a total scene-stealer. Made up of 120,000 pieces, the 300-pound behemoth is the work of local Lego-master James Garrett, who specializes in models of Detroit’s pre-war architecture. Other replicas on display include the Russell Industrial Center (originally the Murray Body Corporation) and Capitol Park’s Griswold Building, long empty but now renovated into luxury apartments and rechristened “The Albert” in honor of its designer.

The show does a superb job laying out Kahn’s early life, and his arrival in Detroit as an impoverished Jewish immigrant when he was about 12. From there on, of course – once he lands his apprenticeship with Mason & Rice, a highly significant downtown firm – the youngster scaled the professional ladder quickly and with astonishing ease. Among other things, Kahn from an early age was a remarkably gifted freehand sketch artist (credit his teacher – Detroit artist Julius Melchers), and the show contains several of his drawings from European travels.

 For those who don’t know Kahn’s work well, there are also some marvelous surprises here — not least the fact that the Fisher Building, as we know it, is only one-third of a massive complex with a central tower that got scotched once the stock market crashed in 1929.

 The exhibition also lays out the Kahn firm’s astonishing work in the late 1920s and early 30s building over 500 plants and factories across the Soviet Union, an effort that industrialized what had been a backward, agrarian economy. Want to know why the USSR didn’t collapse when the Nazis invaded in 1941-42? The answer has a lot to do with the armaments that rolled off the production lines of Kahn-built factories like the vast Stalingrad Tractor Plant.

 The exhibition also explores the architect’s relationship with Henry Ford, Kahn’s most-important client from 1908 on, when he began to design the Highland Park Model-T plant. It also discusses his relationship with the automaker once the latter’s Dearborn Independent newspaper launched a weekly series of anti-Semitic screeds in 1920, “The International Jew: The World’s Problem.” (Despite this, Ford clearly liked and admired Kahn, calling him “one of the best men I ever knew” on the architect’s death in 1942.)

Kahn’s revolutionary, reinforced concrete factories for Ford, with their lack of ornamentation, huge windows, and geometric-grid facades, established the standard for modern industry worldwide in the early 20^th century. They also, as the section titled “Kahn’s Influence on Modernism” details, had a seismic impact on young architectural rebels in Europe desperate for a new, “pure” architecture, which they found in Kahn’s stripped-down Ford plants. Both Walter Gropius and Le Corbusier cited the Highland Park complex in writings that laid out the tenets of early architectural modernism.

All in all, this is a show anyone proud of Detroit’s architectural heritage will not want to miss. Indeed, Albert himself would be proud.

 Karinna Sanchez Klocko: “Memories” at Image Works in Dearborn will be up through May 27.

Albert Kahn: Innovation & Influence on 20^th Century Architecture will be at the Detroit Historical Museum until July 3.

Maya Stovall offers videos of dance on sidewalks and neon objects to vividly juxtapose art and humanity.

On April 16th, 2022, the Reyes / Finn gallery opened an exhibition of artwork, Sail, as a continuation of Maya Stovall’s extraordinary conceptual artwork that permeates her being. The accumulation of Liquor Store Theater, 1526, Theorem no. 2, The Public Library, LUX,  Razon/Reason, and now Sail, reveals a visual artist who uses her conceptual art to communicate her social grievances…her data-driven observations, her hatred for human rights abuses and the sins of human slavery. Not in my recent experience has an artist’s work been so simple yet created by such a complex, thoughtful and complicated artist.

Stovall employs a mix of anthropological observation and urban intervention to create what she considers performance and ethnography.  I was first introduced to her work at the Whitney Biennial in 2017 when I saw her row of videos, each screen playing one of the Liquor Store Theater episodes. I realized she was an artist from Detroit whose work was selected by the curator, Christopher Lew, to be part of the Whitney Biennial 2017, and I included her work in my review. At the time I did not understand the meaning of her work, but in time, with more exposure to the work and her writing, I have come to understand that the Liquor Store Theater contrasts dance performance in the store parking lot (or on the sidewalk) to the everyday activity that is intricately braided with significant socioeconomic distress. Through dance, interviews, and many conversations, Stovall reviews the dismal demographics in the McDougall-Hunt (Detroit) neighborhood, including the median annual income of $13,500 and an unemployment rate of 40%. All of this as the Arab liquor store ownership draws $400,000 per year in profits.

