Who Were They Then, featuring: Morgan Barrie, Carole Harris, Mel Rosas, Clinton Snider, and Bryant Tillman. Much like the physical traces left by time and change on a city, materiality and texture characterize the artists’ work in this exhibition. Each artist has connections to Detroit, whether they have been educated here, lived, or exhibited in the city. The worlds they share in their artwork represent a momentary escape into their inner realm and all the unrevealed traces of their early influences, hopes, experiences, and most current fascinations. Landscapes and tapestries become memory collages and paintings become pictorial communication devices to our legacies: the ones we are a part of and those that we create. Curated by Dick Goody. Full-color catalogue available.

October 20 – November 18, 2018

Morgan Barrie (b. 1988), MFA Eastern Michigan University. Recent projects: Encuentro Fotográfico México 2017, Puebla, México; Women’s Work: Artists Impacting Social Change, Sarah Silberman Gallery, Montgomery College, Rockville, MD; Myth/Document, Detroit Center of Contemporary Photography, Detroit MI.

Carole Harris (b. 1943), BFA, Wayne State University. Kresge Foundation Detroit Artist Fellow, 2015. Recent projects: Rhythm, Repetition, and Vocab, Detroit Institute of Arts; McArthur Binion Curates in Detroit, Hill Gallery, Birmingham, MI.; The Sum of Many Parts: 25 Quiltmakers from 21st-Century America, Beijing Museum of Women and Children, Beijing, China.

Mel Rosas (b. 1950), MFA, Tyler School of Art, Temple University. Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, New York, NY, 2009. Recent projects: Mel Rosas, Davidson Contemporary, New York. Currently Professor of Painting and Drawing and the Elaine L. Jacob Chair, Wayne State University.

Clinton Snider (b. 1969), BFA College for Creative Studies. Recent projects: Making Home: Contemporary Works from the Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit Institute of Arts, Susanne Hilberry Gallery, Ferndale MI; Other Works, Windsor, Ontario; Public Pool, Hamtramck, MI; Gallery Project, Ann Arbor, MI.; Saginaw Art Museum, Saginaw, MI.

Bryant Tillman (b. 1959), Kresge Foundation Detroit Artist Fellow, 2013. Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, New York, NY, 2017. Recent projects: 4731 Gallery, Detroit, Detroit Artists Market, Museum of Contemporary Art, Detroit.

September 6 – October 7, 2018

Kresge Library’s Special Collections include magnificent, unusual, and obscure books, including the Hicks Collection of books by and about women from the 17^th to 19^th century and the Springer Collection of Lincolniana. This exhibition explores these books’ allure: their intellectual significance, historical importance, visual power, and emotional impact. Curated by Andrea Eis, Professor of Cinema Studies, the exhibition centers around the participation of university faculty who chose books from the Special Collections that spoke to them uniquely – ones that generated an unexpected realization, or delighted with an unconventional narrative, or fascinated with a lush materiality. Among the works chosen for the exhibit: a first edition of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol with hand-colored illustrations; intelligent, sometimes raucous women’s writings from the 1600s and 1700s; a mammoth book from 1605 and a tiny one from 1607. Faculty commentaries accompany their chosen books, and are included in the exhibition catalogue. In our digital world, we have fewer and fewer chances to directly experience the rare through books that are physical manifestations of thought. Encountering the Rare Book offers that opportunity, along with photographs, a film made in the book vault, large-scale prints on fabric, and interactive iPad displays, offering diverse encounters with the tantalizing essences of rare books. Full-color catalogue available.

Lectures

Rebecca Baumann: “Haunted Pages: Rare Books and Their Ghosts,” Sunday, September 16 at 2 pm; Rebecca Baumann is Head of Public Services at the Lilly Library, Indiana University Bloomington.

Emily Spunaugle: “Book Brawn and Book Smarts: Recovering the Labors of the Book Object, Wednesday,” September 19 at noon; Emily Spunaugle is Assistant Professor and Humanities Librarian at Kresge Library, Oakland University.

Andrea Eis: “Curatorial Talk,” Wednesday, September 26 at noon; Andrea Eis is Professor of Cinema Studies, Department of English, Oakland University.

March 2 – April 1, 2018

Art in Dialogue seeks to bring together Oakland University’s most precious resource – our students’ viewpoints – with some of our most valuable cultural objects – our Gallery’s art collection. Over the years, Oakland University has amassed a remarkable art collection that includes modern masters like Edvard Munch and Fernando Botero. For this exhibit of modern and contemporary works, students in the art history class AH 3900 Curatorial Cooperative at the OUAG invited a variety of student organizations to consider various artworks in the collection. We asked members of these groups three questions: “What’s going on in this picture?” “What do you see that makes you say that?” and, “What more can we find?” These questions form the bedrock of an art education pedagogy known as Visual Thinking Strategies. Our student curators-in-training then selected highlights from these conversations to include in the exhibition’s labels. We invite you to continue the dialogue. What do you see in these pictures? Curator: John Corso Esquivel, Ph.D.

