Essay'd: Lester Johnson

I'm pleased to share my latest short piece for Essay'd: a consideration of the work of Detroit visual artist Lester Johnson (b. 1937). 

Johnson has lived and worked in Detroit his entire life, and has had a significant impact on the artist community here, both as a maker and an educator (he taught at the College for Creative Studies for 35 years!). I first learned of his work through my ongoing research into the proliferation of visionary abstract public art in Detroit in the early 1970s. His now-lost mural Continuum (1974), painted on a Detroit Edison substation at Grand River and Scotten in the neighborhood where he grew up, was one of eight murals commissioned by New Detroit, Inc. between 1972 and 1974 in an attempt to uplift the city after the devastation of the 1967 uprising.

Lester Johnson with Continuum, 1974, Detroit News photo courtesy of
Walter P. Reuther Library, Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs, Wayne State University

When I interviewed him for the essay, I asked Johnson if he could summarize the most crucial concerns of his long and varied practice. He surprised me by focusing on the increasingly collaborative nature of his work, saying that the great lesson of his life in art is: "You never accomplish anything by yourself." That's the theme I chose to emphasize in my piece. Consider it, this fraught July 4th, as a paean to interdependence, offered as an American alternative to our mania for personal liberty at any cost.

Read it at essayd.org.

Rubello in motion

I recently visited the artist David Rubello at his home and studio in Ray, Michigan, a small, rural town about 40 miles northeast of Detroit, where he lives with his wife Mary, who is also an artist.

Self-portrait by David Rubello, early 1990s

I got to know Rubello (b. 1935) a couple years ago, after I became obsessed with his 1973 mural Color Cubes, a piece of downtown public art I loved that was lost in 2014. Since then, I have come to appreciate him as an astonishingly gifted, learned, and prolific visual artist, whose expansive body of work bears witness to an inspiring practice of perpetual forward motion.

In Rubello's home: antique Sicilian marionettes and six of his dimensional paintings from the early 2000s

Rubello is an under-appreciated modern artist — an American master, I'd venture, whose prodigious output in multiple media ought to be well-known internationally, but who has operated largely under the radar these last decades. Nonetheless, I can't shake the sense that his substantial and varied body of work is ripe for discovery by a wider contemporary audience.

I had a few reasons to visit him recently: I wanted to check out his recently reorganized studio, check in on one of his current projects (more on that later, but here's a teaser: there's a new downtown mural coming!), and to see some of his photograms, "cameraless photographs" that are made by arranging objects on photo paper before exposing the paper to light.

Photogram by Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, 1926

The photogram was popularized by the Hungarian artist Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, whose career retrospective I saw last summer at the Guggenheim. I'd mentioned to Rubello how alluring I'd found Moholy's early 20th century photograms, and he surprised me by responding that he'd made a number of them himself in the 1990s.



He showed me several dozen of these works, which he calls "New Life Forms," during my recent visit. Whereas Moholy made use of a remarkable variety of objects to produce his photograms (including his own hands and even his face), Rubello restricted himself to either an aluminum form of his own construction or, much more often, different kinds of paper, which he folded, sometimes cut, and carefully arranged on top of the photo paper in his darkroom.

Ganz by David Rubello, early 1990s

In their recursive, abstract revelry, hard edges, and play with depth and light, the resulting forms are essential Rubello. But in their delicate, sensitive grayscale, they're something of a revelation.

Septun by David Rubello, early 1990s

Rubello is, after all, an artist to whom pure color is more than a tool, but a subject in and of itself. He's been concerned for decades with how different color fields appear, feel, & interact with each other, and with reflected color, whereby vivid colors are cast onto white surfaces:

Detail of a Rubello sculpture comprised of painted panels

Detail, same piece, from behind, showing the reflected color effect

When we made it out to his studio, there were more surprises in store, starting with a new painting that's part of an ongoing series exploring the use of color to suggest movement and dimensionality.