Leading up to Sail was the 1526 series of neon dates that included a citation next to a wall-mounted neon sculpture that reads simply ‘1526’. At White Column in 2020, the gallery mounted LUX, Maya Stovall’s first solo exhibition in New York City.  LUX comprised 16 wall-mounted neon sculptures from the artist’s ongoing series.  The number is of great personal significance to Stovall, since it marks the year of the first rebellion of enslaved people, which took place in North America’s first European settler colony. Each hangs in chronological order.

Initiated in 2018, the 1526 series emerged from Stovall’s extensive research into historical archives. From tens of thousands of pages of research, the artists developed a series of dates, from 1526 to 2019, that reflect, in the artist’s words, “critical moments in U.S. history.” Each sculpture, a year expressed as numerals inscribed in neon is accompanied by a postcard that visitors were free to take. The postcard expands upon the significance of each particular date or historical ‘moment’.

Maya Stovall’s most recent work proceeds further away from the obvious where her conceptual thinking moves to Minimalism by creating these vertical neon bars of color.  The apparent context is the work of Dan Flavin, an American artist and pioneer of Minimalism, who is known for his seminal installations of light fixtures. His illuminated sculptures offer a rigorous formal and conceptual investigation of space and light in which the artist arranged commercial fluorescent bulbs into differing geometric compositions.  If conceptual art aims to present an idea, the work takes precedence over traditional aesthetics.

In the new exhibition Sail at Reyes / Finn, Stovall creates enlightenment through a minimal arrangement of vertical neon bars with subtle color changes. One can assume that like all of her work, she seeks to draw the viewer into these elegant compositions of neon light with research, discovery and the creation of a better world for those in need.

By design, each elegant, linear composition in the A____that defies gravity series evades direct recognition and simultaneously provokes many algorithmic and structural associations.

The artist says, “In the work, the concept is considered after theory and after abstraction, such that the concept, object, subject, thing, etc., is able to defy gravity itself.”

The Sail concept becomes a metaphor for reaching out to where place, space and time are complex constructs requiring critical and conflicting analysis. Such an analysis is reflected across the artist’s work. In relentlessly searching out contradictions to both investigate and impose within her work, the paradox of abstraction becomes stunning, sensual and compelling amidst the density of the concept, and the creation of Sail is the result.

Maya Stovall is a conceptual artist and anthropologist whose practice spans objects, performance, text and video. She earned her Ph.D. in Anthropology, Wayne State University, MBA, University Of Chicago Booth School of Business and BBA, Howard University.

She is currently an Assistant Professor in Liberal Studies at California State Polytechnic University (Cal Poly), Pomona.

Maya Stovall: Sail at Reyes / Finn, April 16^th – May 28, 2022

Selections from the Mark and Ora Hirsch Pescovitz at Oakland University Art Gallery

In general, collectors have little regard for investment or profit. Rather, art is important to them for other reasons. The best way to understand the underlying drive of art collecting is by describing it as a means to create and strengthen social bonds and for collectors to communicate information about themselves to the world and newly formed networks. Great collectors are often as well-known and widely respected as the art they collect.

Look at the Eli Broad collection, the Barnes collection or the Paul Allen collection, just to name a few.  Collectors like these are famous because they demonstrate talent in selecting their art. J. Paul Getty, an oil baron from Minnesota, started collecting European paintings right before the Second World War, and Peggy Guggenheim, the niece of Solomon R. Guggenheim, was an early 20th-century socialite who became one of the most famous art collectors in the 1930s and 1940s.

Dr. Ora Hirsch Pescovitz, President of Oakland University, and her husband Mark collected art for forty years before he passed away in 2010. What started out as a small collection by her husband in the early 1970s evolved into a lifetime commitment.

The exhibition opened September 10, 2021, at the Oakland University Art Gallery, and is curated by Dick Goody, Chair, Department of Art & Art History and Director, Oakland University Art Gallery.

