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Fabrication in Transit features works on paper by John Dempsey that celebrate and chronicle our shared industrial environments. The exhibition consists of work in a variety of media, from a series of ink drawings dating from the early 1980s, to an extended series of more recent watercolors, as well as mixed-media work fabricated in Mott Community College’s FabLab. Dempsey’s interest in industrial architecture is rooted in personal history as well as in formal aesthetics. A work permit allowed him to hire into numerous factories in Detroit while attending middle school and high school. And although his main studio interest became focused on large-scale, contemporary, landscape paintings he has also produced work for over forty years featuring industrial interiors such as those designed by Albert Kahn and Associates.

Dempsey received his BFA from Michigan State University and an MFA from Central Washington University. He also studied art at Wayne State and Arizona State. Born in Detroit, he lived and maintained a studio in downtown Flint for over 25 years. John retired from Mott Community College’s art department in 2016 and then taught drawing, part-time, at the College for Creative Studies in Detroit until moving his painting studio to Hillsborough, North Carolina in 2019.

Click here to visit John Dempsey’s website