“Divine Impressions: Italian Masters to Detroit Voices” is a double feature of an exhibition that traces the art-historical influence of medieval and early Renaissance religious paintings on the current practice of contemporary artists in Detroit. Collaboratively organized by Galerie Camille’s director Bri Hayes and guest curator Adrienne Willis, “Divine Impressions” views this dynamic relationship as one example among many of the enduring dialogue among all artists through human history and honors the importance of the art museum in that conversation.
It would be hard to find a living artist who doesn’t credit childhood museum-going as a profound influence on their inspiration to make art. The exhibition’s co-curator, Adrienne Willis, remembers an early visit to the Louvre and her surprise as a six-year-old that the Mona Lisa was a painting rather than a person. Many museum visits later, Willis has chosen to follow her childhood passion into a career in art curation with an emphasis on education.
Three paintings, all based on the Madonna and Child archetype, and all of which are now on view at the Detroit Institute of Arts, provide the foundation for the exhibition’s premise. Beginning with the Master of Città di Castello’s distant, idealized and hieratic “Madonna and Child” (ca. 1305-1320), Willis carefully traces slow advances in painting technology and visual perception of space from that early medieval work through the later “Madonna and Child with Angels” (ca. 1425-1430) of Fra Angelico, to Giovanni Bellini’s relatively naturalistic “Madonna and Child” (1509). For over two-hundred years, as the technical means of production developed, the iconography of the paintings show remarkable consistency, held in relative stasis by the Catholic Church, until the seismic shift of the Reformation in the sixteenth century.
The second part of the exhibition executes a fast-forward to our present age of aesthetic pluralism, with its proliferation of technical options for image-making and multiple heterodox viewpoints. From the simple charcoal drawings on paper of Sue Carman-Vian to Carl Wilson’s linocuts to the archival prints of Gil Ashby, a luxuriant and chaotic cultural ecosystem, in Detroit, as elsewhere, reflects a diverse and multi-polar world. Artists have come a long way from painstaking concoctions of powdered pigments in egg tempera and rabbit-skin glue on poplar panels.
Perhaps the biggest development in the fine arts from the Middle Ages to the present has been the expansion in the variety of people now allowed to call themselves artists. In “Divine Impressions,” Detroit artists with diverse backgrounds and viewpoints have marshaled the art of the past to serve contemporary preoccupations. They have added influences from world art to augment European art history as they cross-pollinate Catholic religious iconography with modern themes. What has been lost in consistency of worldview has been gained in richness of expression.
An accomplished painter, illustrator and educator, Gil Ashby employs his considerable skills and deep knowledge of art history to re-imagine, in “Thirteenth Apostle,” the disciples of Christ in the New Testament as unique individuals. Using models based on African American men of his personal acquaintance, he paints the twelve in a contemporary grid-based composition, subverted by a ghostly interpolation of Mary Magdalene as the thirteenth disciple, with the additional shadowy presence of seventeenth-century painter Diego Velázquez behind it all.
Bri Frey’s provocative and profane “Madonna and Their Child” proposes the eternal virgin as subject rather than object. Her direct gaze and sensuous reclining pose against a deep green background suggest an Edenic existence before the Fall. This intentionally heretical mother figure clutches a haloed Kewpie doll child and confidently challenges traditional ideals of femininity and motherhood.
Mark Dancey, trickster-surrealist painter and illustrator, creates contemporary images deeply rooted in art-historical forms. In “Sorrowful Mysteries of Sor Juana Inez Delacruz,” he employs the visual syntax of Spanish ex-votos to commemorate the life of an early Spanish colonial feminist. His diminutive painting is a tribute to a seventeenth-century poet, playwright and scholar who managed to live as an independent intellectual within the Catholic Church of the Baroque period, at least up to a point.
Multidisciplinary Detroit artist Sabrina Nelson expresses her deep relationship with community, family and art history in her pieced and painted textile collage, “Madonna and Child.” Embedded in a metaphorical tapestry of connection, Nelson portrays herself with her young son (the artist Mario Moore), drawing an explicit comparison to the religious iconography of the Virgin and Child and making an implicit claim for the divinity of her offspring. In formal terms, the textile, with its shadowy likenesses and thin, draped fabric, calls to mind the Shroud of Turin. Nelson also looks for inspiration to a well-known 1967 mural by Glanton Dowdell, “The Shrine of the Black Madonna.” The painting, now located in the Pan African Orthodox Christian Church in Detroit, was an important focus for the rising Black power movement in Detroit in the 1960s and seventies.
In art history, time is a slippery thing. Contemporary artists, like the artists in this exhibition, continually engage in a dialogue with their peers from ancient to modern, and from local to worldwide, in an eternal “now.” Museum collections play an important part in this process, preserving the images, thoughts and beliefs of the past to enrich the present as it rushes toward the future.
Contemporary artists in the exhibition: Bri Frey, Carl Wilson, Dayana Juarez, Gil Ashby, Hayla Hay, Joshua Rainer, Mark Dancey, Nivek Monet, Sabrina Nelson and Sue Carman-Vian.
“Divine Impressions: Italian Masters to Detroit Voices” is on view at Galerie Camille, 4130 Cass Avenue, Detroit, Michigan, through August 30.