Chuck Close rose to attention in the early 1970s with his grid-based compositions that replicated a type of photographic realism. The basis for his work depends on a photo image made up of small colorful shapes but, when viewed at a distance, reveals the more significant intended subject, usually a person or portrait. It is the invention of these small shapes that sets the work apart.  Close just recently passed away in August 2021. Chuck Close earned a BFA from the University of Washington and an MFA from Yale.

Christo Vladimirov Javacheff and Jeanne-Claude were artists known for creating large-scale, site-specific environmental installations, often large landscape elements wrapped in fabric. Christo and his wife and artistic partner viewed their work as conceptual, as best seen in The Gates in Central Park, NYC, where visitors would pass underneath steel frames supporting free-standing panels of saffron-colored fabric. Much of their work was done preparing for an installation, supported with numerous drawings and prints. Radio Flyer Wagon, created in 1993, is a preliminary idea created using lithography and silkscreen printing.  Christo passed away on May 31, 2020, in New York, NY. Their works are held in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art collections, the Musée d’art moderne et d’art Contemporain in Nice, and the Cleveland Museum of Art, among many others.

Robert Mapplethorpe was an American photographer, best known for his black and white images. His work featured various subjects, including celebrity portraits, male and female nudes, self-portraits, and still-life images. His most controversial works documented and examined the gay male BDSM subculture of New York City in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Mapplethorpe lived with musician Patti Smith in his early years. She says, “Robert took areas of dark human consent and made them into art. He was presenting something new, something not seen or explored as he saw and explored it. Robert sought to elevate aspects of male experience, to imbue homosexuality with mysticism.” The Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation maintains and manages his work which raises millions of dollars for medical research.

Peter Winslow Milton is a colorblind American artist diagnosed with deuteranopia after hearing a comment about the pink in his landscapes. He attended the Virginia Military Institute and earned his MFA in 1961. Milton is a visual artist of black and white etchings and engravings that often display an extraordinary degree of photo-realistic detail placed in the service of a visionary aesthetic. His themes include architecture, history, and memory, as he employs complex layers in the printmaking process. In the work Stolen Moments, the method of aquatint printmaking is used where the artist creates wash effects by brushing them on the printing plate with a fluid in which sugar has been dissolved. The plate is then covered with stopping-out varnish and immersed in water; the sugar swells and lifts the varnish off the plate. Peter Milton attended the Virginia Military Institute and earned his MFA in 1961.

The artwork of Christyl Ann Boger is largely idealized nude ceramic figures that resemble 18th-century Greek porcelain sculpture with aspects that mimic contemporary ceramics.  In her statement, she says, “ The pieces featuring figures posed with a variation on inflatable beach toys that reference the heroic narratives of Greco Roman mythology in an absurdist way.”  The figures are 1/3 life-size earthenware, often incorporating gold enameling and typical western patterns such as fruits and flowers.  She worked as a Professor at Indiana University and earned her BFA at Miami University and her MFA at Ohio University.

Philip Campbell creates paintings and objects that have a physicality about their presence. These are either assemblages or collages on canvas, and he works with wood, paper and cloth. Afternoon Escape’s abstracted landscape is an acrylic collage on paper with simplified shapes of colorful objects.   He says in a statement, “By completing this major transformation, I have become a physical reflection of my art and a living product of my life’s work to date as well as inspiration for my future creations. A completely changed, renewed human being. My renewal experience has been the topic of many interesting conversations, and because of the discomfort of the healing process, I have been acutely and constantly aware of my transformation.”  Philip Campbell earned his BFA from the Herron School of Art.

There’s a difference between buying art and collecting art. Buying art is more of a random activity based on likes, preferences or attractions at any given moment while collecting art is more of a purposeful, directed long-term commitment.  The Pescovitz Art Collection on display at the Oakland University Art Gallery provides the students and the public with a large variety of artworks representing a diversity of art forms and expression.  It is worth a visit.

This exhibition includes artworks by: Yaacov Agam, Philip H. Campbell, Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Chuck Close, James Wille Faust, Sam Gilliam, Janis Goodman, Robert Mapplethorpe, Peter Milton, Judy Pfaff and John Torreano.

