Detroit Art Review – Page 3 – Critical art reviews of Detroit galleries and museums weekly

Work from Mexico @ Flint Institute of Arts

On July 9, 2024

Installation image of FIA exterior

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mexicanidad, Installation view

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

Alberto Beltrán, The Sugar Mill, 1946 Lithograph

Alfredo Zalce, Lumber Workers, ca. 1945 Lithograph

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

Natalia Rocafuerte Pocha Dream, 2021 Lithograph

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

Natalia Rocafuerte Dream of Emma and Tony, 2021 Lithograph

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

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

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

Mexicanidad – On view now through September 8

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

Kinship: The Legacy of Gallery 7 and From Scratch: Seeding Adornment @ MOCAD

By K.A. Letts

On July 2, 2024

In Ceramic, Mixed Media, Paintings

**Kinship: The Legacy of Gallery 7 and From Scratch: Seeding Adornment, New Work by Lakela Brown @ Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit**

Visitors to MOCAD this summer will have four new shows to enjoy, each adding a facet to the kaleidoscopic multicultural Detroit art scene. At the entrance to the museum, we find “Kinship: The Legacy of Gallery 7.” It’s a collection of significant objects and images providing a window into the art world of the late 1960’s, post-rebellion, when African American artists in Detroit achieved a collective sense of themselves and their purpose. Next, Lakela Brown’s first solo museum show “From Scratch: Seeding Adornment,” looks to a future that explores Black experience through racially specific foodways and styles of personal adornment. Drawing our attention out to the broader landscape, Meleko Mokgosi , a Botswanan artist and academic now living in the U.S., provides a scholarly examination of Black artists as they have seen themselves and are seen by others through the lens of colonialism and diasporic history. Lastly, in Mike Kelly’s Mobile Homestead, museum visitors will find a more informal conversation among the city’s artists, curators, and administrators on the collaborative nature of art presentation.

With apologies to the creatives responsible for “Zones of Non-Being” and “Word of Mouth,” and meaning no disrespect, l will concentrate here upon the artists represented in “Kinship” and “From Scratch. “

Kinship: The Legacy of Gallery 7

Those with a particular interest in the art history of Detroit and of the African American artists working in abstraction in particular, will have the pleasure of seeing a selection of work by some of the city’s most significant practitioners, many represented by the iconic Gallery 7, which showed outstanding work by Black (male) artists from 1969-1979. (In a spirit of retrospective reparation for past gender discrimination, Abel Gonzalez Fernandez, the curator of the exhibition, has also tactfully included work by several contemporaneous female artists, Elizabeth Youngblood, Gilda Snowden, and Naomi Dickerson.)

Fernandez has done an admirable job of telling the story of this seminal period in the city’s art history by employing a small, but choice, selection of artworks begged and borrowed from collectors, the artists themselves or their estates. A welcome bonus is a newspaper-style publication accompanying the exhibition, which includes a well-researched and written short history of the gallery by the curator. The compilation of contemporary press coverage that accompanies his essay goes a long way toward explaining the excitement that accompanied the art that was shown there during the gallery’s ten-year existence. It is also a melancholy reminder of how much the art audience lost when intelligent art journalism in Detroit’s mainstream newspapers ceased with the advent of the Internet.

Lester Johnson (b. 1937) The Sorceress and the Dreamtime Spirits, 1974, installation: wood, fabric, vegetal fiber, feathers, bells. All images courtesy of K.A. Letts

Several of the artists in “Kinship” take inspiration from African artifacts. One of the show’s highlights is The Sorceress and The Dreamtime Spirits (1974) 9 wall-mounted sculptures by Lester Johnson that mimic the form of West African ceremonial objects. The long rods made of found branches and poles are fabricated and decorated with industrial and post-industrial materials, a process Johnson describes as “creating a hybrid product between ancestors and urban present.”

Elizabeth Youngblood (b. 1952) Loop 8, 2015, porcelain and wire.

Loop 8, by Elizabeth Youngblood, subtly references Black personal adornment, a recurring theme in the art of female African Americans, as we see in Lakela Brown’s nearby solo show. (But more on that later.) Using the simplest means of expression, wire, and barely modeled porcelain clay, Youngblood teases out tremulous but insistent meaning from humble materials.

