Why doesn’t anyone paint “the American scene” any more? Is it too superficial and cheap? Too much in need of political correction? Or has it just disappeared—fractured into a multitude of scenes cut by the boundaries of class, ethnicity, education and personal preference? Well, If you want to see what it was once like, visit the Gerrit Sinclair show at Richard Norton Gallery this month and soak in regional flavor from an artist born in Michigan, trained at the Art Institute of Chicago and who taught art in Milwaukee for the last thirty-five years of his life. In a way, spending a career more as a teacher than as a gallery artist or commercial illustrator was a good thing, because Sinclair needed to pander to no one. He only needed to show how he felt about things, and how he loved them. He loved that kind of sleepy, awkward, good-humored quality of Midwestern life, but he didn’t need to commercialize and caricature it like Norman Rockwell did for magazine covers. It was just how he lived and felt, and he could also be more of a craftsman about his work, carefully making something that could sustain closer study. He liked to paint the world around him, but he painted it back in the studio, as if it were a dream. There may seem something primitive about his blockish, non-anatomical figures, but there’s not. This was a man who had seen a lot of painting and whose school was located right beneath the great Layton collection of American painting. Why doesn’t anyone paint the American scene anymore? Actually, I’m sure they do, but the genre has suffered from the absence of regional art shows in our major museums. (Chris Miller)
Paintings of the American Scene shows through October 31 at Richard Norton Gallery, 222 Merchandise Mart, #612
Lost in Translation: A Review of Crip* at Gallery 400 The strongest works in the exhibition succinctly express the ways the artist relates to their own body while calling out how the artist’s body and body of work has been perceived or coded against norms or ideals.
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.
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