Selections from the Mark and Ora Hirsch Pescovitz Collection, will run through November 21, 2021 at Oakland University Art Gallery.

 

Over the past few months, cultural institutions have out of necessity navigated creative ways of making their content available online.   This works better for some forms of media than others.  Most of us already experience music digitally by default, and what happens in the recording studio is pretty much exactly what we experience through our headphones; little gets lost in translation.  But the visual arts exist in space, and they lose a dimension when viewed online.  But emerging technologies, particularly 360-degree photography and virtual reality (VR), have the potential to make digitally exploring visual culture much more rewarding.

Without getting into the technical details, a VR headset (like those offered by the brands Oculus and Vive) makes the Street View content from Google Maps fully immersive and interactive.  Since Google has taken its cameras into many museums, cultural institutions, and architectural spaces, this makes it possible to navigate these spaces not just on a regular computer screen, but also in VR.  With a VR headset, we see the Google Map imagery life-size and surrounding us in 360 degrees, and it really does disconcertingly seem to place us on location.

There are admittedly some problems with viewing art in virtual reality.  Pixilation can be an issue.  On a regular computer screen, a Google Street View image might look just fine, but with a VR headset, even slightly pixelated images are rendered as aggravatingly blurry.  The Google Street View rendering of the interior of New York’s Metropolitan Art Museum, for example, looks great on a computer screen, but the paintings get pretty fuzzy when seen in VR.  Exterior views of architectural spaces are much more forgiving.  A second problem (with or without VR) is that Google’s 360-degree cameras photograph interiors from a vantage point of about eight feet in the air, which can be problematic; if you try to “stand” directly in front of a painting you’ll often find yourself looking down at the work from an awkward angle.

In some instances, though, this elevated vantage point is actually useful.  One of the best places to digitally explore is the Doge’s Palace in Venice; the extra boost we get from Google’s camera offers us a marginally better view of the Renaissance murals which cover every inch of its walls and ceiling.  We can also get satisfyingly closer to the marbles which once adorned the Parthenon, now housed in the Acropolis Museum in Athens.  And we’re offered a much better perspective of some of the larger than life, cinematic Napoleonic propaganda (such as David’s Coronation of Napoleon) that adorns the walls of the Palace of Versailles.

Among the museums which are rendered in sufficiently high definition so as to not appear pixilated (even when viewed through an unforgiving VR headset) include the British Museum, where the imagery is so crisp that we can read the didactic text on the wall.  The same could be said for the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.  Also impressively lucid are Google’s renderings of the Getty Museum and the Art Institute of Chicago.

Some architectural spaces and ensembles especially worth exploring include the Peruvian city of Machu Picchu and the Palace of Versailles and its gardens.  The dazzling, colonnaded interior of the Mosque of Cordoba [later converted to a cathedral] is a fascinating bit of history set in stone; as we navigate its interior, we experience it as a mash-up of both arabesque and European architectural elements.  A personal favorite space to digitally wander is the luminous interior of Barcelona’s Sagrada Familia.   Closer to home is the much under-rated Driehaus Museum in Chicago, a three-story Gilded-Age mansion which has been preserved and functions as an excellent period museum.

In Michigan, Google’s omniscient cameras have photographed nearly all our streets, but disappointingly few cultural institutions.  One notable exception is Meijer Gardens and Sculpture Park in Grand Rapids, rendered in impressively high resolution.  The park is now open again, but during the Covid shutdown, Meijer Gardens found inventive ways to bring the gardens to the public via Facebook, including posting 360-degree video walk-throughs of some of its spaces; although not as immersive as VR, this nevertheless made its Online content satisfyingly interactive.

One street in Michigan that doubles as a cultural institution is the Heidelberg Project.  An interesting feature about viewing Google Street View through the VR App Wander (a Google Map program specifically packaged for Oculus VR headsets) is that whenever a place has been photographed by Google more than once, we can reset the date, and see what the place looked like at each successive photoshoot.  The Heidelberg Project is particularly fluid, so it’s interesting to see how the project evolved yearly (starting in 2009, when Google first photographed the space) as its elements and structures appear and disappear.

