Detroit Art Review

Back on Willis Street, at Detroit’s Simone DeSousa Gallery

Art-wise, New York is a famously tough nut to crack. Cass Corridor legends Gordon Newton, Bob Sestok and Michael Luchs all gave it a shot decades ago but, for various reasons, came back to pursue their careers in Detroit.

Not so Brenda Goodman, one of several talented women who gave the hard-drinking Corridor boys a run for their money back in the 1970s, a talented cohort that also included Nancy Mitchnick and Ellen Phelan.

At 80, Goodman – whose solo show of recent work, Back on Willis Street, is at Detroit’s Simone DeSousa Gallery through June 10 – has finally achieved the sort of success 99 percent of artists who flock to Gotham, stars in their eyes, can only dream of. “Brenda’s the best-known and most-successful artist of the Cass Corridor,” said gallery owner Simone DeSousa. “We have so many amazing, significant artists here, but their work and stories have never really gone much beyond local awareness.”

In a nice touch, Goodman’s Detroit exhibition comes exactly 50 years after her very first solo show. It was 1973 at the Corridor’s legendary Willis Gallery, some eight years after the artist graduated with a degree in painting from the old Detroit Society of Arts and Crafts (now the College for Creative Studies).

It’s been a big year for Goodman. Back on Willis Street follows hard on the heels of her solo show in Manhattan that closed in March, Hop Skip Jump at Sikkema Jenkins & Co., the big-deal gallery in Chelsea that represents the artist, who moved from Manhattan to the Catskills in 2009. Goodman’s work has always refused to bend to commercial whims and now commands impressive prices.

Her early paintings were achingly personal, almost confessional. In the 1994 Self-Portrait 4, a grotesque humanoid with wild eyes is jamming globules of something – some say impasto paint – into her mouth, much of it dribbling down her huge frame with its skinny, almost vestigial arms. The piece is creepy, dark, and deeply unsettling; the self-loathing behind it hits you like a hot wind.

Some have tried to draw a line between those “diarist” works, representing a powerful emotion at a given moment in Goodman’s life, with the equally dark abstractions she switched to starting in 2010, giving up figurative paintings. But the artist insists the abstractions do not tell a story per se, and have more to do with her playing with shape and color than reflecting anything about herself. Her geometric abstracts are often slashed with deep incisions made with a linoleum cutter or Dremel drill press. Some have likened the carved lines to scars, which would fit with some of her painful figurative work, but Goodman doesn’t buy that.

“I don’t think it has anything to do with scarring,” Goodman told Hyperallergic in 2019. “I’m using the linoleum cutter to do automatic writing. I used to do it with black oil marks all across the surface. Now I’m just doing it with the linoleum cutter: pulling out and using the shapes and forms which are generated, and letting that lead to the next shape.”

And Back on Willis Street is about nothing if not shapes. In a work like the gorgeous Shadows of Love, purplish-brown triangles, trapezoids and rectangles are stacked like so many foundation stones, set off here and there by unexpected splashes of yellow, lavender and blue.

 

DeSousa, who’s an artist herself, calls Goodman “a painter’s painter,” one who’s been laser-focused on “constant exploration and a directness about how she approaches her work.” But the Back on Willis Street paintings, all done in the past two or three years, stand out among the abstractions she’s produced ever since a beloved dog died 13 years ago.

“These works are lighter,” DeSousa said, “with washes of color” not seen in much of the earlier work. In another shift, Goodman’s started including references to some earlier paintings in some of the contemporary pieces. With Shadows of Love, there’s a tiny figurative insert on the far right – a running woman with a traumatized-looking face. 

 

 In many ways, Goodman’s turn to abstract paintings helped foster her ascent to the big stage. They also garnered heightened interest. Author, editor, and major local collector Suzy Farbman has a large Goodman hanging in her dining room next to a standing cross by Ellen Phelan. In her recent book, Detroit’s Cass Corridor & Beyond, Farbman wrote, “As Brenda worked her way from very personal, cartoon-like images toward a unique form of abstraction, I became more attracted to her work. Today,” she added, “I’m an unabashed fan.”

One painting, in particular, stands out among the collection at the De Sousa Gallery. Whose Winning has the feel of something oddly, dramatically different. Largely black and deeply scored, creating her trademark mosaic of shapes, the work is topped by a burst of many roundish colors, a bit like a bouquet, and two pink tendrils or “arms” that hang down and seemingly embrace the painting. And at the very bottom? An odd little yellow trapezoid that DeSousa says “balances” the whole work and also makes the black and bright colors alike pop.

