David Klein Gallery

Mario Moore has a passion for digging into the past to find the stories that are the foundation of his beautifully rendered paintings. Extensive research of the subject matter is a fundamental component of his practice. Moore’s previous series have included examinations of the role of African Americans in the Civil War, the presence of African Americans at Princeton University and his family’s history in Detroit. Inspired by the study of "A Fluid Frontier: Slavery, Resistance, and the Underground Railroad in the Detroit River Borderland,” Wayne State University Press, Moore’s research for the Midnight and Canaan exhibition led him to navigate the history of the Underground Railroad in the Canadian border cities of Detroit, Michigan and Windsor, Canada.

David Klein Gallery, 1520 Washington Boulevard, Detroit, Michigan, is pleased to announce the opening of Family Ties, curated by Ebitenyefa Baralaye. The exhibition features ceramic sculpture by Shea Burke, Patrice Renee Washington, and Ebitenyefa Baralaye and paintings by Patrick Quarm. Family Ties touches on the multi-layered bonds that connect those closest to us, our given and adopted family members, friends, and community. These bonds are manifested in traditions, shared history, common spaces, and elements of identity encompassing everything from the rituals and patterns of styling hair, the particulars of gathering places for food and meals, and the textures and shades of skin. The concept of family in this way defines itself in answering the question “Where and who are your people?” Apart from an interpretation of separation or divisiveness, this question is more productively understood as leaning in and drawing upon connections that are essential for unity, health and well-being, especially during a time when we seem to need these things the most. - Ebitenyefa Baralaye, June 2022 Ebitenyefa Baralaye is a Detroit based ceramicist, sculptor, and educator. He holds a BFA in ceramics from the Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI; and an MFA in ceramics from the Cranbrook Academy of Art, Bloomfield Hills, MI. Baralaye has been exhibited widely in the U.S. as well as in Korea and Canada including Cranbrook Art Museum, Bloomfield Hills, MI; Museum of the African Diaspora, San Francisco, CA; Friedman Benda, New York, NY; Emma Scully Gallery, New York, NY; and Staple Goods, New Orleans, LA. Most recently, he curated the exhibition, Family Ties, for David Klein Gallery, Detroit. He is currently the section head of Ceramics at the College for Creative Studies, Detroit, MI. Baralaye is represented by David Klein Gallery, Detroit, Shea Burke holds a BFA from Alfred University and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. They have participated in multiple exhibitions including Mindy Solomon Gallery, Miami, FL; Harvard Ceramics, Cambridge, MA; Ikeda Gallery, Manhattan, KS; Alfred University, Alfred, NY; and SAIC, Chicago, IL. They were the recipient of a Zenobia Award for a residency at Watershed Ceramics in 2018 and was a Studio Fellow at Northern Clay Center, Minneapolis, MN. Burke, a native of Rochester, NY currently resides in Cambridge MA, where they are Artist In Residence at Harvard Ceramics. Patrick Quarm is from the Republic of Ghana in West Africa. He received at BFA in Painting from Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, Ghana and holds an MFA in Painting from Texas Tech University, Lubbock, TX. Quarm’s work has been exhibited in the United States, Ghana and in Europe including Ross+Kramer Gallery, New York, NY; Albertz Benda Gallery, New York, NY; N’Namdi Contemporary Miami, Miami, FL; Trout Museum of Art, Appleton, WI; Pippy Houldsworth Gallery, London, England; K.N.U.S.T Museum Kumasi, Ghana; Kunstraum Potsdam, Berlin; Library Street Collective, Detroit, MI; and the Urban Institute of Contemporary Arts, Grand Rapids, MI. His work is in multiple public and private collections including the Syracuse University Museum, Kalamazoo Institute of Art, and Kemper Museum collection. Residencies include artist-in-residence at the Red Bull Artist Residency, Detroit and the prestigious NXTHVN Fellowship in New Haven, Ct. Quarm currently lives and works in Ghana and in the United States. Patrice Renee Washington, a native of Chicago, IL, holds a BFA from Metropolitan State University, Denver, CO and an MFA from Columbia University, New York, NY. Washington has shown in the United States and Canada including exhibitions at Marinaro, New York, NY; Underdonk Gallery, New York, NY; The New Gallery, Calgary, Alberta, Canada; Mindy Solomon Gallery, Miami, FL; San Jose Museum of Art, San Jose CA; Forest City Gallery, London, Ontario, Canada; Zeitgeist Gallery, Nashville, TN, and the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts, Brooklyn, NY. Her solo exhibition, Patrice Renee Washington: Charts, Parts, and Holders, was held at The Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, Denver, CO in 2018. Residencies include Abrons Art Center, New York, NY; Anderson Ranch Arts Center, Aspen, CO; Museum of Art and Design, New York, NY; and The Vermont Studio Center, Johnson, VT.