We can also virtually navigate parts of Michigan State University’s Broad Art Museum, which offers a VR-compatible virtual tour of its space, and in impressively high resolution.   The interior was photographed not by Google, but by Able Eyes.  Although we can’t enter any of the Broad’s exhibition galleries in this walk-through, we can still navigate the atrium and public spaces, which are enough to sufficiently showcase architect Zaha Hadid’s relish of counterintuitive, angular forms.

 

There’s certainly no substitute for seeing art and architecture in person, of course.  But it’s nevertheless exciting to be on the cusp of emerging technologies which help us experience visual culture in full immersion.  Increasingly, it’s becoming possible to experience art digitally much like we can with music, with little getting lost in translation.  Wolfgang Goethe once even described architecture as “frozen music,”  and these new technologies allow us to explore these spaces in surprisingly lucid detail, note for note, and in fully immersive, navigable three dimensions.

No one saw this coming and it will be part of our history forever.  Covid 19 has affected every part of our lives, and every part of humanity around the world. For us, it has closed down our favorite museums and galleries and deprived us of our love of art and artists. Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer has ordered that libraries and museums may reopen June 8 but must adhere to workplace rules already released for retailers. That means capacity limits, mandatory masks and other safety protocols.

As of 06/5/2020, the writers at the Detroit Art Review:  K.A. Letts, Jonathan Rinck, Kim Fay and myself have tried to provide an update on our sponsors status and any information that looks forward into the upcoming summer and fall months.

Detroit Institute of Arts

The DIA Education Staff has several learning resources available for educators, parents, and students from home. School Field Trips From Home >  The DIA’s collection is available online to browse and learn from wherever you are. You can also explore our upcoming and past exhibitions. They have created Community Partnership Connection where the reader can enjoy online video, slideshows, images and more. For Community Partnership Connection > You can enjoy the work of the DIA’s community partners online through video, slideshows, images and more. The opening of the museum is yet to be determined. Up Coming Exhibitions:

Russ Marshall: Detroit Photographs, 1958-2008 – November 15, 2020

Detroit Style: Car Design in the Motor City  – November 15,  2020

Van Gogh in America – October 2, 2022

Cranbrook Museum of Art

Cranbrook Museum is closely following the recommendations of the CDC and the State of Michigan in order to keep visitors safe  during the COVID-19 pandemic.  Measures taken include deep cleaning throughout the museum, especially in high-traffic areas, sanitizing  doorknobs and frequent disinfection of the area around the front desk. Signage has been added in bathrooms to encourage handwashing. At this time, the Museum is planning to reopen to members on July 8, and to the general public on July 12, subject to change if the Governor’s stay at home order is extended.

Toledo Museum of Art

The Toledo Museum of Art provided the Detroit Art Review the following summary of its current status and the varied ways it is offering content until its doors re-open:

In the time since it temporarily closed to the public on March 15, the Toledo Museum of Art has been developing plans for both a safe return to work for its staff and reopening the galleries to the public. While a reopening date has not been set at this time, TMA is waiting on guidance from government agencies so that when it is safe to do so, we can reopen as soon as possible. TMA has broadened its digital efforts to stay connected to its visitors over the past few months, creating a special section of its website called TMA at HOME. There visitors will find a wide variety of videos, activities and other resources to keep engaged with the Toledo Museum of Art while the galleries are closed. The Museum also launched two community art projects: a COVID-19 Virtual Quilting Bee and the TMA Teen Leader Virtual Talent Show. Entries for the virtual quilting bee are due Monday, June 22 (https://www.toledomuseum.org/quilting-bee) and the virtual talent show will take place on the Museum’s Instagram (@toledomuseum) Saturday, June 6. Additionally, TMA just announced an initial series of virtual art classes to take place later this month. Registration is open, with classes for families, youth and adults.

Flint Art Institute

The Flint Art Institute has yet to establish a re-opening date.  In a brief statement to the Detroit Art Review, the FIA asserted that when the museum opens, it will be in accordance to Michigan’s state mandates, and will adhere to best practices established nationally and regionally for museums.  All public programming (such as weekly events, art classes, and the FOMA film series) has been canceled through June 30.  When the museum reopens, the exhibitions Postscriptand Monumental: The Art of Viola Frey will be on view.  In the meantime, the FIA has placed an impressive amount of multimedia content on its website, which features a digital catalogue of its collection, museum highlights accompanied with audio guides, and videos of public lectures and discussions.