DeSousa had long wanted to do a solo show for Goodman, and Back on Willis Street has been in gestation for some time.  Reflecting on her origins, Goodman spoke about how different her work was from that produced by most of her Detroit compatriots back in the day. “My work was different from the other Cass Corridor artists,” she’s said. “They were mostly guys who used materials like barbed wire and surfaces with bullet holes. Detroit was a rough place, and they were representing the city. My work had a surreal feeling, and it was very personal. It was based on what was going on in my life at the time. But we were still a group, and it was really nice.”

 

Brenda Goodman: Back on Willis Street, at Detroit’s Simone DeSousa Gallery through June 10.

 

 

Dark Matter: Tylonn J. Sawyer at N’Namdi Center for Contemporary Art

The scope of Afrofuturism is vast. It has served as a primary foundation for the creative expression of Black culture for decades before even having a name. The term was coined in 1993 by Mark Dery in his essay Black to the Future and has been used retroactively and moving forward to encompass philosophical applications that depict visions of the future through a Black lens. The dreams and concerns of an Afrofuturist world transcend the real-world struggles of disenfranchised people, particularly those of African descent, in order to imagine a place where their power and contributions are undeniably recognized, appreciated, and valued. Often looped into the genre of science-fiction, it is not uncommon to see images, read stories or hear sounds that seem unusual to us in our contemporary world consumed by oppressive issues of race. Like many Detroit-based artists, the work of Tylonn J. Sawyer actively participates in Afrofuturist conversations surrounding new representations of Black greatness and reclamations of lost agencies. On March 17, 2023, his newest exhibition Dark Matter opened at N’Namdi Center for Contemporary Art in Detroit.

Here, some of the genre’s common motifs are revisited in order to remind us that imagining a future and building a world is a practice that requires maintenance. The effort to carve a place where one was previously not allotted is a process that involves looking forward to the future and looking back to the past. The artist exercises this through classical compositions like portraiture on horseback or in Victorian dress. Embellishment Study: Man on a Black Horse and For Small Creatures Such as We the Vastness is Bearable only Through Love position Black figures in roles traditionally held by white royalty. They are large-scale charcoal drawings that evoke other artists like painter Kehinde Wiley who is known for his naturalistic Old-Master-like portraits. This, of course, falls closely in line with Tylonn J. Sawyer’s history as a student at the New York Academy of Art, a school renowned for its figurative program.

Forward-thinking and backward thinking certainly do still take into account contemporary challenges, treating them as critical jumping-off points to open discussions of potential in these world-building efforts. The title Turf War was given to two different oil paintings, each depicting a group of people holding up masks to block their faces. This has been common in Sawyer’s work; many of these masks use the faces of important public figures held often by the artist himself. These paintings in this exhibition are installed directly across from each other, communicating to each other, and challenging each other, white on one side, Black on the other. There is a significance to the hand gestures in each as well; the body language communicates seemingly sinister intent on one side and a fight for power on the other.

The use of gold leaf returns us back again to the decorated lifestyle of kings and queens in Moonlight while The Space between Adam’s Reach and God’s Unrequited Love has a background that mirrors the glitter in the aforementioned work of a figure on horseback. These materials and drawing techniques echo visual aesthetics often used in depictions of outer space, uniting the relics of the past with dreams of the future. Matriarch and Royal II are surrounded by the cosmos; there is an homage and dignity being paid to the women in these drawings, their contributions to the world, and the potential they represent. Like Tylonn J. Sawyer, there is and has been for decades, a consistent focus on space travel while imagining a new world and inclusive future for the Black community. From George Clinton and Parliament Funkadelic to Sun Ra to Jeff Mills, the feeling of being “alien” or “other” is widely expressed and explored as a healing mechanism that, on one level, could act as a form of escapism while on another, a tool for empowerment. Dark Matter asks us what is needed to push even further out of our boxes and reach even greater heights. Time and place are some of the most important aspects of our conscious reality to consider when deconstructing and reconstructing our identities, an act that continues to be essential to the resilience of the human spirit.

Dark Matter by Tylonn J. Sawyer is on view until June 19 at N’Namdi Center for Contemporary Art, 52 E. Forest Avenue in Detroit. Information:   https://nnamdicenter.org/

The Foreign Intimacies exhibition by Mel Rosas is at the Elaine L. Jacob Gallery on the Wayne State University campus.

While teaching in Canada decades ago, Wayne State professor emeritus Mel Rosas found himself struggling to stay awake just before dark as he was driving across Saskatchewan. But he snapped right to when he came upon the obstacle in the middle of the road.