David Klein Gallery, 1520 Washington Boulevard, Detroit, Michigan, is pleased to announce the opening of Everything Else, an exhibition of painting, sculpture and work on paper by Caroline Del Giudice, Matthew Hawtin, Brittany Nelson, Benjamin Pritchard, Meghann Riepenhoff, Lauren Semivan, Neha Vedpathak, and Sylvain Malfroy-Camine. The title of this group exhibition is borrowed from an Al Held interview that was recorded in 1975 for the Smithsonian Archives of American Art. Held, a pioneer of hard-edged abstraction, moved to Paris in the early 1950’s and soon realized that he didn’t have to follow rules about what to paint. At the time, the New York City art world had a very rigid view about what was considered acceptable abstraction. Paris allowed Held the freedom to fully explore alternative possibilities. “….what happened was I realized very quickly that Paris was an easy place to paint everything else because I had all the New York experience, all the New York painting that I had seen, but being in Paris alone with new friends, I didn't have to explain myself to my old friends, all betrayals, of leaving them and their aesthetic, you know, in the sense—Do you follow me?—that I was able to hop, skip and jump because I was a free man.” - Al Held, 1975 Fortunately, for the contemporary artists in this show, they are not bound by rules. These artists have the freedom to create their own personal language when producing work in their studios. Caroline Del Giudice chooses steel as her medium. While acknowledging the recent history of abstract sculpture, she pushes the forms, often adding playful color and metallic finishes, unlike her aggressive predecessors. Matthew Hawtin continues the practice of minimalism, with references to some of his predecessors, but his torqued canvases, shaped fiberglass panels, and subtle color variations provide multi-layered elements to his formal compositions.  Brittany Nelson and Lauren Semivan step outside the more traditional methods of making photographs and employ antique processes to produce their arresting images. The end result of their individual practices appears to be beautiful abstract paintings with trompe l’oeil effects. Meghann Riepenhoff also uses historical techniques when producing her photographs, however, she brings her involvement with the environment into the cyanotype process. Taking sheets of light sensitive paper to the beach, she allows water, sand and natural debris to wash over it. The paper turns blue when exposed to light and impressions of sand and water are revealed in the final image.  Neha Vedpathak’s striking compositions are part painting and part construction. She uses a self-invented, technique of separating the fibers of Japanese handmade paper with tiny push pins, gently adding color as she works. The resulting plucked paper paintings resemble lace-like fabric in nuanced, abstract compositions. Her slow, repetitive, process becomes a meditation, an experience shared by the viewer. Ben Pritchard and Sylvain Malfroy-Camine make paintings that focus on process, each approaching it in a different way. Pritchard’s multi-layered compositions are reminiscent of the early abstract expressionists. His inclination to paint “en plein air” adds a lively immediacy to his work. Malfroy-Camine often eschews tradition with his geometrically shaped canvases as pentagons, hexagons and octagons instead of the expected rectangular formats. Poons-like ovals float through the work and impressionistic strokes of color give the effect of capturing light-filled moments in time.

David Klein Gallery, 1520 Washington Boulevard, Detroit, Michigan, is pleased to announce the opening of Second Nature, an exhibition of new work by Susan Goethel Campbell. A reception for the artist will take place on Saturday, March 12, 4 – 8 pm, by appointment. Susan Goethel Campbell has always been interested in collecting and documenting ephemeral materials found in nature. Dandelion pods, fallen leaves and other debris from plants and trees have often found their way into her work. The result is an observance of the continual cyclical process of growth, decay, and reformation. Campbell’s visual documentation of nature’s process becomes a tangible narration of time. By exploring both reflection and absorption evident in the surfaces of the work, she finds a footing in the worlds of images and imagination. There are two bodies of work in the Second Nature exhibition: Hibiscus Years, a series of digital photographic prints produced by layering delicate dried hibiscus flowers on top of one another and then photographing the result. And Seasonals, a series of unique walnut stained, hand-sewn and hand-perforated large scale prints on Japanese paper. “Observation of natural processes is front and center in this body of work: a reminder of the bridge between life, death, and reformation. A plant does not think about dropping its leaves or fruit. If it holds on to them forever, it remains stuck in time. Similarly, this exhibition is a marker of transitions, not permanence.” - Susan Campbell, March 2020 Susan Goethel Campbell’s work has been exhibited widely in the United States as well as in the UK, Germany, Switzerland, and Belgium. Her work is in numerous private and public collections including Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit, MI; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington D.C.; New York Public Library, New York, NY; Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT; Cranbrook Art Museum, Bloomfield Hills, MI; Toledo Museum of Art, Toledo, OH; Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Minneapolis, MN; Grand Rapids Art Museum, Grand Rapids, MI; and Spencer Museum of Art, Lawrence, KS. Campbell holds an MFA in printmaking from Cranbrook Academy of Art and has been awarded numerous grants and residencies. She lives and works in Metro Detroit.

