This broad survey of textiles in contemporary art comprises thirty-six artists of various backgrounds, methodologies and concerns. The press release — written by The Shepherd’s artistic director and the curator of the show, Allison Glenn, guides visitors from one piece to the next by highlighting the wide scope of conceptual foundations at play. The themes range from the relationship between humans and technology to new interpretations of traditional techniques, the passing of time, the physical manipulation of fabric, familial connections, adornment, pedagogy, industrial weaving, and fashion...
Ashley Cook
March 28, 2025
The collection of works on view at Matéria Core City represents Mark Joshua Epstein’s ongoing inquiry into the creative practice and its relationship to the process of weaving. Facets of identity become unique tapestries of expression as color and shape are joined by cultural nuances in these thirteen compositions. While each one is playful enough to enjoy without context, the depths of the Jewish, Queer and Gen X experiences are hidden throughout...
Ashley Cook
March 13, 2025
Axel Livingston’s exhibition at The Barbershop satisfies an impulse to acknowledge the ongoing objectification and consumption of bodies through “ingredients” like gelatin, packaged egg, chicken feet, processed cheese and meat. Sculptural forms shrink-wrapped in plastic and cast in iron work with found objects and cryptic diagrams to solicit a feeling that may inspire veganism or a concern for civil rights. There is a thinned-out line between the concepts of “human” and “animal” here.
Ashley Cook
March 6, 2025
Camila Gb is an interdisciplinary artist. She works within her intimate imagination to explore the contrast between the soft and the threatening. This creative space evokes the tensions commonly found when contemplating the power of desire and vulnerability...
Ashley Cook
February 3, 2025
In 2024, Baldwin would have been one-hundred years old. His milestone birthday was celebrated all over the United States, and the world. In Paris, from September 9th to 13th, 2024, the James Baldwin Centennial Festival recognized his continued relevance by honoring his life and writing. The festival was organized by Tara Phillips, the eloquent and dedicated Executive Director of the Paris-based non-profit, La Maison Baldwin, which was established in 2016 to preserve James Baldwin’s memory and contributions to literature and political activism...
Roopa Chauhan
January 20, 2025
Corrosion has come to define this place that was once the center of the Industrial Revolution in the US, with its metals now tarnished by extreme neglect and its communities plagued by disinvestment. Detroit, Michigan and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania flourished as engines of technical innovation in America before waves of economic abandonment left them jobless. Curator Kemuel Benyehudah’s newest exhibition Echoes from the Rust spotlights artists from these two cities, whose work touches on engineering, manual labor, and community as foundations of their blue-collar culture.
Ashley Cook
January 2, 2025
The Soothsayings of Iris, created in 2020 by artists Lauren Huret and Maria Guta, is a film that examines the topic of influence in the digital age. Through the employment of Vogue’s “73 Questions” rapid-fire interview format, the fictional character Iris, who is a mystical influencer living in Switzerland, gives a tour of her home while answering questions ranging from basic interests to esoteric craft...
Ashley Cook interviews Maria Guta and Lauren Huret
December 16, 2024
In a sunlit studio in Little Village, Davaris Broaden, a self-taught, Detroit-born and based artist, stands before a canvas, brush in hand. Known for his muted color approach, Davariz’s paintings beautifully distill the profound love and nuanced beauty within the Black community...
Wes and Chukwuma Ezeanya
December 9, 2024
Palm Treat’s anarchistic appropriation of popular culture entertains maximalism as part of their “anti-design” methodology. Whether it be calm or chaotic, cross-cultural syntheses usually challenge consumers to reconsider their established constitutions of beauty and usability.
Ashley Cook
December 2, 2024
For the third show hosted by the recently-formed Site Works collective, Wyatt Thiry and Nolan Young conjure up a variety of structures which feel loosely related, yet intensely connected. Methods of sculpting, drawing, painting, and digitization are used to amalgamate a concoction of materials which become trapped together inside stoic gray walls...
Jackson Gifford
November 1, 2024
Mary-Ann Monforton is back in Detroit after living in New York City for 48 years. Here she offers a glimpse of her NYC life and what she is doing since her return...