Since I've come to think of him as a purely abstract artist, when he showed me a handful of watercolors from the early '70s, I was struck by their transitional nature, hovering as they do between abstraction and representation.





There are a number of sizable paintings stored in his studio, some as big as 4' x 8'. Most of them are purely abstract, but one, a work from the late 1970s that was inspired by a pre-Renaissance crucifixion painting he'd seen in Italy, has figures in it!



When I remarked on this, Rubello pulled out some of his earliest works on paper, illustrations made in the 1950s after he pursued studies at both Cass Tech High School and the School of the Arts and Crafts Society of Detroit (now the College for Creative Studies).



These sixty-year-old works, the last we looked at together, are evidence of a young artist's powerful raw talent. While they're confident, subtle, and painstakingly rendered, there's little evidence in their straightforward style of the rigorous, experimental abstraction that would follow. As such, they offer remarkable insight into Rubello's ever-evolving trajectory, revealing just how far he's come in order to come into his own.

NYC 2016!

I went to New York in August! It was my fifth time there, my fourth solo adventure. It means a lot to me to go to New York, which I try to do every few years. It energizes and enlivens me in particular ways -- intellectually and sensorially, of course, but also emotionally. I used to think that I wanted to live there, but that's increasingly untrue. Instead, this is what I want: a lifelong relationship with it. When I'm there, enveloped by masses of bodies and buildings, in near-constant motion yet situated, appreciably, at some still point between past and future, I am frequently, inexplicably, on the verge of tears; I feel that I belong there, more than other places -- but then I remind myself that when I'm there, I'm on vacation.

I usually plan my NYC excursions around shows, typically performances, but this time, it was Future Present, the Guggenheim's exhibition of the work of Bauhuas multimedia artist Laszlo Moholy-Nagy (opening soon in Chicago!). I'd only seen one or two Moholy-Nagy pieces in person before, at the Gropius House outside Boston a couple years ago, and I've been hungry for more ever since. I started getting obsessed with seeing this show once I read about it...I even had dreams about it. So upon arriving to the to the city, getting to the Guggenheim was my first order of business.



Also on my to-do list this visit was the Central Park Conservatory Garden, Louis Kahn's Four Freedoms Park on Roosevelt Island, Alan Sonfist's 1978 Greenwich Village installation Time Landscape, the new Whitney Museum of American Art, and 101 Spring Street, the recently reopened onetime home and studio of Donald Judd, now operated as a permanent installation/quasi-museum. I photographed extensively at all these locations when I could, as well as around the Prospect Lefferts Gardens neighborhood of Brooklyn, where I stayed with friends and where I had a good opportunity to try my hand at street photography. Here are 60 or so of my favorite shots from a memorable trip (a lot, I know, but these were whittled down from my original 300....). You can view them below, in a column, with captions, or else open a scrolling gallery by clicking any one of them.

On Color Cubes and David Rubello

Since last Spring, I've been researching and writing about Color Cubes, one of my favorite pieces of public art in Detroit, and David Rubello, the artist who designed it in the early '70s.

Here's Color Cubes (and a sun-soaked Washington Blvd.) shot from the Broderick Tower 
in Fall 2011. Image copyright Matthew Piper (CC BY-NC-4.0)

I've admired Color Cubes for a little more than ten years, I guess -- since I really started paying attention to the downtown landscape. That admiration deepened in 2009, when Michel and I stumbled upon a poster-sized version of it, painted in acrylic, at a local junk shop and happily hung it in our home. (I later learned that Rubello had originally painted it in 1973 for the downtown offices of New Detroit, the group that commissioned the mural.) But it wasn't until Color Cubes was painted over last May that I became seriously interested. Over the last five months, I've spent a considerable amount of time conversing with the artist, photographing his work, and doing historical research about the circumstances surrounding Color Cubes' creation and destruction.