Harold Neal, a major figure in the Black Arts Movement of the 1970’s, is represented in “Kinship” by Brotherhood, a medium-sized, text-heavy artwork that wears its racial advocacy on its sleeve. The artist’s work, through the 1960’s and 1970s when Gallery 7 was in operation, was figurative and militantly political. As a movement leader, he led a faction of Black creatives whose radical work was in tension, if not in opposition, to the more cerebral concerns of his fellow gallery artists. (A recently published history of this group, “Harold Neal and Detroit African American Artists: 1945 through the Black Arts Movement” by Julia R. Myers, is available from Amazon.)

Harold Neal (1924-1996) Brotherhood, n.d., oil on board.

The art practice of the Gallery 7 artists focused primarily on their own personal experience as African Americans, or as gallery founder Charles McGee explained, “My roots are in America, and the ideas I deal with as an artist come out of this time and place.” McGee occupies a special position in Detroit’s art history. In addition to his importance as the force behind Gallery 7, he was an influential arts educator and a leader in the African American art community. Many of his public artworks can be seen throughout the city, and his importance was recently acknowledged by a posthumous survey of his work in the newly opened Shepherd in Detroit’s Little Village. Ring Around the Rosy, an early McGee work from the 1960s, is a tantalizing glimpse of the artist’s figurative work before he moved in a less conventional direction.

Charles McGee (1924-2021) Ring Around the Rosy, ca 1950’s, oil on board.

Allie McGhee, a significant Detroit artist honored by a major retrospective in 2022 at Cranbrook Art Museum, is represented here by a couple of lively abstract paintings. The Artist in his Studio (1973) is chromatically subdued, allowing the gestural line to take center stage. His recurring use of a personal icon, the banana moon horn, was first seen during his tenure at Gallery 7 and continues in his current work, a personal, idiosyncratic emblem of ancestral energy brought from the past into the present. Coco Blue (1984), a more colorful cousin to The Artist in His Studio, is typical of McGhee’s later work and exhibits the exuberant presence typical of his paintings.

Allie McGhee (b. 1941) Artist in the Studio, 1973, mixed media on Masonite.

Allie McGhee, Coco Blue, 1984, mixed media on Masonite.

Album, a self-portrait by Gilda Snowden, is a psychological and physical evocation of the artist, an embodiment of her tempestuous and elusive power. Her unexpected and premature death in 2014 cut short a promising career, but this painting preserves her positive presence. It is an enduring influence she shares with the eminent artists represented in “Kinship.”

Gilda Snowden (1954-2014) Album, 1989, oil on canvas.

Artists represented in “Kinship: The Legacy of Gallery 7” Namoi Dickerson, Lester Johnson, Charles McGee, Allie McGhee, Harold Neal, Gilda Snowden, Robert J. Stull, Elizabeth Youngblood. June 28-September 8, 2024

From Scratch: Seeding Adornment

LaKela Brown describes her first solo museum show, “From Scratch: Seeding Adornment,” as a love letter to her community. “I want to center culturally significant objects that challenge and hopefully correct historic […] notions of value and taste while loving the brilliance and ingenuity of my community,” she explains. Brown practices a kind of archeology in reverse—preserving present cultural artifacts for future appreciation rather than searching for ancient objects to excavate and exploit. She is looking forward rather than back.

Lakela Brown, Parts and Labor (Eight Collard Green Leaves, Five Hands) 2024, urethane resin.

Brown, who grew up in West Detroit, has filled two large galleries at MOCAD with resin and plaster casts of foods specifically related to the culture of the Black diaspora and objects of personal adornment, particularly doorknocker earrings. The materials she uses to create these artworks are well-known to artists and lend an air of elegance and permanence by their association with classical museum casts.

Lakela Brown, Doorway to Adornment, 2024, site-specific installation, urethane resin.

The first gallery features resin casts of vegetables– collard greens, corn, okra–artfully arranged on the gallery walls in square formats. In a surreal touch, and in tribute to her matriarchal connections, the artist tucks barely visible casts of the delicate hands of her grandmother, Evelyn Helen Brown, in among the vegetables. Though the usual designation for artworks featuring food is still life, these pieces, in the formality of their presentation and their low-relief arrangement on a rectilinear base, seem to be more architectural in nature. In particular, the ruffled edges of the collard greens call to mind decorative rococo details one might see in an 18th-century European drawing room. Brown makes the comparison explicit with the site-specific row of cast collard greens installed over the doorway to the second gallery, Gateway to Adornment (2024). With her casts of ethnically specific doorknocker earrings, chain necklaces, and other ornaments to the body—including casts of crowned teeth—Brown taps into a rich vein of visual associations she shares with many of her contemporaries. A case in point is the work of Tiff Massey, now on view at the DIA, which features hair ornaments—oversized ponytail ties and enormous replicas of Snaptite Kiddie Barrettes, as well as an entire wall of hair weaves. The exhibition’s curator, Jova Lynne, who also shares many of Brown’s creative interests in her own work, says, “Lakela’s practice is a mirror to Black legacies that encourage people across the diaspora, including myself, to take pride in reflections of home…In her work, I see the cultivation of land, the preservation of adornment, and the production of artworks acting as ledgers of Black life.”