Ashley Cook
October 17, 2024
Gallery Mouse has welcomed the transition from summer to autumn with an exhibition by Kelly Agius and Natalie Lerner. It Creeps In opens a conversation about pursuit, not as an essential aspect of the food chain but as an element of horror in storytelling...
Ashley Cook
September 30, 2024
There’s something circuitous about seeing masses of textile art, in the old Boyer-Campbell Building, in the Milwaukee Junction neighborhood of Detroit. The building was once a factory and warehouse for an automotive supply company...
Lisa John Rogers
September 28, 2024
This exhibition by Maria Prainito-Winczner presents thirty individual works that collectively demonstrate the artist’s longstanding dedication to material and symbolic indulgence...
Ashley Cook
September 26, 2024
Art Clvb is a Detroit-based Market Network created in 2022 by Steve and Dorota Coy with the intention of facilitating connections between artists, collectors, curators, galleries, and individuals involved in the local art ecosystem...
Ashley Cook
September 23, 2024
Raised in Bavaria, Hanna Maria Schmutterer recognizes this dress, called the dirndl, as a symbol of a preserved tradition that is still worn in Bavaria today. The creative process itself is performative, and she engages directly in women’s history of labor and childhood fantasy exploration...
A conversation with Hannah Maria Schmutterer and Isabella Nimmo
September 13, 2024
July 27th marked the opening of Olivia Guterson’s inaugural exhibition with Louis Buhl & Co. As a recent graduate from Cranbrook Academy of Art, the work in this show represents her transition from student to professional, starting this new chapter with an adventurous use of material and form...
Ashley Cook
September 2, 2024
A series of paintings by Marissa Jezak, inspired by the aesthetics of Detroit’s Movement 2024 festival...
Marissa Jezk
August 5, 2024
Sophia Moreno is a designer and artist based in Detroit. Her work delves into themes of hyper-femininity, excess, and adornment, with a particular interest in exploring low-brow aesthetics....
Studio Visit
July 28, 2024
Currently on view at Matéria Core City are twelve paintings that illustrate the artist Ian Swanson’s newfound employment of texture after nearly a decade of increasingly subtractive approaches to material application...
Ashley Cook
July 16, 2024
Elizabeth Youngblood is a Detroit-based artist who has demonstrated a dedication to simplicity. Her exhibition Syntax at Stamps Gallery affirms her continued reverence for minimalist philosophies, presenting a survey of her work from the 1970s until now...
Ashley Cook
July 8, 2024
Too often, contemporary art about humanity’s demise uses raw data and overwhelming research in an attempt to explain the true horror of our imminent extinction. Jasmine Murrell, a contemporary artist from Detroit, who is based in Brooklyn, helps sieve through the collective anxiety by reminding us that in order to survive, we must stop the domination and let nature dictate the future...
Matthew Kyba
June 24, 2024
There is an almost scientific approach to object-making in Michael E. Smith’s current exhibition at What Pipeline. This is routine for this artist though; his consistently careful use of material and space indicate a dedication to poetry while unpacking the vastness of language and perception...
Ashley Cook
June 10, 2024
From Friday, May 31st through Sunday, June 2nd, The Boyer Campbell building in Detroit’s Milwaukee Junction neighborhood was the host of a surreal exhibition by botanical artist Lisa Waud...
A Conversation with Lisa Waud
June 6, 2024
The Listening World at Louis Buhl & Co. is a display of paintings by artists whose practices have encouraged contemplation of nature as a welcoming home, accessible in its authentic entirety, just past the veil of civilization...
Ashley Cook
May 30, 2024
This year’s annual MFA show at the Cranbrook Art Museum showcases work from 59 artists—graduates from eleven departments at the Cranbrook Academy of Art...
Antonia Piedmonte-Lang
May 22, 2024
Handwoven drawings have populated Lynn Bennett-Carpenter’s practice since 2015. Over the years, her dedicated exploration of concept, image, form, and presentation have culminated in the exhibition now on view at Matéria Cass Corridor...