This work has led to the publication of three pieces in the last three months that explore Color Cubes and David Rubello in different ways. Since the most recent just came out last week and I have no plans to write anything else on the subject in the near future, I figured it was time to collect all three in one place. Without further ado, here they are:

David Rubello 

(Essay'd, 2/10/15)

Hamtramck-based artist, writer, and gallerist Steve Panton is currently leading Essay'd, a great effort to publish short, illustrated biographies of Detroit artists online. When he asked me to contribute one on Rubello, who has had a long and interesting career, I was glad to oblige. 

Remembering 'Color Cubes,' downtown Detroit's lost public art landmark 

(Model D, 2/3/15)

This feature article, published in the Detroit-focused online magazine Model D, introduces David Rubello to Detroitophiles and explores the remarkable circumstances under which Color Cubes was commissioned in 1972. I'm grateful to Model D's Matt Lewis for the opportunity to tell the story in this form, which gives it the chance to reach a wide and enthusiastic audience.

matrix for color cubes 

(Infinite Mile, 11/11/14)

This is the big one. It was the invitation to contribute something to the November 2014 edition of Infinite Mile, an online journal of art and culture in Detroit, that originally inspired me to learn more about Rubello and his lost Color Cubes. Over several months of research, I became convinced that I needed to find a new form in which to tell this story, a form that was inspired by the mural and that freed me from the familiar constraints of the essay. Encouraged in this pursuit by Stephen Dewyer and Jennifer Junkermeier, Infinite Mile's editors, I partnered with my friend Jonathan Gabel, a gifted artist and web developer, to make "the matrix," an interactive web feature that investigates Color Cubes aesthetically, culturally, and historically. Since it's meant to be explored over time rather than digested all at once, the matrix is very information-rich. As a result, it also serves an a kind of reference work for people who are interested in Color Cubes, David Rubello, and/or early '70s public art in Detroit in general.

Free City & Jason Mitcham

We went to a curious art festival called Free City last night in Flint. We'd caught a few minutes of a conversation about it that morning on the Craig Fahle show and liked what we heard: something something old Chevy plant, something something light art. Well, why not?  The last (& first) time I was in Flint I was 15 and watching that terrible Avengers movie with Uma Thurman & Sean Connery at the drive-in.

Free City (at least this first night -- it's a three day festival) was kind of a mess. Poorly lit, difficult to navigate, and attended (pretty sparsely) by as many rowdy, wasted teenagers as arty types. Not that we had a bad time, exactly. There was a certain sloppy, anarchic, '80s movie charm about the whole thing. It was like ... an art carnival, complete with hot dogs.

Some of the art was pretty exciting, including a big inflatable silver dome (remember Starlab?) with a party waiting to happen inside. One participant at a time pedaled a stationary bike that powered a stereo blasting "Move This" by Technotronic. There was a tiny disco ball hanging from the very top of the dome, and if you weren't dancing or making the music happen, you could make bubbles with tennis rackets, instead.

There was also a pretty spiral made from strings of different colored LED lights. It seemed to invite participation, so I walked through it, carefully & concentrically, for about five minutes until I got to the center, where jets were spraying cold mist. Later I talked to the artist and she seemed surprised that people were walking through it. And by "surprised," I mean "dismayed but resigned." I told her I was sorry, but that it seemed like it was made to be interacted with. I think mostly she was sad that drunk kids were stepping on her light bulbs & breaking them.

The highlight of the evening, though, was the work of Jason Mitcham, the whole reason I wanted to write this. His stop motion paintings stopped us in our tracks, and made the ~140 mile round trip excursion totally worth it.

Each short video piece is assembled out of still images of a single, painstakingly altered painting. These keenly observed depictions of American-style progress are rendered in a rapid, fluid visual language that shows the viewer years, even decades, in minutes. In constant forward motion, we see landscapes, development, construction, infrastructure and economic boom; we also see transformation, neglect, collapse, and decay. Mitcham's moving paintings provide lyrical & transcendent birds' eye views of triumph, folly, and the steady erosions of time. They pull us back from the historical moments and processes we unconsciously inhabit, thereby revealing them.