Lakela Brown, Coverall Composition with Doorknocker Earrings. , Gold (2023) plaster

The exhibitions on view now at MOCAD emphatically demonstrate the interrelated nature of the art community in Detroit, a true commonwealth of creatives who share philosophies, exchange materials and cross-pollinate cultures. Born of common experience, each collection of artworks forms part of a contrapuntal melody–or maybe a jazz improvisation–of mutually reinforcing themes which flow from one gallery to the next and out into the city.

Kinship: The Legacy of Gallery 7 and From Scratch: Seeding Adornment @ MOCAD

Sharon Que @ MATE’RIA Gallery

By Ron Scott

On June 13, 2024

In Assemblage / Collage, Metal, Mixed Media, Sculpture

Sharon Que, Installation image. All images courtesy of DAR

Born Sharon Querciograssa, Sharon Que opened a new exhibition at the MATE’RIA Gallery on June 8, 2024, with constructed reliefs that rest on the wall, keeping the viewer engaged through exotic material, illustrated line drawings, and intriguing compositions. Que refreshingly sets her oeuvre apart from mainstream American sculpture. Her eclectic collection of disparate objects first confronts the viewer with an aesthetic experience, followed by a precise, calculated, measured, and intellectually investigated, sometimes having scientific connotations.

Sharon Que, Pollination, Mahogany, Plywood, Pine, Gold Leaf 20x31x3.75″

In Pollination, the wooden grid pieces are divided into two fields; squares of solid stained mahogany are juxtaposed against laminated squares of like-sized pine, punctuated with a spill of protruding star-like objects painted and covered with gold leaf. We are left be-dazzled in wonder, in awe of the precision with which the squares are made and arranged.

In an essay by Mary Ann Wilkinson, the former curator at the Detroit Institute of Arts, she says, “Que has been making objects for more than thirty years. She credits her awakening as an artist as a consequence of her eye-opening travels to Italy, Greece, and Turkey in the mid-1980s. Que’s deft combinations of physical elements often lead viewers to overlook the subtle emotional undercurrent of her work. Often, the mood seems to be melancholy, evoked by dark coloration, a sense of being anchored or bound, or a suggestion of emotional ambivalence.”

Sharon Que, Roller Coaster, Steel, Wood, Gold Leaf, Paint 29x36x15″ 2024

In Roller Coaster, Que finds a used wooden frame, creates an imaginary metal circular structure, and places it in the upper half of the composition, where it rests and comes forward. The simple line drawing acts as a side view, which we might perceive as an elevation view.

In her statement, she says, “There is a scaffolding system that exists for each of my sculpture exhibitions made up of the interactions with people, nature, music, and art that I have come across accidentally or made great efforts to experience. My imagery can take the form of data visualization algorithms. Algorithmic operations describe motion and growth; data visualization aims to reduce the clutter to make complex data more accessible.”

Sharon Que, I’ll Watch Over You, Wood, Birch Bark, Paint, Gold Leaf, 2024

Those familiar with Sharon Que’s work will notice motifs that often reoccur. In “I’ll Watch Over You,” the squares of wood appear with a drawing of a previous oval sculpture on the left (Dear Mr. Fantasy), and the repetition of a line matrix forms a field on the right side. In addition, she is repeatedly drawn to using the same tree bark as a background (Birch) while finding comfort in a band of colored strips next to her geometric field of circular shapes.

Sharon Que, That Long Lonely Highway, 9.5×16.5X2.25″ Wood, Birch Bark, Paint, Gold Leaf, 2024

In an interview with Sharon in 2014, I asked her about influences in her work, and she responded by talking about walks in the woods and at the beach; she said, “I was working simultaneously with magnetic sand from Lake Michigan and a two-dimensional image of the field of force around a magnet. In retrospect, it seems obvious to put the two together, but the obvious sometimes evades me.” In response to a question about her family, she says, “Some of my ancestry goes back to Emilia Romagna in Italy, where Ferrari, Maserati, and Lamborghini all originated. Before that, in ancient times, this region was inhabited by Etruscans, the undisputed masters of bronze casting.”

