Revolutionary Times draws from three bodies of work by detroit-native Mario Moore; presenting paintings, silverpoint drawings, and works on paper that focus on American history and current connections to the past. The exhibition begins with his 2021 series A New Republic, looking at the role of how Black Union Soldiers saved the nation during the Civil War. By placing contemporary figures in historical contexts, Moore outlines the similarities between the past and our country's current racial and political divisions. Through depictions of anti-slavery abolitionists, his 2022 series Midnight and Canaan explores the relationship between Detroit and Windsor, Canada, and their intertwined history related to the Underground Railroad and the prospect of freedom. His newest series, produced in 2023, looks at the relationship between the Detroit fur trade and the use of Black enslaved bodies for the export and transport of products. In each work Moore is re-inserting Black struggles and triumphs into the canon of art history. The series are tied together by the hard work, labor, liberation and ingenuity of Black citizens that have revolutionized those time periods in comparison to contemporary problems the United States faces as a nation.
Funded by a grant from The McCombs Family Flint Fund of the Community Foundation of Greater Flint
Combining her background in dance and metal fabrication, Georgia b. Smith’sCavernous Bodies is a performative experiment preoccupied with the bonds and borders between living bodies and nonliving environments. Smith braids speculative design, soft robotics, and object theater together with mechanical automation and human choreography. The set through which performers move, adorned with silicone wearables and tethered to air compressors, is made up of a synthetic tree with pulsing fruit, disembodied lungs, and a landscape of miniature biospheres, isolated within membranes that appear to breathe. Inflatable silicones are programmed to “breathe” alongside human performers, challenging the notion of separateness between beings and things.
This surreal scene is presented with a droning, mechanical soundtrack accompanied by eerily “natural” clicking sounds made by Smith’s robotic pieces. These wearables, through choreographic transitions, variously appear to be medical, fashionable, symbiotic, or parasitical.
Smith is an interdisciplinary artist that creates sculptural environments which she activates through performance. Her sculptures become prosthetic parts of performers' bodies or perform themselves through motors, lights, and sound. To Smith, the film is often the end point of each project, becoming an extension of the choreography and capturing a world where the performers, props, and stage are all equally active participants in the performance. Smith received her MFA from the University of Michigan in 2022.
Blue is a moving image work by Canadian artist and University of Michigan alum, Laura Magnusson. In the artist’s words, “Alone on an ocean tundra, wearing a protective clamshell-like parka and winter boots, I arduously move, exhale, and burrow through the afterlife of sexual violence. The medium of water, with its destructive potential and capacity to heal, in addition to the weight of an air tank, with its promise of survival and threat of impending emptiness, hold the fullness of traumatic experience. In this silent, psychic landscape, I bear witness to the complex nature of trauma and the ongoing process of healing.” Shot entirely underwater, 70 feet beneath the surface of Cozumel, Mexico, Blue is the impact statement the artist was never permitted to give before a court of law.
Magnusson is a Canadian interdisciplinary artist and filmmaker based in Montreal, Quebec (Tiohtià:ke/). Magnusson’s current research-creation explores and elucidates felt experiences of trauma through installation, sculpture, drawing, performance, and video. She is a trained scuba diver who has filmed underwater in Iceland and Mexico, using the medium water as a site for healing and reconnecting to the body. Magnusson holds a Master of Fine Arts in Interdisciplinary Art from the University of Michigan (2019), and is currently pursuing a Doctorate in Interdisciplinary Humanities at Concordia University, Montreal.
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.
Nov 9 | 6p | FIA Theater | Landscape Painting and Memory and Q&A
John Dempsey will discuss his attempt to create a visual equivalent of our experience of place in his contemporary landscape paintings and discuss the works in his exhibition. The talk will be followed by a Q&A with the audience. To submit questions for the Q&A please email rholstege@flintarts.org. This event is free and open to the public.