Ashley Cook
March 21, 2024
Morgan Strong is a multimedia artist, currently based in Detroit. Her work is interdisciplinary and sculptural—consisting of many 3D elements, and various mediums, with a particular gravitation toward metals and fibers. She often blends these two modes together in her main body of work, juxtaposing the harsh and fragile...
Studio Visit
May 13, 2024
Maha Hmayed is a Lebanese Detroit-based mixed media analog collage and lens-based artist. She channels inspiration from the ethereal realms of her dreams, working intuitively and tapping into her subconscious mind through the exploration of the human psyche, desires, fears, and the interpretation of symbols...
Studio Visit
March 4, 2024
Joshua Kochis considers his creative practice as a collaboration with the natural world, and the ecology of Southeast Michigan in particular...
Studio Visit
January 22, 2024
The current exhibition at What Pipeline features the work of four artists from varying backgrounds and generations, emphasizing their continued effort to explore the breadth of art history, locate critical points of reference and present them as outlets to prompt contemporary conversations. The works in this show oscillate around each other like satellites, offering hints here and there to guide interpretation...
Ashley Cook
January 12, 2024
On October 28, 2023, one of Detroit’s newest galleries, Matéria Core City celebrated the opening of Split, a solo exhibition by Detroit-based artist and curator Jova Lynne. Photographic and sculptural elements are spread throughout the gallery in a minimalist tone, with pops of yellow, copper, gold and silver enriched by the whites of the walls. The simplicity allows for a serenity that supports the conceptual focus of the show, healing...
Ashley Cook
January 4, 2024
A liveliness radiates from the vivid, energetically charged works by Progressive Art Studio Collective (PASC) members, currently on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit. Featuring 37 artists, the exhibition marks the progress of the past three years of the program, which offers artistic guidance and exhibition opportunities for adults with disabilities in the Metro Detroit area...
Marissa Jezak
January 1, 2024
Kevin Bernard Moultrie Daye, also known as SPIRITUALS, is a Detroit-based architectural designer, artist, curator, music producer and performer. He was born on the East Coast, raised on the West Coast and currently teaches architecture at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. His exhibition shadowworking on view at The Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit applies methods from his various creative backgrounds to deliver an encompassing experience that can satisfy both a passive and active viewership...
Ashley Cook
December 18, 2023
On September 1, 2023, Celma Project Space + Sucesiva in Mexico City hosted a conference to discuss their most recent exhibition FICTIONAL DYNAMICS: Microtubular web castles of poiesi by Juan Diego Covarrubias...
Ashley Cook and Juan Diego Covarrubias
December 15, 2023
The collection of photographs exhibited at Belle Isle Viewing Room marks a notable moment in the gallery’s effort to bring extraordinary work to the contemporary art scene in Detroit. For their final show, they present Joanne Leonard, a world renown photographer whose work spans decades and leaves a trail of influence in its path...
Ashley Cook
December 4, 2023
A sizable group assembled in the backyard behind Spaysky Fine Art in Hubbard Farms for Matteus Huvaere’s anticipated performance Honoring the Heatwave: I Have to Save my Family. Huvaere and I recently met onset during a music video shoot. Huvaere was the talent, I was the movement director...
Biba Bell
December 1, 2023
Dardas uses her art practice as a tool in remembering the lost relationships between humans and non-human beings because of the extractive nature of capitalism by regulating and healing our collective body to restore interdependency...
Studio Visit
November 20, 2023
Exhibition review and interview with Switzerland-based Dutch artist Linda Voorwinde about her most recent show Kakophonie Der Diskrepanz at Austellungsraum Friedengasse in Zurich...
Ashley Cook and Linda Voorwinde
November 13, 2023
Born in Detroit, the artist Austin Martin White’s first show at Petzel Gallery debuts a materially layered body of work navigating the complex histories of identity...
Chris Pinter
November 3, 2023
Made by American artist, Yashua Klos, these pieces explore how identity is assembled not only from within, but also from without: “one’s identity cannot be separated from the geography around them. Just as the environment is built by people, the environment in turn – builds us,” says Klos...