Simone DeSousa, the gallery owner, says that Sharon Que approaches her work from a triad of content, material, and technique, looking for synergy among the three. She uses recurring images from nature and geometry to reveal her own “coded inner life.

My personal experience with Sharon started when she was a middle school student at Shelby Jr. High School. She was taking my art class, and there was a brief introduction to ceramics. It was her turn after I did a rather crude demonstration of using the electric potter’s wheel. She dropped a large clump of stoneware down, centered the clay without effort, and pulled a beautiful, perfect cylinder with ease. At that moment, it was clear the teacher became the student.

It is hard to place Que’s work in a historical context. Still, in some ways, her work reminds me of the work of Joseph Cornell, a collector of objects with ambiguous meanings and mysterious connections. In both Que and Cornell, their work becomes a metaphor for their lives.

Transcending a simple literal reading, Que’s work explores the mysterious link between the known and the unknown. In each piece, she dips into her trove of life experience and formulates an expression that is exclusively hers, a very personal sensibility, and original.

Sharon Que earned a BFA from the University of Michigan in 1986. Her works are part of the permanent collection at the Detroit Institute of Arts and the public sculpture on the campus of Oakland University. She has also exhibited in Venice, Italy, San Francisco, and Chicago and extensively in the metro Detroit area.

**Sharon Que’s Ice Cream Castle exhibition will be on view at the MATE’RIA Gallery through August 10, 2024.**

Group Exhibition @ M Contemporary

By Michael Hodges

On June 9, 2024

In Paintings

General Rules Do Not Apply at Ferndale’s M Contemporary gives a quick, refreshing tour of the lyrical possibilities of colorful abstraction produced by an intriguing set of Detroit artists: Matt Eaton (now in Los Angeles), Lauren Harrington, MALT, Jaime Pattison, Senghor Reid, Zach Thompson and Dino Valdez. General Rules is up through June 15.

Jaime Pattison, Afterimages, Acrylic and oil on canvas, 72 x 58 1/2 inches, 2024. (Photos courtesy of M Contemporary).

These are sophisticated abstracts — even if Zach Thompson’s striking, half-and-half canvas stars, respectively, Wylie Coyote and Pig-Pen of “Peanuts” fame. Indeed, taken as a whole, the contrast in stylistic approach from one artist to the next is exhilarating.

A downright mesmerizing work is Jaime Pattison’s Afterimages. This is a severe gridwork composition, yet rendered in utterly seductive shades of startling red and aquamarine where the former frames the latter with thin, wispy lines to great visual effect. It’s all rather high concept. Pattison’s playing with what happens when you stare at intense red good and hard, and then close your eyes. The “after image” that pops up leaps from the opposite side of the color spectrum, almost like a photographic negative. And after looking at red, that negative will always be some shade of green.

Each of the 140 aquamarine rectangles within its red frame is a tiny, meticulously constructed abstract in itself, giving the whole a visual depth that, combined with the shock of the red – in this case approaching a neon intensity — is pretty darned transfixing.

In an April interview with the online publication Canvas Rebel, Pattison says she’s been working on “a series of large dichromatic paintings investigating notions of the screen and embodiment. Painting for me is an analog process,” she added, “a process based in the hand, a sifting through digital material to make connections to this time.”

Gallery director Melannie Chard says she’s been following Pattison, who hails from Toronto, since she first saw her work a couple years ago in the annual Student Exhibition at the College for Creative Studies. At the time, Chard says, Pattison was working in a figurative vein, “but now she’s moving into pattern” –- for which we should all be grateful.

Zach Thompson, The Coyote Has to Eat Too, Oil pigment stick, spray paint, and acrylic on canvas, 48 x 36 inches, 2024.

If Afterimages gives an impression of freehand precision, the left half of Zach Thompson’s canvas, titled The Coyote Has to Eat Too, announces itself with a blast of what appears to be slapdash enthusiasm, with an array of colorful, “careless” blotches scattered across a vivid yellow background.

At once comic and disturbing, the visual focus is our friend Wylie Coyote, lying prone in the bottom-right corner, as if shortly after being obliterated by one of those falling anvils he always seemed to attract like metal filings to a magnet. There’s also a miniature version of Mr. Coyote up above, on the edge of a vortex of swirling hues, holding a teensy sign reading, “Why me?” — a question that can’t help but trigger a laugh, even as it gets to the heart of the human condition.