Let’s Talk Shop
November 10 | 6p | Factory Two (129 N Grand Traverse St, Flint, Michigan)
Dempsey invites community members to share short personal accounts of poignant, humorous or emotional stories, challenges, accounts of friendships, and memories about their experience from their time working in the ‘shop’ at Buick City or AC/Delco here in Flint. This event will take place during Art Walk on Friday, November 10th at Factory Two, Flint’s Makers Space and former factory of the Dort Motor Car Company. This event is free and open to the public.
Japanese Vase with Dragon, ca. 1900, Taisho period (1912-1926). Porcelain, silver and lacquer 8 13/16 × 4 5/8 in. (22.4 × 11.7 cm). Gift of Angela E. Garrett in memory of her daughter, Julie A. Garrett 1981.45
Decorative by Design: 250 Years of Japanese Objects
For centuries little formal distinction existed between all types of Japanese art—from ceramics to sculpture and basketry to paintings. One art form was not more distinguished than another and everything played an equally vital role in the embellishment of people and spaces. The objects in this exhibition range in functionality; however each item reflects the importance of decoration. Whether they are highly detailed, minimalistic, or somewhere in between they each illustrate the concept of kazari, or the art of decoration and ornamentation. Stimulating the senses through viewing, using, or adorning a work of art, kazari highlights the dynamism of Japanese art and illustrates how the mundane world can be transformed into something extraordinary when aesthetics are considered. This exhibition features artwork from the 18th through 20th century from the FIA’s permanent collection and includes objects that were created for the Japanese market as well as for export to Europe and the United States.
Please note due to unforeseen circumstances this exhibition is closing one week early on April 14, 2024.
Henry Wilmer Bannarn, American, 1910 – 1965. Ironing Day, 1949. Gouache on board, 20 × 16 in. Courtesy of the Isabel Foundation, Inlander Collection L2003.36
Drawn from the collections of the Flint Institute of Arts, Muskegon Museum of Art, and the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts, American Realism highlights paintings, works on paper, and sculpture from the 1900–1950 that capture the evolving experience of 20th century America. The closing of the 19th century and first decades of the 20th century saw massive changes in the American Art scene, as artists, still heavily influenced by Western European art centers, began to aggressively seek to define a new “American Art.” Fueled by trade, industry, and immigration, New York grew into a dominant international city, easily rivaling its European counterparts as a hub of finance and culture. Artists responded to this transformative period with explorations of the changing social scene and growing urban landscape, resulting in a revolutionary time for American art.
Drawing primarily from the collections of three Michigan museums–the Flint Institute of Arts, the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts, and the Muskegon Museum of Art, the show begins in the early 1900s and continues through the 1940s, highlighting artists whose work sought to define the era. The exhibition will feature the works of such well-known artists like Robert Henri, George Bellows, Guy Pene du Bois, Edward Hopper, Peggy Bacon, Reginald Marsh, Hughie Lee-Smith, and many others, including Michigan artists who too sought to define the changing ways of living. Emphasis will be given to women and artists of color active during this period, sharing a deeper look into the stories and lives of the era.
After its premiere at the Muskegon Museum of Art, American Realism will travel to the Flint Institute of Arts and the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts.
Thinking Hurts Too Much is a slowly scrolling video that incorporates found and manipulated internet footage, creating a panoramic collage of gyrating, pulsing, and writhing characters to expose America’s—and the world’s—desire for the sensational. Cameron Gray pieces together thousands of pop culture images to offer a provocative and poignant depiction of excess and the constant urge to seek new and more extreme visual stimulation.
The video is an immersive experience that is constantly changing, as your eyes move from one area to the next, dancing across a screen that never stops shifting. In doing so, Gray makes us aware of the passage of time as we witness the reactions of other viewers standing next to us—reminding us of the separation that results from unshared memory.
In conjunction with the Flint Youth Media Project, the FIA will exhibit the award winners of the 2023 Flint Youth Film Festival. The Flint Youth Media Project introduces the art of filmmaking to people ages 13–30 and college students regardless of age. In addition to a series of free filmmaking workshops, the program provides opportunities for participants to share their work with peers, professional filmmakers, screenwriters, and the public.