According to the artist, he is inspired by Robert Smithson's view of suburbs as "rising into ruin." "They exist without a past," he writes, "at least in any real sense, and thus have no hope for a lasting future.  As they are being built, their immanent decay can already be predicted."

Below are three examples of his work, all of which were featured at Free City. (The last one is a music video for "Head Full of Doubt/Road Full of Promise" by the Avett Brothers.)

This Land is Your Land from Jason Mitcham on Vimeo.


Valley of Ashes: A Brief History of Flushing Meadows from Jason Mitcham on Vimeo.

Head Full of Doubt/Road Full of Promise from Jason Mitcham on Vimeo.


For more examples of Jason Mitcham's work, check out his Vimeo page.

Moments of transition: a conversation with Cedric Tai

"Inset" by Cedric Tai, 2010, stained oak and spray paint on acrylic plastic

(originally published 8/19/11 in Bad At Sports)

Cedric Tai really came to Detroit’s attention with his Brixel murals, dazzling and colorful pieces of public art funded by a Kresge Arts Fellowship and created, with active community participation, around Midtown Detroit. The murals are meant (in part) to draw attention to the beautiful brickwork that’s all over the city. (Brixel = brick + pixel, and the pieces definitely have a distinctly pixelated look; when I see them, I can’t help but think, delightedly, of original Nintendo game landscapes.) Creating each mural involves generating a pattern with a specialized computer program, then organizing a team of volunteers to execute it by painting individual bricks according to the pattern. They’re sort of like large-scale paint-by-numbers projects, offering participants who aren’t visual artists the valuable sense of what it feels like to produce public art. (Just don’t call it street art. Click here for an earlier interview I did with Cedric where he explains why he’s uncomfortable using that term to describe his Brixel work.)

But there’s much more to Cedric’s art than Brixels. He concentrated in painting (and art education) at Michigan State University, where he earned his BFA in 2007. His paintings, mostly executed on acrylic plastic, allow for considerably more fluidity than his Brixel work. Some of them evoke landscapes, others aerial perspectives of natural and man-made systems, and others little more than the materials and gestures used to create them. What unites them, to my eye, is a sense of transformation (nearly each piece seems to represent a moment of transition, arrested) and collision (there are usually several distinct visual languages competing for space on the canvas at once).

Cedric’s about to leave Detroit for Glasgow, where he’ll be pursuing an MFA at the Glasgow School of Art (and most likely branching out into different media). We talked over email about his work, bartering in Detroit, art infrastructure and community, toxic materials, happiness, and his impending move.

Read the rest at Bad At Sports.

Coming "Home"

(originally published 7/27/11 in KnightBlog)

The first piece you’ll see when you check out “Homeland,” the show on view at the N’Namdi Center for Contemporary Art until August 20, is Jother Woods’ astonishing, 52-foot long installation “Plantation House.” The dense miniature world, full of buildings, vehicles, avenues and landscaping constructed mostly from found materials, is a testament to the imagination and talent of its warm, inviting 82-year old creator, who was there in shirt and tie when I visited the gallery.

Woods explained that the piece represents a fictional world based on his personal history and the future he imagined for himself as a young man. The story begins as his life did, in rural Louisiana in 1929, where he shared a single room in a crowded house with four brothers. Woods eventually moved to Detroit and became a sign painter; his imagined self met a different fate, building a trucking empire and the resplendent, titular house that is the centerpiece of the installation.

Read the rest at KnightBlog.

