The Brooklyn Rail

The stained-glass windows of a deconsecrated neo-Romanesque church hardly evoke the white-cube austerity of the settings in which most contemporary art finds itself today. Yet subtle architectural interventions into this former house of worship—rebaptized as the Shepherd, a cultural arts center with broad community ties—have produced a viewing space at once airy and tightly organized. Curated by Laura Mott (chief curator of the Cranbrook Art museum) and Nick Cave (a Chicago-based artist with enduring Detroit connections), the exhibition draws from the private collection of local philanthropist Jennifer Gilbert. From those prodigious holdings Mott and Cave have mounted a focused and incisive show, both rippling with larger art historical currents and anchored by local talent. Mirrored surfaces, portraits, and intersecting gazes link works of disparate mediums and formats in an open-ended exploration of vision and (especially Black) embodiment.

Near the exhibition’s entrance, Fidelis Joseph’s arresting 2022 untitled work reveals a blurred, turbulent mass of bodies locked in some sort of struggle. A New Haven-based artist originally from Nigeria, Joseph incorporates elements from his brother’s military experience in their native land. Facing Joseph’s large canvas across the hall hangs the more meticulously composed Last Communion (2023) by Akea Brionne. Her striking use of beaded textures finds various echoes throughout the exhibition, revealing a keen facility (and adventurous willingness to experiment) with specific materials—not surprising given the number of alumni from Cranbrook represented here, and that institution’s legendary dedication to the practice of craft in a range of different mediums and formats. Its frame wrought from a melted and molded rug, Jack Craig’s multiple-paneled Vegetable Sheep Carpet Mirror (2022) provides a further case in point, its surfaces reflecting a range of striking portraits on the adjacent wall. Barkley L. Hendricks’s Yocks (1975) finds a poignant interlocutor in the nearby Wearing Fur Coats in America (2021) by Jammie Holmes, both paintings recalling Blaxploitation films of the 1960s and ’70s and the newfound—if fraught—prominence they brought to Black protagonists.

But even amid this compelling group of portraits, it is Mario Moore’s It can all be so fleeting (2024) which stands out, if only for its poignant conjuring of Max Beckmann’s Self-Portrait in Tuxedo (1927). Striking the same debonair pose as Beckmann, Moore places his own body’s representation in a contemporary art gallery, suggesting a reflection on his own (metaphorical) place in a history of modern painting. Across the way hangs Doug Aitken’s EVERYTHING (flag) (2015). Set at different angles across the work’s undulating surface, geometric mirrored panels set various works in the surrounding gallery (as well as the viewer’s own body) into competition—a visual cacophony that accords with the work’s allusion to partisanship. At once outsized and white, its center emptied of anything but reflective triangular shards, Aitken’s flag invokes the rituals of adherence, but remains an empty signifier. That sentiment is contrasted by the proximity of Rashid Johnson’s painting, Untitled Anxious Audience (2018), with three rows of near-identical, caricatural faces pinched in stylized scowls.

In its outsized, liquescent abstraction, Helen Frankenthaler’s Titian Center (1968) might seem to interrupt the figurative thrust of the exhibition’s central gallery. Yet its placement across the door from Henry Taylor’s carolina miranda (2016)—the rough-hewn body of its subject seated on a chaise longue—sets up a compelling formal rhyme, one that Frankenthaler’s coy, corporeal title perhaps already hints at. Other nearby abstract works play with embodiment through different materials. Most striking is Anders Ruhwald’s Object for 3 plants (2022). Veined with green threads, its lumpy pink ceramic appears at once body and receptacle, protrusion and vessel. Very different engagements with abstraction inform Tiff Massey’s White out, You In (red) (2021) and McArthur Binion’s Self:Portrait (Blue) (2022). The former sets a red lattice recalling gingham cloth (referred to historically as “slave cloth” for its use in dressing enslaved African peoples) against a mirrored surface. Binion’s blue-green grids likewise appear abstract at first glance, though closer inspection finds various body parts set into their tight squares. Both works invite closer inspection of seemingly straightforward lines, which only gradually give up the ghost of more personal embodiment.

On a far larger scale, Mickalene Thomas’s Clarivel #5 (2023) reveals a woman lounging on a kaleidoscopic couch, her sensual reclining pose echoing Frankenthaler’s allusion to Titian’s Venus of Urbino (1538) around the corner. Bedazzled and bejeweled swatches alternate with other textures across the mixed media painting’s surface, all further reflected and refracted in the tinted glass of Olafur Eliasson’s nearby The speed of your attention (2018), which also mirrors the burnished lozenges of Beverly Fishman’s Untitled (Stacked Pills #2) (2017). In place of a completely painted face, Thomas’s figure is endowed with a set of photographed eyes, underscoring the sentient agency which returns the viewer’s gaze. Across the gallery on the opposite wall, a work from Tom Wesselman’s “Great American Nude” series offers the perfect foil. Her face evacuated of any defining traits except a shock of unmodulated blonde hair, Wesselman’s model reclines on a red blanket, its fabric raised into actual, quilted relief on the canvas’s surface. A deft hanging makes Thomas’s Clarivel #5 appear almost a pointed riposte to the objectified anonymity of Wesselman’s subject. In the same vein, if Kerry James Marshall’s nearby Untitled (Painter) (2010) reveals the artist himself resting in his studio, one can’t help but recall that some of his most memorable portraits of painters involve female subjects—a further (oblique) riposte to Wesselman’s gendered indolence.

Passing almost undetected and below eye level, Tony Matelli’s painted bronze Weed (2015) sprouts from the seam between floor and wall. Intricate, delicate, and arrestingly lifelike, the object seems—however fleetingly—to bring something of the surrounding environment into the space. Even this unlikely vegetable metaphor speaks to the relationship between the works at hand and the city at large. Opened relatively recently, the Shepherd is one of a thriving (and growing) set of non-profit art centers on the city’s east side, from LANTERN to the Progressive Art Studio Collective (which works with adult artists with developmental disabilities). Three works near the church’s nave (and hence toward the exhibition’s conclusion) allude to the space’s former pious purpose, not least a playful neon sign (by Anthony James, 2011) set atop the altar reading “Heaven.” If its religious origins persist only in name, the Shepherd remains a lively site of community congregation, and Seen/Scene adds a thoughtful chapter to that growing history.