Lucienne Bloch, American, born Switzerland, 1909–1999. Progress, 1936 (later state of 1935 edition) Woodcut on paper, 101/2 x 83/4 inches. Gift of Constance Evanoff Knaggs, David G. Knaggs and Michael B. Evanoff in honor of Genevieve and Michael W. Evanoff, 2021.55
On Press: Women Printmakers of the Early 20th Century
Despite women taking an active role in the American art scene since the mid-1830s, they still faced many challenges in a male dominated field by the turn of the century. By the early 1900s, the prospect of formal training and having a career as a female artist had become a reality, in part by the support of institutions, programs, and groups that practiced a gender-inclusive and democratic approach to art such as the Art Students League of New York, the American Artists Group, and federally funded opportunities like the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Art Project. This exhibition presents works on paper by female artists, from 1900 through the 1950s, who were seizing on these new opportunities and laying the foundation for future generations of artists. The etchings, woodcuts, and lithographs included in the exhibition range from portraits to landscapes and genre scenes that reflect the social realities of the time. Artists in the exhibition include Peggy Bacon, Minna Citron, Lucienne Bloch, and more.
This exhibition presents a selection of paintings by the photorealist painter Rod Penner. A Canadianborn, Texas-based artist, Penner’s work captures the visual dichotomy of forgotten towns in southwest America. Painted in excruciating detail using a small paintbrush, he renders each paint-chipped facade, pavement crack, and aged sign in precise detail. The artworks in this exhibition present a cinematic-like view that explores the desolation and serenity of rural Texas and New Mexico.
Featuring artworks by Surrealist artists such as Salvador Dalí, Joan Miro, and Leonora Carrington, as well as contemporary artists like Kenny Scharf, Sergei Isupov, and Peter Milton—Beyond Dreams: Surrealism and Its Manifestations illustrates that the ideology, themes, and techniques of Surrealism are still alive today. Working in a range of mediums like painting, drawing, sculpture, photography, and film, these artists have tapped into alternative states of reality, seeking to liberate their imagination. Today, artists have continued to explore common surreal themes such as dreams, fantasy, the uncanny, strange juxtapositions, and the manifestation of fears and desires. The artists in this exhibition have explored these themes through nontraditional techniques and materials in an effort to explore the potential of an individual’s unconscious to create artworks that exist outside of reason.
Enrique Pascual Monturiol, Spanish, 1886 – 1933. Three Blacksmiths at Work, n.d. Charcoal on paper 17 x 23 in. On loan from the Farrell-Herrick Collection
Drawn to Collect: Selections from the Farrell-Herrick Collection of Drawings
This exhibition highlights selections from Detroit-based collectors Michael Farrell and Marc Herrick. Collecting together for 20 years, and individually before then, the two have amassed an ever-growing assemblage of artworks across an array of mediums, including paintings, drawings, prints, glass, ceramics, and silver. The artworks included in this exhibition, just a portion of their collection, reveals the pair's interest in the intimate and personal aspect of drawings. During the Renaissance, drawing became the foundation for the academic principles of art. Before artists learned to paint, they learned to draw. This tradition continues today and allows an artist to experiment, study detail, and draft out the main structure before arriving at the definitive work, or it can be the finished piece itself. Drawn to Collect includes preliminary sketches, landscapes, portraits, and narrative scenes from the Farrell-Herrick collection by artists including Isabel Bishop, Reginald Marsh, John Koch, and more.
59 Days is an experimental work by South Korean artist Seoungh Cho that combines lyrical image and sound collages. In his works, Cho focuses on the study of human subjectivity as well as isolation and alienation in relation to culture and landscape. The natural and urban landscapes that Cho depicts often move with a continuous fluidity, shifting from dreamlike abstractions of light to fleeting reflections of objects and people. Figures and their environments are mirrored and diffused through one another, silhouetted with a haunting anonymity that is echoed in the poetic texts and soundscapes that accompany each piece. Born in Pusan, South Korea in 1959, Cho received his BA and MA in Graphic Arts from Hong-IK University, Korea, and an MA in video art from New York University.