A similar mix of the absurd and the profound characterizes the other half of Thompson’s work, Everything Returns to Dirt, which sports Charles Schulz’s Pig-Pen floating over, of all things, a roosting parrot. Rendered in an array of rich earth tones, including burnt orange, Thompson pulls off another oddball composition that just won’t let go.

Dino Valdez, Family Values, Acrylic and silver leaf on canvas, 72 x 48 x 1 1/2 inches, 2024.

Ready for something completely different? Painted in black acrylic and elegant silver leaf, Dino Valdez’s Family Values stands out in marvelous counterpoint to the color-rich works surrounding it. An energetic swirl of highly textured black brush strokes, Valdez, formerly exhibitions director at Red Bull House of Art Detroit, manages to achieve a surprising amount of depth that feels downright three-dimensional.

His CV says his recent work focuses on the understanding of violence, conflict, and resolution, which would seem to sum up Family Values, with its barely suppressed fury, rather neatly. Anchoring this visual storm is one perfectly straight white line (although it reads as gray in the image above) that seems to prevent the turbulence from blowing away and dissipating.

Chard says this particular piece is related Valdez’s martial-arts training, and likens the work to that of the classic abstract expressionist Franz Kline, “but not as aggressive. I like Family Values because it almost looks like a dance,” she added, “so expressive and so much energy behind it.”

Matt Eaton, Celestial Blanket (Yellow), Aerosol on canvas, 48 x 36 inches, 2024.

Once an energetic presence in Detroit connected with the Library Street Collective, Contra Projects and Red Bull House of Art before his move to the West Coast, Matt Eaton has sketched out a career exploring inventive possibilities in the world of abstraction. Using materials associated with graffiti and graphic arts alike, Eaton’s work has been characterized by a skilled use of color and form.

At M Contemporary, his four identically sized canvases are hung in a square like four panes of a window, through each of which we see what appears to be a piece of fabric fluttering in the air as if hung from a clothesline. Two of these are in rich colors, as with (Yellow) above, while the other two are composed in black and silvery tones. Taken altogether, they make a rich stew.

In a 2016 interview with The Detroit News, Eaton credited the visual universe of the 1980s with steering his artistic instincts in a particular direction. “Growing up at the end of the good punk-rock age,” he said, “there was a lot of hugely influential graphic design at the time. I genuinely would be content if nobody ever saw my art again,” he added. “I’m compelled to make it. It’s more a meditative ritual than a career.”

Senghor Reid, Decision at Sundown 6, Acrylic on canvas, 2024.

If Eaton’s blankets mine the potential of simplicity, Senghor Reid’s Decision at Sundown 6 deals with almost stupefying complexity and detail. An explosion of line and squiggle radiating out from a central core near the bottom, it almost reads like – going way out on a limb, here – a visual representation of nuclear fission.

But Chard, who would know, says Decision actually has water as its subject. “It’s one of Senghor’s abstracted water series,” she said. “A lot of people recognize him for portraiture and figurative work, but he has a whole other part of his practice that deals with water, water justice and water rights.” Indeed, anyone who caught last winter’s Skilled Labor: Black Realism in Detroit at the Cranbrook Art Museum might note the resemblance — in line, at least — between Decision at Sundown and the swimming pool in the artist’s large, cheerful Make Way for Tomorrow, that was one of the focal points of that exhibition.

Zach Thompson, Everything Returns to Dirt (detail), Oil pigment stick, spray paint, acrylic, 48 x 36 inches, 2024.

General Rules Do Not Apply will be up at Ferndale’s M Contemporary through June 15.

“Seven Mile and Livernois” @ the Detroit Institute of Art

By K.A. Letts

On May 15, 2024

In Installation, Metal, Sculpture

Detroit Artist Tiff Massey Mounts an Exhibition: “Seven Mile and Livernois” at the Detroit Institute of Art

Tiff Massey, Installation image, Courtesy of DAR, 2024

Museums are often risk-averse institutions, choosing their curatorial offerings with an eye to what is safe and canonical. The Detroit Institute of Art has made a provocative and unexpected choice with its just-opened exhibition of Detroit-based sculptor and community activist Tiff Massey. “Seven Mile and Livernois,” as this year-long exhibition is called, places the artist’s practice squarely in the neighborhood where she grew up while also acknowledging her ties to art history, and in particular to artists whose works in the DIA’s collection shaped her childhood experience.

