Born Battle Creek, MI, 1979 / BA, University of Michigan; MFA, Cranbrook Academy of Art / Lives in Detroit
Megan Heeres’s Invasive Paper Project is, in principle, quite simple: participants take vegetable matter from invasive plants, such as Phragmites, Honeysuckle, and Garlic Mustard, and use it to create paper. Continue reading
Born Bryn Mawr, Pa, 1980 / BFA, Rhode Island School of Design; MArch, Cranbrook Academy of Art / Lives in Hamtramck
Art, it’s been said, is often about taking something small, and making a really big deal out of it. For Jessica Frelinghuysen, that initial seed is the minutiae of social interaction – the tiny events that individually are of little consequence, but that collectively make up the fabric of any society. Continue reading
Born Canton, MS, 1948 / Studies in Mechanical Engineering and Art, Wayne State University / Lives in Detroit
Olayami Dabls’ sprawling outdoor installation at Grand River and West Grand Boulevard verges on a world where America rushes by, cocooned in tons of rusting metal – in other words it overlooks Interstate 96. Dabls knows that world. He trained as a mechanical engineer, and worked as a draftsman for Chevrolet Motors. Then in 1975 he had a serious car accident that hospitalized him for three years. During that time he turned to painting (his minor in college) as an escape from the constant physical and psychic pain. He left the hospital and never looked back, taking stints with the original African-American museum, and various theater companies, before eventually founding a gallery with his wife. Around 1998 he moved to the present location, starting the African Bead Museum that carries his name, and transitioning from an artist/gallerist to an educator/storyteller. Continue reading
Born Pittsburgh, 1945 / Studies in Industrial Design, College for Creative Studies, Detroit / Lives in Detroit
What does Matt Corbin’s performance piece GYMSHOELIFESTYLE, in which he periodically wore size 22 gym shoes to the high school class he taught, have in common with the found object assemblages he has been making for nearly four decades? Actually more than you might think. Continue reading
Born Nyadiri, Zimbabwe, 1969 / BFA, University of Georgia; MFA Notre Dame University, Indiana / Lives in Detroit, MI
Chido Johnson grew up knowing the meaning of struggle. His Methodist missionary parents were deeply committed to the Zimbabwean independence movement, and one of his early memories is of the family being deported for his father’s political cartoons. Continue reading
Born Oklahoma City, 1969 / BFA Center for Creative Studies, Detroit / Lives in Bloomfield Township, Michigan
Clinton Snider’s beautifully-realized paintings examine issues of social and environmental transformation in Southeast Michigan. Often his works talk to their interconnectedness. Continue reading
Born Detroit, 1947 / BFA, MFA Wayne State University, Detroit / Lives in Royal Oak, Michigan
Sandra Cardew’s strange figurative works emerge fully formed from a place that is both totally familiar yet completely unknowable. Continue reading
Born Waterford, Michigan, 1981 / BFA, College for Creative Studies / Lives in Hamtramck, Michigan
How do you construct a life in the ex-urban cultural wasteland of Waterford? How do you create meaning from the detritus of America’s lowest-common-denominator consumer culture? Two questions that may, or may not, interest the artist Dylan Spaysky. Most likely he would politely decline any such lofty dimensions to his work.
Born Detroit, 1952 / BFA, University of Michigan; MFA, Cranbrook Academy of Art / Lives in Detroit
Elizabeth Youngblood’s work combines great personality and remarkable restraint. Typically starting from a monochrome palette and the repeated graphical element of the line, she has utilized her dexterity with fiber, wire, ceramics, drawing, and paper to quietly produce a visually coherent body of work that has continued to evolve over a period of several decades.
Born Trenton, Michigan, 1958 / BA Wayne State University, MFA University of Michigan / Lives in Wyandotte, Michigan
As we enter the age of “the internet of things,” with its universal connectivity and planned obsolescence, what to make of an artist like Frank Pahl who uses almost theatrically non-standard ways to connect discarded objects into sound-making mechanisms? Continue reading
Born Redford, Michigan, 1975 / BFA, College for Creative Studies / Lives in Detroit
If James Brown was the hardest working man in show business, Scott Hocking is arguably the hardest working artist in Detroit. Even a virtual trip through the monumental site-specific installations, photographic studies, and gallery projects on his website is an exhausting business. But hard work can only get you so far, and doesn’t by itself explain how Hocking, alongside contemporaries such as Clinton Snider and Mitch Cope, has managed to develop an international practice based in, and often quite literally on, the city of Detroit.
Born Detroit, 1956 / Lives in Hamtramck, Michigan
Carl Wilson’s autobiographical print projects are clever, heartfelt, and often filled with self-deprecating humor, but most of all they show an artist with an exceptionally refined capacity to reflect unflinchingly on life, its pleasures and demons. To be sure, Wilson has seen more than his fair share of the latter: raised in humble and difficult circumstances on Detroit’s east side, falling prey early in his life to a manipulative religious organization he calls “the cult,” spending years breaking his health in automotive assembly plants, and then finally, after emerging from all these tribulations into a new phase of his life, suffering cancer and two years of total deafness. All this informs the story of a natural artist who, thanks in part to a timely buyout from Ford Motor Company, but more importantly the loving support of his new wife and emergence from the constraints of a stifling religion, decided late in life to devote himself full-time to his work. It also explains the apparently fearless way in which he opens himself up through his work—for after all these experiences, what more is there to worry about?
Born Gouda, the Netherlands, 1977 / BFA, The Design Academy, Eindhoven; MFA, Cranbrook Academy of Art / Lives in Detroit
Photographer Corine Vermeulen’s meticulously constructed projects, such as Your Town Tomorrow (Detroit, 2007–12), The Walk-in Portrait Studio (Detroit, 2009–14), and Obscura Primavera (Medelin, Colombia, 2009–14), reflect an artist willing to devote significant periods of time to, and seriously immerse herself in, her subject. Her works display an exemplary combination of empathy for their subjects and a very European sense of distance. The resulting images are instantly recognizable while remaining constantly surprising in their freshness.
Born Detroit, 1956 / BFA, BA, Wayne State University / Lives in Detroit
Alongside contemporaries such as Ed Fraga and Carl Demeulenaere, Kathleen Rashid is one of a prodigiously talented group of artists who emerged from Wayne State University’s art department in the mid to late 1970s. By all accounts she arrived on the earth with a fully formed ability to draw, and at Wayne entered a school still basking in the glow of the “Cass Corridor” era and awash with experienced and talented teachers such as Robert Wilbert and Pat Quinlan. She emerged ready to paint whatever she saw.
Born Detroit 1954 / BFA, MFA, Wayne State University / Lives in Highland Park, Michigan
Over a career spanning five decades, painter Saffell Gardner has created a large body of work that combines a consistent, and highly personal, artistic vocabulary with a relentless desire to experiment through new materials and techniques. Working at the edge of the tradition belatedly recognized as Afro-Futurism, and inhabiting a creative state that allows him to move easily between abstraction and symbolism, Gardner has used his practice to extensively explore, and creatively re-imagine, the past, present, and future of the African diaspora in America. Continue reading
Steve Panton is the founder of 2739 Edwin and 9338 Campau Galleries, the co-founder of the Hamtramck Neighborhood Arts Festival and the Hamtramck Free School, and one of the co-founders of Essay’d. He has conducted curatorial workshops at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, is the inaugural curator of the innovative Art@TheMax program at Detroit’s Orchestra Hall, and writes on Detroit art for Sculpture Magazine. Outside of art programming, his background is in technology, engineering, and education. Image credit: Jeff Cancelosi.