In 1974, during a university seminar devoted to cold-working glass techniques, American Studio Glass pioneer Harvey Littleton developed a new process for printing that he called vitreography. Unlike traditional printing methods that utilize wood or metal plates as a tool in image-making, vitreography uses glass plates.
Over the course of thirty years Littleon invited more than 110 visiting artists to his studio to make prints using this process. They experimented with tools like diamond point styluses, etching acids, assorted drawing or scraping instruments, as well as sandblasting. By utilizing these many different tools and techniques they discovered that they could achieve tonal variations, textures, fine lines, and detail. Traditional printmakers, painters, ceramic and glass artists, and sculptors quickly discovered that vitreography allowed them to express themselves in new and interesting ways. This exhibition features vitreograph prints by some of the most well known contemporary glass and ceramic artists.
Exhibition and programming support provided by the IFPDA Foundation
Bishop Randall, Turtle Island, Waiting on Change, 2022. Sand carved borosilicate, glass and copper. Copper Electroplating: Ryan Fitt and Jared Cortland. Photo Credit: Jared Cortland
Featuring glass pipes from some of the most renowned contemporary artists, this exhibition will explore the creative possibilities of functional glass. In the early 1980s, flameworking artist Bob Snodgrass began making small color-changing glass pipes to sell at Grateful Dead concerts. The market quickly grew and a small underground glass community emerged. When the movement began, cannabis was illegal across the United States so artists needed to protect their identities from authorities who might otherwise shut down their studios or pursue legal action. While they needed to keep their artwork covert, they sought new and interesting flameworking techniques, advanced technical aspects of borosilicate glass, and explored the creative possibilities of subject matter and design.
Over the next four decades laws began to change, artists continued to create, and the market for these elaborate objects increased. What was once a taboo artform has made its way to the mainstream artworld and pipes are now being acquired by museums, sold at auctions, and collected by many. Everyday thousands of artists gather their glass rods and light their torches to make pipemaking one of the fastest growing areas of glass production. Although functionality has always been important, artists are experimenting with color, pattern, and form, taking the pipe from a utilitarian object to fine art.
Related Programming:
Flameworking Demonstration & Discussion with Bishop Randall
FREE Admission
September 16 & 17
SAT 11A – 2:30p | SUN 1 – 4p | HOT SHOP
Bishop Randall will demonstrate his unique flameworking techniques in the FIA’s Hot Shop while creating new original artworks.
SAT 3:30p | FIA Theater | DISCUSSION
Bishop Randall, one of the artists included in Torched: Glass Pipes, has been working in glass for 22 years and is deeply connected to history and place. Randall, who is also a poet and storyteller, will talk with artist and philanthropist Drew Kups about his career, inspiration, and the story of pipes from human’s early relationship with fire to the experiences and stories of contemporary pipemakers.
Bishop Randall currently lives in Yuba watershed along the San Juan Ridge, California, where he has immersed himself in the history and cultural inheritance of his environment. In addition to working in glass and being a student of Zen, Randall tells stories through poetry. His upcoming book of poems called Animal Droppings has been described as, “a resurgence of collective thought that the place itself has been waiting to be retold. The ending of a time, forgotten tools, medicine, songs of healing, the vision of what might come next, through the lens of everyday life.”
Drew Kups has been working in glass since 1997. He is the co-founder of the glass collective Urban Pheasant and the co-founder of The Michigan Glass Project. Since 2012, The Michigan Glass Project has hosted an annual festival highlighting pipe artists to raise funds for Art Road Detroit, a nonprofit that brings art classes back to schools. To date, the organization has raised over $500,000 and has assisted in reinstating art curricula for more than 2,200 children throughout Detroit.
