Working from the conceit of updating the seventeenth-century Dutch painter Jan Steen’s depictions of messy bourgeois households, Julie Blackmon sets up scenarios of the disorderly domesticity of America’s middle class and shoots them in limpid color. Blackmon’s rooms are filled with children performing antics on floors covered with scattered toys and clothing, sometimes in the presence of adults trying to do their own thing while keeping up the pretense of indifference to the bizarre chaos?to an adult’s eye?brimming around them. Blackmon is the rare combination of a hip conceptual artist who aims for thoroughgoing—if heartily humorous—realism; her tableaux, which only slightly exaggerate everyday life, remind us of the family circus that is on stage perpetually in millions of homes, brought to us here by an ordinary avant-garde mom. (Michael Weinstein)
Repurposing AI: A Review of Stephanie Dinkins at Stamps Gallery While this show is timely for everyone, I consider its setting within a university art gallery and emerging tech hub like the city of Ann Arbor a subversive provocation which Dinkins invites the greater public—including members of the university community—to consider our own positionality to AI and technology.