Roopa Chauhan
October 10, 2023
Most pieces written on the work of Luc Tuymans approach his paintings from the conceptual. Treading in the land of images, how they function, his contribution to that epistemological body etc. This consistency amongst critics and scholars makes sense to me, especially in 2023 where very few people who write about artwork see it in person. But in the context of Luc T., his work in person sings an entirely different song...
Chris Pinter
September 14, 2023
Nicholas Polisuk (b.1989, Detroit, MI) is an artist whose practice is concerned with the preservation of print media. Their recent work has focused on assembling two-dimensional collage works from collected print and digital materials...
Studio Visit
August 7, 2023
Through her artwork, Arrington investigates the depths of identity in the context of American sociocultural anthropology. Working through a process of research and photographic manipulation, she aims to excavate personal truths regarding her own Blackness and womanhood.
Studio Visit
June 21, 2023
Emilia Nawrocki creates work using their own body to explore the facets of her identity along with the battle of one's relationship with their body image when struggling with mental illness, societal expectations, etc...
Studio Visit
April 22, 2023
On March 11, Belle Isle Viewing Room hosted its second dual opening event with the work of Yeager Edwards greeting visitors who then traverse the space into B. Scoba’s exhibition before taking a moment to reflect on these two artists who were selected to exhibit side by side...
Ashley Cook
April 10, 2023
Amber Codiñera Locke’s first solo exhibition since moving from Detroit to Los Angeles evokes the conversation about place as an essential part of an artist’s practice. The forms, colors, subjects and brushwork varies to meld these two worlds as her views transition primarily to the west coast and its own distinct relationship with the natural world...
Mary Kate and Ashley
March 20, 2023
When viewing bree gant’s Wend, currently on view at Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, I reflect on our bodies in relation to space. Interior space, space within our bodies, exterior space, space our bodies take up in the world and the infrastructural space our bodies are confined by...
Chris Pinter
February 27, 2023
Maddie Duda's work explores a variety of techniques with an emphasis on painting with acrylic paints and sewing using second-hand materials. Her work draws inspiration from childhood memories and vintage items to explore themes of nostalgia and the contrast between light and dark. With dreamy color palettes and touches of glitter, her work is far from minimalist...
Studio Visit
February 20, 2023
On January 14, two separate exhibitions opened simultaneously at Belle Isle Viewing Room. Most recently, what used to be the workshop of Pence Fine Art became a second showspace for the gallery, and this would be the inaugural event where two separate artists would show their work side by side...
Ashley Cook
February 16, 2023
The Figure Club of Detroit provides the opportunity to sculpt from life...
An interview with Heather Anger and Rich Wiquist
January 30, 2023
In his solo exhibition Butch Boy Fantasy at What Pipeline, Detroit, Genevieve Kuzak’s photographs and video position the viewer as spectator in a diary of intimate portraits exploring the intricacies and flux of gender and human sexuality...
Marissa Jezak
January 12, 2023
This place has been relatively neglected compared to the well groomed public park across the canal; to find the location for the show, we toured the landscape of high grass, fallen trees and broken concrete paths. Marissa Jezak was the curator of the show, inviting artists who she felt had an affinity for magic, folklore and craft...
Ashley Cook, Genevieve Goffman, Oda Haugerud, Marissa Jezak, Madeline Kuzak and Jackie Valadez
October 31, 2022
Tables and Chairs is Quintessa Matranga’s second solo exhibition with What Pipeline and is currently on display, viewable until Saturday, October 29, 2022...
Ashley Cook
October 24, 2022
Tim Johnson’s approach to art-making based on nostalgia and sensorial memory is at play in his most recent solo exhibition, Speed Bump at No Place Gallery in Columbus, Ohio. ...
Mary Kate and Ashley
September 19, 2022
The work of Morgan McPeak realizes a combination of two stylistic genres, 1960's psychedelic art and futurism, reviving and bringing the two into the current day to participate in an evolving aesthetic that a number of artists are also currently developing through their own practices....