Broad Art Museum

Michigan State University’s Broad Art Museum is working on a multi-phased plan for re-opening, but as Michigan’s state mandates are fluid, there is currently no firm date established for re-opening.  The museum is in close conversation with the University and other museums regarding best practices for health and safety, as well as how to bring more content into digital space.  The Broad’s website provides links to virtual walkthroughs of its current lead exhibitions: the 2020 Master of Fine Arts Exhibition, and Beyond Words: 2020 Curatorial Practices. Follow the Broad’s Facebook page for frequent digital content, including a 3D walkthrough of the museum, and “Studio (in)Prosses at Home” –the museum’s weekly studio demonstration delivered via Facebook Live.

University of Michigan of Art

The University of Michigan Museum of Art does not have a re-opening date, but a spokesperson says it is planning on following the lead of the University of Michigan pending an announcement of plans for the fall semester.  When it does re-open, it will adhere to necessary social distancing and sanitary practices in order to keep the public, its students, and its staff as safe as possible.   The UMMA has been busy developing new ways for guests to experience the UMMA online, including its recently launched UMMA at Home, the online hub for its digital programming.  Here, visitors will find a robustly multimedia array of educational materials, activities, virtual tours, virtual events, and collection highlights which can be explored by theme.  There’s even downloadable coloring pages and zoom backgrounds inspired by the UMMA’s collection.

David Klein Galleries

Assuming the current Stay At Home Order is relaxed on June 8th and not extended , the galleries  plan to open exhibitions on June 20th.

The artists showing will be Elise Ansel in Detroit and Al Held in Birmingham. The openings will be on Saturday 6/20 and Sunday 6/21, from 12- 6. Reservations for 1 hour time slots in each location will be required. There is a maximum number of visitors allowed during each time slot, 10 per hourin Detroit, 4 per hour in Birmingham; those numbers will be confirmed in the exhibition announcement.  Visitors must wear masks and observe social distancing.

All of the details and guidelines will be in the show  announcements and on the website as well as on social media. Both galleries are open by appointment and Tuesday – Saturday during regular business hours. Openings will be postponed if Governor Whitmer extends the stay at home order.

Simone DeSousa Gallery

 Simone DeSousa Gallery is pleased to participate in FAIR, presented by the New Art Dealers Association (NADA). This is a new art fair initiative designed to be entirely online, function cooperatively, and act as a benefit for NADA’s community of galleries, nonprofits and artists. Taking place May 20–June 21, 2020, FAIR will directly support 119 NADA Gallery Members and 81 other galleries that have been financially impacted by the COVID-19 crisis, totaling nearly 200 galleries around the world.

Each participating gallery will present a series of artworks over four-weeks with the opportunity to share new artworks each week. The initiative will also feature a series of online performances, studio visits and talks to complement the artworks presented by participating galleries and artists. FAIR, produced in collaboration with Artlogic, utilizes their Online Viewing Rooms service and is generously hosted by them.

Simone DeSousa Gallery’s FAIR featured artist is Mark Newport who was born in Amsterdam, NY and attended the Kansas City Art Institute (BFA) and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (MFA). He is currently the Artist-in-Residence and Head of Fiber at the Cranbrook Academy of Art.

The gallery is currently exhibiting On the Fly by Michael Luchs. Detailed installation shots and images of all the works are now available online on the gallery website, as well as on our Artsy page, where you are able to zoom into the works, and also inquire about purchase.

Wasserman Projects

Wasserman Projects is carefully monitoring the situation with COVID-19. We will adhere to terms of the Executive Order for the State, which will inform our decisions on reopening procedures and what best serves our artists and audiences.

Wasserman Projects has been hosting small group (15 – 25 ppl) – guided tours of the current exhibitions. DOROTA + STEVE COY: The Five Realms and Adrian Wong: Tiles, Grates, Poles, Rocks, Plants, and Veggies

Along with our online galleries and increased content on social platforms, a virtual tour leads you through the exhibition via Zoom with a combination still and moving images. The tour simulates the experience of walking through the space and is enhanced with commentary from Alison Wong and the exhibiting artists. We may continue and or adapt this model when things begin to reopen.