January 11 – February 18, 2018

Art & Design Faculty Exhibition, featuring: Lucas Albrecht, Claude Baillargeon, Maria Smith Bohannon, Bruce Charlesworth, Eugene Clark, Miranda Clark, John Corbin, Susan E. Evans, Amy Feigley-Lee, Grace Frost, Lynn Galbreath, JenClare B. Gawaran, Dick Goody, Tim Gralewski, Trisha Holt, Keegan Kuvach, David Lambert, Alexander Meiser, Martha Mysko, Sinisa Nedelkoski, Eleanor Oakes, Kimmie Parker, Matt Ross, Ryan Standfest, Sally Schluter Tardella, Cody VanderKaay, Rachel Reynolds Zahorsky. Curated by Dick Goody.

September 9 – November 19, 2017

Matthew Albanese, Greta Alfaro, David Allee, Jasper de Beijer, Amy Bennett, Julie Blackmon, Sharon Core, Roe Ethridge, Richard Finkelstein, April Gornik, David Hilliard, Alex Kanevsky, Patrick Lee, Richard Mosse, Michael Najjar, Toyin Ojih Odutola, Richard Renaldi, Hannah Starkey, Becky Suss, Jörn Vanhöfen and Guido van der Werve. 

A fascination with the specificity and veracity of content in contemporary image-making fuels this exhibition. The depiction of places, objects and people has been the raw material of visual art for millennia, and this capacity to record and editorialize subject matter is what makes visual art such a crucially informing and contextualizing pictorial capture of the time of its production. These works represent something just short of an inundation of content, and the presentation – “salon style” – affirms the idea that kaleidoscopic subject matter is enriching and arouses curiosity about the way in which contemporary artists use data and themes in their work to create a reflection of their life and time. The ethos of the exhibition sees parallels with the cabinets of curiosities from the past. Like the curious viewers of old encountering such astonishing collections of objects, we today also experience a primary emotional connection to this type of work because its meaning is self-evident. The viewer’s entry point into these pictures is unclouded by unfamiliarity with contemporary art; anyone can find their way into these accessible depictions and explore the familiar, the strange, the formalistic, and the poetic stance of each image. Curated by Dick Goody. Full-color catalogue available.

March 3 – April 9, 2017

Cody VanderKaay’s oeuvre encompasses a network of interests concerning architecture, assemblage, modularity, mass-production, repetition, and utilitarianism. He examines the paradoxes presented by the properties of dense and delicate materials and blends strictures of ritual and metaphysics under the celestial umbrella of Zen-inflected craftsmanship. Each work quietly purveys the results of his mantric-like practice of personal mysticism, grounded in the terrestrial. His exhibition highlights include: the Athens Institute for Contemporary Art, Athens, GA., Snack Projects, Houston, TX., Arena 1 Gallery, Santa Monica, CA., Collins C. Diboll Gallery, New Orleans, LA., and Joshua Tree Art Gallery, Joshua Tree, CA. Full-color catalogue available. Curated by Dick Goody. Full-color catalogue available.

January 7 – February 19, 2017

“A rose is a rose is a rose…” Gertrude Stein’s semiotic-inflected phrase beautifully extrapolates on the fact that a flower is an indivisible aesthetic cul-de-sac, a fundamental adorable form. In winter, this intimates that the next best thing to a living rose is a picture of one. This exhibition embodies the idea of creating an overarching environment or an inclusive artistic synthesis through the work of artists Laurie Tennent and Lisa Waud. Using flowers as object and imitation, signified and signifier, life and art, the gallery becomes a place to contemplate the living and the dead and the interplay between the joy of existence and the grief of memorialization, which is in essence at the core of our preoccupation with the meaning of a photograph of the living, to inevitably become a remembrance of the once alive.

Curated by Dick Goody. Full-color catalogue available.

Laurie Tennent and Lisa Waud in Conversation with Dick Goody, February 12, 2017.

Laurie Tennent

Laurie Tennent is an American photographer known for her distinctive, dramatic botanical images. Tennent is represented by galleries internationally and her work is part of many public and private collections including, The Detroit Institute of Arts, Kresge Art Foundation, Detroit Riverfront Conservancy, The Gap/Doris Fisher Collection, The Chicago Botanic Garden, The Mira Goddard Center for Photography at Ryerson University in Toronto and Bibliothèque Nationale de France in Paris. 

Lisa Waud

Based in Detroit, Michigan, Lisa Waud is the founder and owner of Pot & Box, a floral design and horticultural decor studio. Pot & Box will celebrate its 10th anniversary in February 2017 and has become a well-known and sought-after design studio for floral event decor and botanical installations in the Detroit area. She is also the creator and producer of Flower House, a contemporary floral installation that took place October 15 – 17, 2015 filling an abandoned Detroit house with American-grown fresh flowers and living plants. The project brought together 37 designers, more than 100 volunteers, and 3,400 visitors for its three-day exhibition. The event received international media attention, including the New York Times and Vogue Portugal.

