Getting Together in Detroit

By K.A. Letts

 

So…can we come out now? In the wake of a pandemic, inflation, supply chain problems and political idiocy there’s suddenly a whiff of spring and a sense of renewal in the air, so maybe it’s time to slip out of hiding and into the sun. The folks at Reyes/Finn seem to think so. They have decided to celebrate this perceived change in the zeitgeist with an extravaganza, a festival of survival—an announcement to the world—that Detroit’s art community endures and thrives. Artworks from a broad, though far from comprehensive, selection of the city’s most consequential artists are now installed, salon-style, in their elegant mid-size gallery in the Corktown neighborhood. “Get Together” will be on view until May 6.

This visual statement of resilience can be best understood, not as the first iteration of a planned project, but as the culmination of a recent online series of exhibitions and events entitled Art Mile. Beginning in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic, Reyes/Finn, along with Cultural Council and in collaboration with Red Bull Arts, organized a series of virtual exhibitions and events that included over 60 Detroit galleries, institutional non-profits, museums and artist-run spaces. Their aim was to begin building a cultural infrastructure to support cooperation among the city’s art organizations at all levels.

But more on that later. For now, the excellence of the very real work that fills the walls and spills out onto the floors of Reyes/Finn demands our attention. Salon-style surveys can be deadly and very much like a visit to someone’s attic or a garage sale. The organizers of “Get Together” have successfully avoided this pitfall by limiting the work to pieces of roughly equal size, hung or placed in checkerboard fashion on the walls and floors of the gallery. Amazingly, each piece holds its own and plays well with its neighbors. The curator, Bridget Finn, explains that rather than trying to be a comprehensive survey of all the art and all the artists in Detroit (it isn’t), this is a snapshot of the creative community right now and a promise of things to come.

A variety of esthetic premises are represented in the exhibition, from the jolly visual stylings of graffiti artist Sheefy McFly to the cerebral minimalism of Elizabeth Youngblood and the spiritually resonant painted abstractions of Allie McGhee. Scott Hocking, Bakpak Durden, and James Benjamin Franklin, all of whom had recent solo shows at Cranbrook Art Museum, are represented by relatively small versions of their usually larger-scale works. Robert Schefman’s intimate realist painting I Have Slept with over a Hundred Men (The Secrets Project) retains the power of his monumental, mural-size pieces. Beverly Fishman’s satirical take on pharmaceuticals Untitled (Osteoporosis, Migraine) is smaller than her usual wall-sized constructs but holds the center of the diagonal wall in the gallery just fine. Maryann Monforton’s tongue-in-cheek plaster and chicken wire mockup of an Olympic gold medal sends up our preoccupation with success (and our fear of failure lurking in the obverse.)

 

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(Left) Robert Schefman, I Have Slept with Over 100 Men (The Secrets Project), 2022, oil on canvas, 24 x 24 inches. Photo courtesy of the artist, David Klein Gallery, Detroit and Reyes/Finn, Detroit. (Center) Beverly Fishman, Untitled (Osteoporosis, Migraine), 2020. Urethane paint on wood, 22 x 14.5 inches. Photo courtesy of the artist, Library Street Collective ,and Reyes/Finn, Detroit. (Right) Maryann Monforton, Olympic Gold Medal, 2022. Wire mesh, plaster gauze, paint, ribbon, paint markers, 24 x 8 x 1 inches. Photo courtesy of the artist and Reyes/Finn, Detroit.

 

In this exhibition many artists whose work is familiar in one medium have effortlessly translated their sensibility to another. Kylie Lockwood’s fragmentary porcelain body casts are adapted here into photography with Postpartum torso with the head of the Pieta doubled. Iris Eichenberg, known primarily for her work in metal, has kissed the gallery’s wall with a fragile linen house shape and its drawn penumbra, Double Exposure of a Home. A tiny assemblage, Skeleton Woman, is instantly recognizable as the work of Miriam Ezzat, whose life-size figures improvised from assorted household odds and ends were recently on view in the Elaine L. Jacob Gallery.

 

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(Left) Miriam Ezzat, Skeleton Woman, 2018, assemblage, 16 x 10 x 6 inches. Photo: K.A. Letts. (Right) Kylie Lockwood, Postpartum torso with the head of the Pieta doubled, 2021, Archival ink jet print, 16.5 x 11.125 x 24 inches. Photo
courtesy of the artist, Simone DeSousa Gallery, and Reyes/Finn, Detroit.

 

Many of the artists in “Get Together” are significant in Detroit beyond their personal art practice. Graem Whyte, represented here by a sooty bronze cast of a rubber chicken, is known for his eccentric assemblages. But he and his wife Faina Lerman (whose painting, My People and a Horse, is included in this exhibition) are also responsible for Popp’s Packing, a community-based studio program that hosts national and international artist residencies, workshops, community events and exhibitions. A different community studio,               PASC, which provides an art and design workspace and exhibition program for disabled artists, is represented in “Get Together” by no fewer than 11 entries.

Everyone in the arts in Detroit wears at least two hats, and the city’s gallerists and art administrators are no exception. This exhibition allows them the rare opportunity to show the products of their own studio practice. Alison Wong of Wasserman Projects has contributed A House is Not a Home, which features meticulously painted small objects strewn across a raw linen ground. With her whispery, feathery abstract composition Like Silver in Mother of Pearl Silence, gallerist Simone DeSousa demonstrates that she can paint and curate. Dylan Spaysky of Spaysky Fine Art, displays Radiant Bone Sculpture, a tiny, comic Stonehenge.

 

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(Left) Bakpak Durden, Self-Portrait: Yield to Change, 2019. Oil on wood panel, 24 x 24 inches. Photo courtesy of the artist and Reyes/Finn, Detroit. (Right) Graem Whyte, From the Other Side, 2023. Cast bronze, 7 x 20 x 11 inches.  Photo courtesy of the artist and Reyes/Finn, Detroit.

 

“Get Together” is only the first post-pandemic, non-virtual iteration of the ongoing Art Mile project that began in 2020. Building upon their online presence, the long-term goal of gallerist Bridget Finn and her collaborators at Cultural Counsel is to create connections among disparate arts organizations at all levels and from a variety of constituencies in the metro area. In future cooperation with institutional partners, they hope to build out a robust and inclusive cultural infrastructure to support Detroit’s arts and artists.

More than the connoisseurship we routinely apply to individual creatives, “Get Together” reminds us that artists in any given place are members of a living, breathing community of like-minded souls, all working together to fashion a worldview consistent with their experience. It traces a web of community connection—personal, professional, and esthetic—through the works on display and out into the surrounding community. The artists contribute the raw talent for an exhibition like this one and provide the reason for a project like Art Mile.

 

 

K.A. Letts is the Detroit editor of the New Art Examiner, a working artist (kalettsart.com) and art blogger (rustbeltarts.com). She has shown her paintings and drawings in galleries and museums in Toledo, Detroit, Chicago, and New York. She writes frequently about art in the Detroit area.