Rosas, a painter whose show Foreign Intimacies is at the Elaine L. Jacob Gallery on Wayne’s campus through June 2, initially assumed the creature was a cat. But as he leaned on the brakes, he realized the animal was far too big. It was a mountain lion.

That twilight encounter, he said, was both “surreal and other-worldly.” Remarkably, it’s an experience he’d repeat, in much the same fashion, years later while driving through his father’s homeland, Panama. Again, the first glimpse down the road suggested a cat. But on closer examination, it turned out to be something entirely different and far more spiritual and thrilling – a black panther.

These brushes with mythic felines materialize in a 2015 work, The Day of the Panther, that’s well worth seeking out if you go to the exhibition. Here we find ourselves on a nameless street well south of the border. Centered dead ahead, right in our line of sight, is the panther — a black silhouette against a rich green background – who’s carefully making his way across a dirt road. We’re looking through a doorway in a wall, a device Rosas uses frequently and to great effect — an opening that ushers us from this stained and peeling world to a more lyrical place. On our side of this threshold, all is every day and a little grimy. Contrast that with the verdant countryside on the other side, where the cat’s pacing and the image is nothing short of transporting.

Rosas’ work straddles the line between a waking dream state, on the one hand, and soiled reality on the other, albeit rendered in the rich hues of the Caribbean.  It would be easy, given the material, for the artist to romanticize – or worse yet, exoticize — these urban vignettes. But Rosas works in unsentimental realism, at least when he’s sketching out the walls and streets that constitute the foreground, or scrim, of these compositions. The colors may be lush, but the walls are pock-marked and streaked. There is, of course, an undeniable pathos to decay, but the real romance here lies in the distant vistas espied through windows, doorways, and apertures of all kinds. It’s as if the work operates on two levels – a flat picture plane facing the viewer and portals that give way to hopeful worlds beyond.

The paintings in Foreign Intimacies were mostly worked from drawings or photographs Rosas has taken on his travels over 40 years through Panama, Guatemala, Costa Rica, Peru, Brazil, and Cuba.

At first, the colorful streetscapes in Foreign Intimacies might look to be empty, but that’s not the case. Many sport an individual, but never more than one — and that singularity, as with Edward Hopper’s under-populated canvases, makes the relative emptiness echo all the louder. Rosas, who studied art at Drake University and Philadelphia’s Tyler School of Art, attributes this in part to his own nocturnal storylines: “When I dream,” he said, “I find myself alone, walking around a semi-familiar environment.”

Which, in a way resembles Rosas’ take on being a foreigner abroad in Central and South America. As a “half-gringo,” he said, he still feels like an outsider looking in, never mind his family connections in Panama. Indeed, as he notes, the show’s title, Foreign Intimacies, underlines this paradox. “These experiences were foreign,” he said, “but strangely familiar.”

 A number of the paintings on display clearly come from Cuba – a fact given away by the awesomely preserved American cars from the 1940s to the early 60s that figure prominently in them. One good example is Pare (Give way), a particularly handsome color study starring what looks to be the back half of an early-Sixties, two-tone Ford Falcon painted a gleaming mustard yellow with a white roof. At the far end of the frame are two walls, one a matching mustard, juxtaposed with a neighbor in exuberant pink. Uniting the whole composition is a large wall in the middle, rendered in mottled shades of soft green. Mustard yellow, hot pink, sea green, and back to mustard — it’s a gorgeous, balanced composition.

The 2021 Memory and Artifact looks to be from Cuba as well, with its mint-condition four-door from the Forties. And once again, it’s a color study of sorts, although this time in monochromatic shades of brown and dark beige. The only exceptions are a few splotches of light blue on walls framing a neo-classical doorway, which look as if posters have been ripped down. For its part, the automobile is pristine, the architecture old and distressed.

Learning on another trip down south that the Panamanian term for speed bumps is “dead policemen,” Rosas knew that, by hook or by crook, he had to work that into a painting somehow.  The result is El Policía Muerto from 2016, which in many ways hits the political reality in some countries harder than the other paintings here, with its portrait of a heavily armed and flak-jacketed member of the Guardia Civil standing guard by a doorway near a car parked just short of a speed bump. Once again, the color is well curated. The wall behind the soldier is a fading turquoise, while the car – with a hood that doesn’t quite close – is an off-putting shade of dull, lemon yellow. It’s a brilliant choice for a work with undercurrents of politics and fear. The tension set up between the turquoise and the ugly yellow knocks the whole painting slightly off-kilter, which works to great advantage.

 

“Foreign Intimacies” by Mel Rosas will be at the Elaine L. Jacob Gallery on the Wayne State University campus through June 2.