A conversation with Morgan McPeak
September 5, 2022
Upon entering the gallery, artist Alexandra Virginia Martin presents us with a problem. There are two hanging sculptures located just inside the door. These sculptures block our passage and our view of the rest of the space. As viewers we must choose whether to contort our bodies to maneuver between these two hovering green latex vessels or to pass through by committing the cardinal sin of art viewing and touch the art...
Kurtis Greene
August 22, 2022
For her first physical solo exhibition in Detroit, Liu merges Eastern and Western culture in her continuous exploration of the female figure, imbuing silk and paper alike with intricate, layered imagery. A handful of the featured works are elevated by the employment of color-changing light, which is a common use in her practice and represents Taiwan's position as the global leader in LED manufacturing. Liu splits her time between Taiwan and Detroit and received her MFA in 2020 from the Cranbrook Academy of Art...
Conversation between G.E. Liu and gallery director Sara Nickleson
June 27, 2022
These five artists and curators decided to come together with a commitment to create platforms for their peers on the margins through as many ways as possible. Since 2017, they have organized talks, exhibitions, performances, workshops, publications as well as participated in already established initiatives around Detroit, the United States, and abroad...
Ashley Cook
May 2, 2022
Chloe Sells
April 25, 2022
The history of art in Detroit encompasses the story of C-Pop, an exhibition space that started when Michael Lask responded to Rick Manore's ad in The Metro Times about old concert posters...
Michael Lask and Rick Manore, narrated by Ashley Cook
April 18, 2022
By collapsing their personal histories with Sexton’s biography and mathematical theories of motion, Ouyang explores the body as a vehicle of self-mutability, temporal transference, and rapturous discovery...
A review of the most recent exhibition at No Place Gallery in Columbus, Ohio
Stephanie Kang
March 28, 2022
Despite 2021 being a watershed year for many Detroit-based artists’ representation at the fairs, it seems to have gone largely unremarked upon. By my count, works by thirty three Detroit artists made their way down to Miami this past December, represented by twelve galleries across all the major fairs...
Nolan Simon, edited by Rachel Pontious
January 31, 2022
Maddie Kuzak’s work has been shown across the United States, from Los Angeles to New York City, granting a glimpse into internet-laden aesthetics alongside horror tropes, melding into a singular, one-of-a-kind practice that transcends the current zeitgeist of Millennial and Gen Z art, piercing through the online and the in-person.
Kellen MacGregor
January 17, 2022
In the end I’m not trying to find anything too specific. I just enjoy the thrill of looking in deep waters of the self, sometimes using Jungian archetypes as guidance tools, but in the end it’s all about getting in contact with the stuff dreams and nightmares are made of, because we wouldn’t be without it...
Juan Diego Covarrubias
December 6, 2021
Gen Kuzak’s most recent pornographic film The French Boys premiered at the Cranbrook DeSalle Auditorium in Bloomfield Hills on October 14, 2021. The film features a transmasculine couple in Paris, France who responded to Gen’s call for actors after having also become fans of his work in recent years...
Ashley Cook
December 2, 2021
Brown’s work exudes a genuine sense of warmth and affection for her subject matter that is evident in the amount of labor invested in these works. Hundreds of earrings and chicken heads had to be cast individually in brittle plaster and then inlaid into these tablet forms. The care shown and labor exerted is presented as if they are love letters to all of the women who have adorned themselves with these ornaments throughout history....
Kurtis Greene
October 4, 2021
These nine small gouache paintings presented at Belle Isle Viewing Room were made as part of a larger series that will debut at The Contemporary Dayton, an upcoming solo show featuring over 200 new pieces by George Rush...
Ashley Cook
September 27, 2021
The high contrast between the contexts of the gracefully dilapidated domestic space and the fragile glass works seems to invent a place where the architectural structure feels, in-fact, to be more delicate than the artworks inside.
Ashley Cook
September 13, 2021
“The ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently.” I kinda think like people are a wrapper around the animalistic void. At certain times the wrapper gets thin or goes away. And hence the human instrumentality initiative seeks to unify the void inside all of us lmao
Palm Treat and an Anonymous Media Theorist
May 10, 2021
The common theme amongst the mindset of these artists is in their communication of an experience similar to seeing the world through a sheer translucent veil. Whether intentional or not, the recognition of the relationship between the inner and outer world is at play, and there is no filter that is attempting to hide this current state of mind.