Please join us on January 22nd for the opening of Salon, Redux at David Klein Gallery, Detroit. The exhibition, featuring the work of 27 artists, presents over 50 small scale works in various media including collage, drawing, painting, sculpture, ceramics, and photography. Participating artists: Ebitenyefa Baralaye, Emmy Bright, Caroline Del Giudice, Terry Lee Dill, Bakpak Durden, Patrick Ethen, James Benjamin Franklin, Matthew Hawtin, Alisa Henriquez, Scott Hocking, Brad Howe, Anthony Mastromatteo, Sylvain Malfroy-Camine, Mary-Ann Monforton, Brittany Nelson, Marianna Olague, Rachel Pontious, Benjamin Pritchard, Kelly Reemtsen, Jessica Rohrer, Robert Schefman, Lauren Semivan, Mark Sengbusch, Rosalind Tallmadge, Neha Vedpathak, Ricky Weaver and Richard Wilson.

David Klein Gallery is pleased to present Rosalind Tallmadge, Terrain, featuring Tallmadge’s latest series of paintings. An opening reception for the artist will take place on Saturday, November 13, 4 - 8 PM by appointment via TOCK. See below for link. Tallmadge is recognized for her multi-textured paintings incorporating manmade materials such as sequins and glass beads, with mica and metal leaf, creating surfaces that are evocative of substances found in nature, like tree bark or metamorphic rock. Using sequin fabric as her canvas she references the feminine body, costume, and the fashion industry within the framework of monochrome and color field painting, an historically male-dominated field. “Aside from the implicit politics of the medium, I want to create elusive, experiential paintings that activate the viewer’s body through their seductive light-based surfaces The pieces are meant to be organic, almost living beings that reveal themselves over time. They are both psychically interior and exterior, evoking degraded urban surfaces or worn rocks you would happen upon in nature.” - Rosalind Tallmadge, 2021 Possessing beauty and a luminous presence, Tallmadge’s paintings alternatively excavate and layer on light catching intervals of silver and gold leaf, often with sparkling additions of sequins and glitter. In this newest body of work for Terrain, the artist has delved into using natural minerals with chunky applications of various forms of mica. These chunks of mica, commonly found in igneous and metamorphic rock, offer a weighty companion to the use of more delicate materials like metal leaf, glass beads and sequins, creating a metaphor on the power that is produced by the combination of traditionally male and female characteristics. Rosalind Tallmadge, a native of Cincinnati, Ohio, is a multi-media artist, currently living and working in Brooklyn, New York. Her work is in multiple private and public collections and has been exhibited widely in New York City, Detroit and Chicago. Most recently she was included in the 2021 exhibition, With Eyes Opened: Cranbrook Academy of Art since 1932, Cranbrook Art Museum, Bloomfield Hills, MI. Tallmadge has received numerous awards and residencies including the Oxbow School of Art, the DNA Residency, Provincetown, MA and the Yale Summer School of Art, New Haven, CT. Rosalind Tallmadge received a BFA from Indiana University, Bloomington, IL and her MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art in 2015.