Wasserman is hoping and planning for the best scenarios, and looking forward to everyone seeing the current exhibitions in person. That said, Wasserman has committed to extending the current exhibitions through August 15 and will determine if necessary, or possible, to extend further as that date nears.

N’Namdi Center for Contemporary Art

 The N’Namdi Center for Contemporary Art has a reopening date tentatively scheduled for Mid-July.

Our summer-fall exhibition schedule will present, Detalles “Details”, an exhibition of small works, featuring local artist Mel Rosas in the Rose Gallery.  The Main Gallery and Black Box Gallery will showcase “Sign of the Times”, Selected Abstract Works from the N’Namdi Collection. Each of the works from this remarkable collection demonstrates the evolution of the African American community and the influence of African American artist, prior to, in the height of, and beyond the Civil Rights movement, representing the breadth and depth of how African Americans are only now getting their due.

As we anticipate the art world will continue to be influenced by this new reality of social distancing.  We look forward to returning to our beautiful space and opening our doors to your virtually and with limited public access.

There are a few things we will be doing around the gallery to make your art-viewing experience as safe and comfortable as possible for you, as well as for our staff. We feel fortunate that our gallery space is large and open, and hope this makes you comfortable to pop in for a visit. We look forward to smiling at you from behind our protective masks, knowing that you will be smiling back from behind yours. We will have hand sanitizer available for you upon your arrival and we will be happy to answer any questions or concerns you have before your visit, so please don’t hesitate to reach out to us.

K.OSS Contemporary Art

K.OSS Contemporary Art has determined to remain closed until October, 2020 for now, but will continue to monitor the situation and will reopen when it can ensure the safety of its staff, artists and audience. The upcoming exhibition is a series of paintings by American Artist Lloyd Martin. The exhibit, “Monument,” features a collection of large-scale works that beautifully reflect the artist’s thematic, abstract compositions. The day for the opening is still not clear, but will make the announcement when it’s known.

K.OSS has been invited to participate in Art Mile, a community engagement platform and digital exhibition dedicated to championing Detroit’s arts community that will launch June 25–July 1. Details on this event to follow.

Oakland University Art Gallery 

As Oakland University’s Emergency Response Team (ERT), we are committed to sharing the most up-to-date, relevant information regarding OU’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Please check this page frequently as facts and information is changing rapidly.

If you have a question, please call the OU Crisis Communication Hotline (248) 556-3330. Someone will be available between Monday-Friday, 9 a.m. – 4 p.m. to help answer your questions.

Marshall M. Fredericks Sculpture Museum

The Museum is temporarily closed at this time. The opening is to be determined.  Click here to access our Virtual Engagement offerings. Email [email protected] or call 989-964-7125 to leave a message. We will get back to you within 24 hours.

Birmingham Bloomfield Art Center

In response to State of Michigan “Stay at Home” mandate, the BBAC is closed until further notice. The BBAC open date is to be determined.  Michigan Fine Arts Competition will be a virtual exhibit.

For further information, please monitor our eblasts and website, which will be updated accordingly. The current exhibits are up until June, 18, 2020 and call our main number to schedule an appointment to view in person. All children’s camps will be virtual.  We will still have several adult workshops on site depending on dates.

BBAC exhibits – tour online – CLICK HERE

Image Works

Image Works specializes in archival pigment printing, also known as giclée or inkjet printing, for reproducing photographic and fine art imagery. We also provide a number of digital services including high resolution artwork captures, film & slide scanning, portfolio printing, posters, and prepress proofing.  As of Monday, June 8th, Image Works will begin accepting visitors to the gallery by appointment only, Monday through Saturday. You may email or call ahead the same day or book a time a few days in advance. We will ensure that there is no overlap in visitors. We will ask visitors to wear face masks while in the gallery until the state advises otherwise.  We are also offering our printing and scanning services by appointment at this time. Please visit www.imageworksfineart.com for current exhibition information or call 503-449-0964.