Sentences is a captivating, hypnotic meditation on the poetics of space and language. In 2019 multidisciplinary artist Sara Magenheimer released Beige Pursuit, a collection of writings that included a poem titled Sentences—which Magenheimer then adapted into this work. The video is a look into the elasticity of architectural and social spaces, drawing on and reanimating text from the poem. Sentences appear on screen, slowly warping and swaying to the music. Magenheimer has manipulated the footage so that it never rests, but rather gradually changes color and shape, reminding us that balance is an illusion and that space, like language, is ever changing.
Image 1: Sheila Turner, American, 1961 - 2018, Raisin' the Dead, 1999, Gelatin silver print, 25 1/4 x 19 1/2 in., The Paul R. Jones Collection of American Art at The University of Alabama, PJ2012.1350.
Image 2: Hayward Oubre, American, 1916 - 2006, Self Portrait, 1948, Ink on paper, 26 1/2 x 20 3/4 in., The Paul R, Jones Collection of American Art at The University of Alabama, PJ2008.0925.
Ways of Seeing: The Paul R. Jones Collection of American Art at The University of Alabama
The Paul R. Jones Collection of American Art at The University of Alabama includes one of the largest and most comprehensive collections of 20th century African American art in the world, amassed over decades by Paul Raymond Jones, who was described by Art & Antiques magazine as “one of the top art collectors in the country.” Jones donated the 2,000-plus piece collection to the College of Arts and Sciences at The University of Alabama in 2008. The collection includes art in a variety of media from more than 600 artists, including Emma Amos, Jack Whitten, Sam Gilliam, Howardena Pindell, Romare Bearden, and Jacob Lawrence, all of whom are represented in this exhibition. These selections display the breadth and depth of the collection, showcasing artists working in a variety of materials and styles from the 1930s to the present day.
Karsten Creightney, American, born 1976. 12th & Resilience, 2019. Lithograph on paper 24 3/4 x 35 1/4 in. Museum purchase with funds raised from the Flint Print Club 2022.175
Expressions: Works on Paper by African American Artists
Artists frequently draw on their own experiences to create unique works of art, incorporating personal themes such as identity and memory, as well as aspects of the universal human experience. Through styles that range from narrative and figurative to conceptual and abstract, the artists in this exhibition have explored these themes in various ways, and include names such as David Driskell, Karsten Creightney, Tyree Guyton, and Therman Statom.
Expressions presents a selection of works on paper by African American artists acquired by the Flint Institute of Arts over the last decade. Several of these artworks were created through traditional techniques such as drawing, woodcut, lithography, screen printing, and etching. While others have experimented with innovative materials and methods like vitreography and sculpturegraph. Despite their differences in method, all of these works can be seen as personal expressions of the artists who created them.
This volume features four video works by artist Ezra Wube’s, each uniquely referencing time, urban experience and cross-cultural mobility. Born in Ethiopia, Wube is a mixed media artist that lives and works in New York City. His work focuses on the notion of past and present, the constant changing of place, and the tensions between “here” and “there”.
The Wake was filmed at the Invertebrate Zoology department of the Carnegie Natural History Museum in Pittsburgh. In the department there are old cabinets full of categorized butterfly specimens, neatly ordered in drawers. According to the artist, Dana Levy, “ I released 100 live butterflies [into the space] that flew among the dead specimens. The result is as if these dead specimens have now come to life. The work explores themes such as resurrection, life/death, release from captivity to freedom, and the transition from sleep to new consciousness. Leaving behind old memories and ideas to explore new ones. Conveying hope for a new discovered freedom.”
Dana Levy was born in Tel Aviv, Israel and lives and works in New York City. Her work includes cinema, video installations, and photography. Levy earned her Mast of Arts in Electronic Imaging at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design in Dundee, Scotland and her Bachelor of Arts from University of the Arts London: Camberwell College of Arts.