Massey is the youngest artist to be chosen for a museum exhibition at the DIA, as well as the first Black woman to earn an MFA in metalsmithing from the Cranbrook Academy of Art. The artworks, 11 in all, range from a piece, Facet, that she created in 2010 when she was still a student at Cranbrook, to 4 recent artworks commissioned by the DIA. (The museum provided funds for fabrication, though the artist retains ownership.)

Tiff Massey, Whatupdoe (part 1), 2024, stainless steel, photo K.A. Letts

As we enter the exhibition, a delicate swag of metal chain is draped high across a deep blue wall. Through the door into the next gallery, however, we see that this chain is connected to a much longer one that, as it grows in size, goes from ornament to architecture. At its midpoint, individual components reach beyond head-high and we simultaneously shrink from adult to child size and perhaps smaller as we measure our bodies against these monumental links. It is a through-the-looking-glass experience.

The chain, entitled WhatupDoe, is intended by the artist as a love letter to her spiritual community in Detroit and beyond. She celebrates her affection for the city, for its hair salons, fashion boutiques, and coffee shops, its hip hop artists and hair weaves, in the sculptures that extend throughout the exhibition. In a nearby wall title for an older piece, I Got Bricks (2014), Massey directly addresses her audience, “Detroit, I’m designing for us, so we can see ourselves …This represents us building something together.”

Tiff Massey, I Remember Way Back When, 2023, stained wood, photo K.A. Letts

Massey’s intense emotional involvement with her social connections, friends and family is balanced by her acknowledgement of her early art education. As the artist developed plans for the exhibition with Juana Williams and Katie Pfohl, Associate Curators of Contemporary Art, she chose a couple of artworks from the DIA’s collection that hold special resonance for her: they are now displayed in the galleries along with her own work. She draws a particularly interesting comparison between her art practice and Stack, a minimalist sculpture by Donald Judd. In a recent interview in Detroit Cultural she says, “I chose Donald Judd because I remember this piece specifically from when I was a kid and my mom would take me to all of these institutions.” Stack, narrow and tall, climbs militantly up the wall of the gallery, a lacquered green tower of rectangles. In response, Massey has created Baby Bling, an adjacent, long row of objects that reference the hair ties she wore as a child. Made of enormous red metal beads, woven rope and brass, their horizontal orientation implies movement outward, toward caring and community.

Stack by Donald Judd (r.) 1969, plexiglass and stainless steel on the right. Tiff Massey, Baby Bling (detail, l.) installation on the left), photo K.A. Letts

Themes of adornment run through the exhibition, rituals involving hair being especially prominent. Across the gallery from Baby Bling we find I Remember Way Back When. Eleven outsize scarlet replicas of Snap-Tight Kiddie Barrettes recall the 1980s when little girls’ hair was carefully dressed by grandmas, mothers, and aunties. And at the end of the gallery, there is an enormous, wall-size homage to the elegant and exuberant hair weave, in ombre shades of green and seemingly endless in its shapes and patterns.

Tiff Massey, Quilt Code 6, Assmbledge, Detroit Institute of Arts, 2024

The other artwork with which Massey has chosen to pair her work is Louise Nevelson’s Homage to the World. The correspondences between this wall relief and Massey’s Quilt Code 6 are straightforward. As the artist developed plans for the exhibition with Juana Williams and Katie Pfohl, Associate Curators of Contemporary Art, she chose a couple of artworks from the DIA’s collection that hold special resonance for her; they are now displayed in the galleries along with her own work. ”Nevelson’s relief derives its power from the accretion of randomly found scraps into a massive wall of chunky wood pieces in sooty black; Quilt Code 6, by contrast, is finer and more literary, composed of carefully curated symbols and signs. As the name suggests, this piece shares characteristics with the American story quilt, a folk art fiber genre used to great effect by Faith Ringgold.

Tiff Massey, 39 Reasons I am not Playing, 2018, brass, photo K.A. Letts

In this exhibition, Massey both speaks for and to her community; she is fluent in the language of the hood and of the academy as she advocates for her city: “We’re a UNESCO city of design, and I’ve been talking about this in every interview but I don’t think we’re taking that designation seriously enough, and so to me it’s like how can I bring these elements and make sure that we have highly curated, beautiful spaces in the hood too.”

Massey demonstrates her commitment to her city and her people in “Seven Mile and Livernois.” It seems only fair, at least to this writer, that the DIA should take this opportunity to reciprocate by acquiring one of her public artworks for their permanent collection.

Tiff Massey, Whatupdoe, Stainless Steel, 2014, image courtesy DIA.