Making brixels with Cedric Tai

(originally published 6/10/11 in KnightBlog)

Cedric Tai doesn't think Detroit is a blank canvas. (That controversial metaphor gets tossed around quite a bit these days by people who champion the city’s remarkable creative potential at the expense of its complex present and recent past.) The Detroit-born artist and Kresge fellow does think the city is filled with bad graffiti. To draw attention to the existing beauty of Detroit’s historic brick facades, and to prevent yet more graffiti from marring them, he facilitates the creation of stunning, colorful outdoor murals composed of what he calls “brixels.” (That’s “bricks” plus “pixels,” in reference to the blocky shapes they make, as well as the fact that they're originally generated online.) The community-created murals do more than that, though, as I learned when I pitched in to help create one in Woodbridge last weekend: They also bring people together, and let those of us who aren’t visual artists feel like we are, even for just a little while.

On Saturday, Tai gave paper "keys" to the 20 or so people who showed up to the alley behind the gas station at Warren and Trumbull (the "keys" let us know which bricks to paint which colors). He also gave us a whole lot of spray paint and some very basic instructions. (There was good food and drinks, too, which made the unseasonable heat a little more bearable.) The next few hours’ collaborative work was fun and focusing, and, by the end, we'd created a beautiful piece of public art that gleamed in the afternoon sun.

This was the fifth and final brixel piece that Tai himself will be organizing, as he hands over control to interested community members. I talked with him over e-mail about his work, street art and the future of brixels in Detroit.

Read the rest at KnightBlog.

Kids paint the Cass Corridor way with Gilda Snowden

(originally published 4/15/11 in KnightBlog)

Since 2007, the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit has invited children and their caregivers to create together during Family Days. This Sunday, kids will have the extraordinary opportunity to paint with noted local artist Gilda Snowden. Snowden is a Kresge Arts Fellow whose Flora Urbana series is currently on display as part of MOCAD's Art X Detroit show. (She's also an avid and observant chronicler of the local art scene; check out her wonderfulYoutube channel for more than 400 videos she's taken at gallery shows and other events.) Having studied under some of the original Cass Corridor artists in the late '70s, Snowden is offering a workshop called "Learn to Paint the Cass Corridor Way." I asked her about her relationship to the Cass Corridor art movement and what participants should expect out of the workshop. (For background on the movement, check out this essential essay by Wayne State art historian Dora Apel.)

Read the rest at KnightBlog.

Pop up Detroit!

(originally published 4/1/11 in KnightBlog)

Pop Up Detroit is back. The temporary art gallery that periodically pops up around town started building a reputation last year as a showcase for Detroit's young artists and overlooked spaces. It premiered last fall in the Kresge Building downtown, followed by a Midtown Noel Night appearance in a vacant Art Deco auto showroom. This time, organizers Michelle Tanguay and Nina Marcus-Kurlonko are setting up shop at 71 Garfield, a recently redeveloped,green live-work space for artists in the Sugar Hill Arts District.

Eighteen visual artists, from the emerging to the established, are participating in the show, which opens Saturday, April 9. I asked Tanguay and Marcus-Kurlonko about their project, the upcoming show, and the space.

Read the rest at KnightBlog.

Material dreams at the N'Namdi Gallery

(originally published 3/29/11 in KnightBlog)

If you haven't visited the N'Namdi Center for Contemporary Art since it opened in the Sugar Hill Arts District last October, now's an excellent time. The splendid, 16,000 square foot facility is currently hosting its first curated show, New Departures and Transitions: Medium, Materiality and Immateriality. (Additionally, there are three other shows by individual artists on display in auxiliary galleries, each of which is worth a look.)

Curated by critic and College for Creative Studies instructor Michael Stone-Richards, New Departures and Transitions exhibits work by more than fifteen artists, some local, some national. (It's interesting, though, how the show succeeds in breaking down geographic distinctions; Industrialization, shown below, is by the New York artist Chaikia Booker, but its chaotic texture and sense of post-industrial anxiety look like something straight out of the Cass Corridor.)

The many, disparate works on display are unified by a shared sense of self-conscious materiality. They insist that you consider the materials used in their construction (tires, cable ties, encaustic paint, video, papier-mâché, and much more) as essential components of their meaning (or, in some cases, as their meaning).

Read the rest at KnightBlog.