Tag Archives: Collage

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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92 George Rahme

Artists,

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Born Lansing, MI, 1981 / BFA, College for Creative Studies / Lives in Hamtramck, MI

At the edge of the city, one empty lot from the noise of I-75, George Rahme lives and works in a small, unassuming Hamtramck house. His studio occupies the second floor. With no partition walls, the space is open and provides plenty of room for a drafting table and enough area on the floor to spread out and assemble his large-scale collage pieces.

One of his early works, a crudely rendered human figure, is stationed just inside his entry door. The body is made from foam with applied resin. Its right leg is truncated below the knee and stuck with forks. Titled Exit Eden (2004), it was his first in a series of sculptures regarding living with a disability.

“I was born with severe club foot,” Rahme says. “My feet were turned in and upside-down. I had surgery, and they put a pin in at six months. I had casts to wear until I was two. At a young age, I had arthritis. I spent time in a wheelchair. It framed my identity, and in the early days of my sculpture work, I used my feet as a reference.”

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82 Timothy van Laar

Artists,

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Born 1951, Ann Arbor, MI / BA, Calvin College, Grand Rapids, MI; MFA, Wayne State University / Lives in Grosse Pointe Farms

What do an oscillating fan and a Josef Albers “square” have in common? Nothing. Nothing at all. They aren’t even in the same category of things. A fan is a fan, a practical object in the world. An Albers square, by contrast, is a study in color and shape. It’s an abstract work of art that has no obvious purpose.

So why did Timothy van Laar make a painting (Fan, 2009) that consists precisely of one fan and one Albers square? Van Laar, who is currently the Chair of Fine Arts at the College for Creative Studies was, for thirty-two years, a professor of art at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He’s also published three books on art. Van Laar has been thinking about and making art for more than forty years. Surely, then, he put these two strange items together in one painting for some reason.

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47 Scott Northrup

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Born Dearborn, MI, 1969 / BFA, College for Creative Studies; MA (Media Studies), New School University, New York / Lives in Detroit

Scott Northrup’s recent temporary installation Hämeenkyrö, Mon Amour (2015) was comprised of text projected onto the landscape near the town of Hämeenkyrö, Finland, at sundown. For about thirty minutes, excerpts of scripted dialogue from Alain Resnais’s Hiroshima, Mon Amour and several movies by Finnish filmmaker Aki Kaurismaki, as well as Northrup’s own writing, crawled across the vast, darkening plain in what the artist refers to as a “love letter” to the beautiful, welcoming place he’d come to know after a month-long residency there. Continue reading →