October 15 – November 20, 2016

“… the paintings do aim to create a new image in the world where one might feel at least in some manner that they are navigating something for the first time.”
– Thomas Berding, July 2016

Thomas Berding, b. 1962, Cincinnati, OH, lives and works in East Lansing. The most challenging aspect of contemporary abstract painting is to make something that we never anticipated seeing before. Thomas Berding’s uniquely distinct paintings overcome this challenge with brio and inventiveness. The lightness of being in his work, the range of forms, contours, edges, saturations and coloring – and the lightness of the spaces in between his network of slashes, swatches, and other painterly exchanges, is so navigable for the eye that the paintings are airy, permeable, and most significantly, written in a language that is all his own. And he has developed a taxonomic sensitivity to what constitutes expedient form and significance. The Berding Memorandum – the ideology and meaning in his work – is made sentient in the gravitas of his paintings.

Curated by Dick Goody. Full-color catalogue available.

September 9 – October 9, 2016

This exhibition features sixty-five twentieth-century prints from the 1920s to the 1940s, which was a prolific era for printmaking. The WPA (Works Progress Administration), which was part of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal in response to the Great Depression, put millions of unemployed people to work in the execution of public works. In this case, artists were commissioned to make prints. These works depict poignant moments when the country pulled together in a time of adversity and strife.

In stark contrast, Gerald Brockhurst was a highly successful English society portrait painter whose finest work was completed during the twenties and thirties. He is now best remembered for his extraordinarily detailed etchings. Highly sought after, wealthy collectors, even during the depression, appreciated his prints for their draftsmanship, extreme accuracy, and evocative spirit. By the 1950s, with the dawning epoch of abstract expressionism, his prints faded from view, but today, once again, his canonic work is well represented in museum collections. Curated by Dick Goody.

January 16 – April 3, 2016

Born in Chicago in 1970, Carlos Rolón/Dzine has been recognized for his elaborately crafted paintings, ornate sculptures and works that come out of American, Latino and uniquely based subcultures. His studio practice investigates pop culture, craft, ritual, beauty and its relationship to art history, subculture, appropriation and the institution. As a first-generation immigrant of Puerto Rican decent, the artist creates objects questioning the concept of luxury and craft making to explore questions of identity, integration and aspiration. His work also represents a detailed examination of curiosity and the process of art making and the cultures surrounding this.

Rolón’s oeuvre often addresses his biography by melding memory and the imaginary with carefully crafted, hybrid works that are playfully situated between the contradictory worlds of conspicuous consumption and urban artifact. His work is at once melancholic, excessive and exuberant, poised somewhere between celebration and regret. He illuminates how the masculine can become delicate and the how the baroque can be minimal. The artist often channels this approach with site-specific installation work, vivid large-scale paintings and ornate sculptures in various materials expanding on ideas of self-reflection and imagined luxury. This approach questions not only cultural identity, but also its place within the confines of the institution. The works ultimately produce a hybrid language of social practice, painting and sculpture inviting the viewer to engage in discourse and discussion.

In his newest installation, Carlos Rolón/Dzine: Commonwealth, he transforms the gallery environment into an actual inner-city barbershop, with its authentic sounds, aromas, and rambunctiousness; the viewer is immersed into a visceral, boisterous, yet subtly nuanced cultural platform. During the opening performance Chicago barbers from the Bladez of Glory barbershop will create six unique haircuts on-site, literally altering the viewer experience from spectator to performer. This work includes a three-channel video.

A second installation, Rolón’s Nomadic Habitat (Hustleman), which is a collaboration with Garland Gantt, a Chicago street vendor, explores another realm of urban commerce, community relationships, sustainability, and the visual cultural richness of a vending cart; this ready-made was debuted at the Arts Incubator Gallery on the Chicago’s South Side last month.

The viewer experience continues with Rolón’s all-enveloping, luxurious wall treatments, highly finished fragmented mirrors, and a collection of rococo inflected Chinese porcelain vessels with Puerto Rican flare. Additional sculptures such as golden masks and dynamic oversized hair-pick will also fill the gallery space. Rolón’s highly finished exotic objects d’art initiate us into the Commonwealth of Carlos Rolón, engaging us into a richer, broader cultural exchange.

Rolón has had solo exhibitions at The Dallas Contemporary, Dallas; Bass Museum of Art, Miami; Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, UK; Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico, San Juan, Puerto Rico; and CAM Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis. His work has also been exhibited in group shows at The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Marta Herford Museum, Herford, Germany; Museum Het Domein, Sittard, The Netherlands; Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego; Museo del Barrio, New York and Centro Atlantico de Arte Moderno (CAAM), Canary Islands. In 2007 Rolón represented Ukraine in the 52nd Venice Biennale. He is a recipient of the Joan Mitchell Foundation award for Painting and Sculpture.

Rolón’s work is included in the following public collections: Bass Museum of Art, Miami; Brooklyn Museum, New York; City of Chicago Public Art Collection; Deagu Art Museum, Deagu; Museo del Barrio, New York; Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico, San Juan, Puerto Rico; Museum Het Domein, Sittard, The Netherlands; Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego; Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City; and Pinchuk Art Centre, Kiev, Ukraine, among others. Curated by Dick Goody. Full-color catalogue available.

Carlos Rolón and Dick Goody in Conversation & Book Launch, Mike Kelly’s Mobile Homestead, Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit Sunday, April 3, 2016