Tag Archives: Religion+Spirituality

151 Precious Johnson-Arabitg working as VODKASERENGETI

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Born in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, 1982 \ BA University of Chicago \ MA University of Illinois – Springfield \ Lives in Detroit

There’s a mysterious but exciting energy in the images created by Precious Johnson-Arabitg, known artistically as VODKASERENGETI. Her performance-based compositions have a strong and fearless nature that arrest the eyes at a glance and draw the observer into the scene. 

Often turning the camera on herself, VODKASERENGETI describes her visual voice with expressive terms like out there, weird, disruptive, uncomfortable, and shocking. A scroll through her Instagram page (@vodkaserengeti)–home to her bold images– complements her self-assessment. In a ghostly diptych, VODKASERENGETI becomes Persona Non Grata (2017), an allegorical figure who, in this set, instructs the observer to “make space to mourn past selves, lost selves, fictional selves.” The character appears, she says, in a state of limbo where there’s difficulty in processing and coping with things unsaid and unaddressed – “individually and collectively as a nation.” Each transitional state calls for an enlightened consciousness and allows rebirths to take form.

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147 Ricky Weaver

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Born Ypsilanti, MI,1990 / BFA  Eastern Michigan University; MFA Cranbrook Academy of Art / Lives in Ypsilanti 

To enter the photography of Ricky Weaver, first, take a breath. Hold it. Feel it. Float with it. Exhale. 

This instruction steadies you for the type of meditation experienced when observing Weaver’s quiet but complex image-making. There’s a spiritual essence felt as the artist unpacks concepts of time, identity and lineage through photographs that pay homage to Black women who have come before, are with her today, and are of the next generation. Stylistically, her salute to them comes by way of the gold trim that frames each image (a tribute to her late grandmother’s black and gold-framed bedroom set) and quoted titles of her images, because, as the artist says of her work, “This is collective; it’s not just me.”  

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132 Judy Bowman

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Born: 1952, Detroit, MI; Studied at Spelman College and Clark College, Masters of Art from Olivet College/ Lives in Romulus, MI

Trading low saturated pastels for eclectic textures of colored paper and acrylic paint, Judy Bowman’s recent bold and often jubilant collages have been years in the making. After a 35-year hiatus from art-making—a period during which she worked as a Detroit Public Schools educator and raised a family of 10—Bowman describes her return to canvas and to documenting the black experience as a “gift from the universe.” 

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70 Billy Mark

Artists,

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Born Rhinelander, WI, 1979/ BFA (Music), California Institute of the Arts / Lives in Detroit

The artist Billy Mark intentionally messes with your head. He moves, he morphs, he mystifies. Watch him for even a moment, and it’s soon clear that he embodies this trio of M’s and more—sometimes all at once.

In fact, Mark means to make you believe that the whole “artist” moniker—improvisational freestyle poet and installation artist, to be exact—is too confining for him or his multidimensional work, which spans and connects conceptual theater, performance, sculpture, poetry, music, movement, even silence. Label him, if you must, but no longer will he narrow himself.

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61 Ed Fraga

Artists,

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Born Imlay City, MI, 1956 / BFA, Wayne State University / Lives in Troy, MI

Ed Fraga remembers as a child taking a sheet of cardboard, folding it into a box, and looking at it, being thrilled to realize he’d created a small but powerful object. Later he started to populate the box, with dioramas, stage sets, magic shows for neighborhood kids, and other constructs of his imagination. “In a way,” he says, “I’m still trying to fill the box.” Continue reading →

59 Renata Palubinskas

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Born Kaunas, Lithuania, 1968 / Diploma in Fine Art and Restoration, St. Zukas Technium of Applied Arts, Kaunus, Lithuania / Lives in Beverley Hills, MI

Lithuania, Renata Palubinskas confides, was the last place in Europe to embrace Christianity, maintaining its pantheistic pagan beliefs as late as the fourteenth century. A similar sense, of being out of sync with prevailing currents, and instead embracing the richness of the distant past, pervades Palubinskas’s own extensive body of paintings. She is an especially wholehearted artist, making full use of a rigorous Eastern European education in traditional painting and drawing techniques to take on big topics, such as mortality and the search for enlightenment, with great joy. Her quest is a spiritual one, drawing insights from all religions, but finding the most compelling answers in writings from the Hindu tradition. She talks of the beauty she finds in martial arts, and if pressed will admit to having a black belt in karate. Continue reading →

56 Carl Demeulenaere

Artists,

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Born Detroit, 1956 / BFA, Wayne State University/ Lives in Grosse Pointe, MI

To understand Carl Demeulenaere it is best to approach his art from the perspective of technique, but also to remain conscious that the resulting work originates from a place of deep-rooted anger. Demeulenaere sets out to seduce you with color and craft. He sees himself as a “contemporary Pre-Raphaelite,” seeking to emulate the 19th century English “brotherhood” who themselves sought a return to the detail and intense coloring of 15th century Italian art. Continue reading →

50 David Philpot

Artists,

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Born Chicago, IL, 1940 / Lives in Detroit

David Philpot is an antenna, finely tuned to subtle frequencies. He listens carefully, receiving transmissions from as far away as West Africa, and from as nearby as God or the wood in his hands. His primary medium, fittingly, is the staff, an energizing rod that joins the earth to the sky via the human being who wields it.

Long before he ever considered himself an artist, the 30-year-old Philpot heard a voice call his name, leading him, amazed, to an oasis: a grove of trees in a Chicago housing project. A week later, Philpot, who had never abandoned his childhood habit of gathering and carrying sticks, and who had recently admired Charlton Heston’s staff in The Ten Commandments, woke in the night with a mission: to chop down one of those trees, and make from it a staff of his own. When it was done, he called it Genesis (1971), an apt title for the first of more than 350 staffs he has made in the 45 years since.

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09 Carl Wilson

Artists,

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?

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08 Rose E DeSloover

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Born Monroe, Michigan, 1944 / BA, Alverno College, Milwaukee, Wisconsin; MFA, Claremont Graduate School, Claremont, California / Lives in Farmington Hills, Michigan

Though the vows taken by Rose E. DeSloover when she became a nun were dissolved when she left the convent fourteen years later to more freely pursue the art practice that had become her higher calling, there remains a thread of both religion and faith that runs throughout a number of her signature bodies of work.

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