Ashley Cook
April 12, 2021
"The five wall works presented in The Ritual of the Mask are intimate paintings made of paper, fiberglass and wood. McGhee refers to these shaped artworks as ‘crushed paintings’....."
Ashley Cook
March 29, 2021
VeilsFINAL/LifePrevailsPromo.jpg "Life(Pre)Veils.BryanCorley")
What is the role that image making plays during the process of grievance, catharsis and even in the production of acceptance or new hope? This question seems to be something that is emerging when viewing the work of Bryan Corley in the exhibition Life (Pre)veils at Cass Cafe. On view are 19 works that seem to be on some kind of dissected journey through different histories from art to mythology to meme culture, combining them all into an amalgamation that mirrors the contemporary “melting” pot of meaning that is this internet saturated world of symbols....
Bryan Corley in Conversation with Ashley Cook
March 15, 2021
We often see the curatorial arts rely heavily on white-walled galleries and cube-like centerfolds embellished by cocktail parties and small talk. The simpler the space, the easier for the viewer to digest the art, correct? With conceptual art cementing its place within the contemporary art world, the traditions of art institutions, as well as the art market, are in question. How do we make art spaces more accessible to a broader audience, therefore easing the process of artists’ presentation of work?...
Lydia Kuzak
February 8, 2021
“Bower of Bliss is an enchanted setting in the epic poem The Faerie Queene by Edmund Spenser. In her book Sexual Personae, Camille Paglia theorizes that Spenser’s bower of bliss represents a feminine space of sexual domination: a shady, womb-like enclosed area where the hero is seduced away from his quest and kept in a state of ‘languid indolence and passivity’ by a sorceress who erotically drains his energy"...
Ashley Cook
January 4, 2021
For those who are aware and conscious, this is not a new conversation. The title of this exhibition by Sean Maxwell at Granny’s Chandelier (October 16th - November 10th) points unapologetically to a discourse that is fundamental to the development of the “free world” that we call the USA; this discourse I am talking about is one that has been sustained by and for the voices of those who believe we can do better, for centuries...
Sean Maxwell in conversation with Ashley Cook
December 14, 2020
The interplay between something completely untouchable and something utilitarian provides an avenue to imagine a more playful yet still functional reality. Could we really live like this? What would reality feel like if industrial design more commonly teetered into surreality?...
Ashley Cook
November 30, 2020
The work presented in their most recent exhibition Outer Heaven at No Place Gallery in Columbus, Ohio holds a sense of stoicism above their previous exhibitions...
Ashley Cook
November 16, 2020
Art Mile is an exhibition that took place online from July 29 to August 5, 2020. It was founded in order to “champion Detroit’s vibrant and diverse arts community, by promoting public programs and online acquisitions.” With over 50 different galleries and project spaces participating, Art Mile was able to function as one of the few local exhibitions that has worked to highlight hundreds of artists’ work, presenting the broad scope of what is happening within the local art scene, in a simultaneous and relatively concise way...
Ashley Cook
August 10, 2020
James Oscar Lee's n u l l Account opened on February 15th at 1201 Bagley Street in Detroit, a location which was formerly the Engine Company No. 8, built in 1908 and functioned as a firehouse until 1982. Initially, it could be interesting to consider the relevance of choosing this location, which was in relatively raw condition, to host a contemporary painting show, but, throughout the history of Lee's practice, he has commonly chosen to exhibit his work between off site “found” spaces throughout the city and proper gallery spaces....
Ashley Cook
June 22, 2020
Nolan Simon (b. 1980) lives and works in Hamtramck, Michigan. His work has been included in exhibitions across the US and Europe, including solo shows at 47 Canal in New York City, Lars Friedrich in Berlin, Rieseburo Galerie Christian Nagel in Cologne, Green Gallery in Milwaukee and at What Pipeline in Detroit. Nolan and I met in his studio at CAVE, a collective art studio located in the Russell Industrial Center...
Virginia Torrence
May 11, 2020