“Being out of my element is quite scary. It keeps me on my toes. Printmaking definitely fills that need. It allows me to shake it up a bit.” – Kelly Reemtsen David Klein Gallery, 163 Townsend St, Birmingham, MI is pleased to present a retrospective exhibition of Kelly Reemtsen’s prints and multiples. Over the past decade, Kelly has explored every tool in the printmaking toolbox; woodcut, screen print, lithography, and etching. This exhibition will include rare examples of her first large scale woodcuts Splitting Hairs and You Wouldn’t from 2012, unique hand painted etchings Twister Sister, Ground Breaking, and Birthday Girl from 2015 and her most recent screen prints Smashing and Dig It. In addition to prints, the exhibition will include important examples of Kelly’s sculptures – Xanax Rainbow (2012), Fuck The System (2015), and her most recent work Taking Shape (2020). Kelly Reemtsen MULTIPLES will run concurrently with her exhibition of new paintings A VIEW FROM L.A.at David Klein Gallery Detroit.

David Klein Gallery is pleased to present A View From L.A. featuring new paintings by Kim McCarty & Kelly Reemtsen. Also presenting, Bird’s Eye featuring new paintings and drawings by Jessica Rohrer. Kim McCarty and Kelly Reemtsen have maintained their studio practices in the city of Los Angeles for their entire careers. The climate and atmosphere of Southern California has a tangible effect on those who live and work there. Brilliant sun, blue skies, and the Pacific Ocean adjacent to the sprawling city weigh in, all permeating daily life. Color and light are at their best. Kim McCarty is known for her evanescent watercolors that evoke the impermanence of nature and humanity. She captures fleeting moments in time with fluid renderings of faces and figures, plants and flowers and domestic and wild animals, all are an intuitive response to the ever changing world around her. Adolescents become adults, nature relentlessly cycles through the seasons, blooming, fading and blooming again. McCarty’s process endeavors to create a delicate balance between realism and abstraction. She works quickly, embracing the transparency of the medium, often creating and losing images within seconds. With her most recent group of paintings, Kelly Reemtsen continues to explore the ongoing challenges faced by contemporary women. Widely recognized and avidly collected, Reemtsen has developed an iconic series of richly textured paintings that feature beautifully dressed women wielding the kind of powerful tools traditionally reserved for men. This recurring image acts as a metaphor for the capable women who arm themselves with quick minds, inherent talents, and the necessary resources to achieve success in today’s complicated world. For this exhibition, in addition to traditional presentations, Reemtsen has employed the use of rounded panels to focus in on her subjects. As always, her clever tongue-in-cheek titles make a point.

Jessica Rohrer’s recent work offers us a “Bird’s Eye” view as she continues the exploration of public and private space. With the use of a drone, Rohrer has moved outside of her own domestic space to explore the neighborhood around her. Her precise depictions of orderly streets, with their rows of perfect houses offer fascinating views of front walks, back porches, driveways, and sidewalks as seen from above, all in miniature. At first glance the meticulous images offer us a perspective that everything is the same and yet we know behind those front doors there are individuals living out their own private stories. Jessica Rohrer holds an MFA in painting from Yale University School of Art. She has a BA from Northwestern University and did post-graduate work at the Art Institute of Chicago. She has been awarded multiple residencies including Yaddo, Wave Hill and the Guttenberg Space and Time Residency. Rohrer‘s work is in multiple private collections and has been exhibited widely throughout the United States since 1998. She has been reviewed in numerous publications including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Art in America, and The New Yorker. Rohrer lives and works in New Jersey.

David Klein Gallery is pleased to present Best Times, featuring recent work by: Susan Campbell, Mitch Cope, Matthew Hawtin, Cooper Holoweski, Sylvain Malfroy-Camine, Ben Pritchard and Lauren Semivan. …I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer. -Nick Carraway, The Great Gatsby After long winters bereft of sunshine and rainy spring days the annual arrival of summer brings a return to color with bright blue skies, vibrant gardens, brilliant sunsets, and a certain kind of light unique to the season. It is the best of times. We celebrate the season and life refreshed with a selection of work from eight artists employing color in a multitude of ways. This summer begins again with Susan Goethel Campbell’s Lost City woodblock prints in layered hues of green and blue, Cooper Holoweski’s playful compositions with their purple and pink auras and Lauren Semivan’s painterly photographs in shades of red and pink. Matthew Hawtin’s minimalist collages of red, yellow, black and grey offer a subtle conversation on line and form and Mitch Cope’s large-scale tondo, Yellow Rose Moon, draws us into its buttery warmth. Sylvain Malfroy-Camine’s bright pointillist canvases are joyfully reminiscent of impressionist painting and provide an alternative use of color to Ben Pritchard’s richly layered abstractions. This summer, more than ever, we welcome a return to color and the best of times.

David Klein Gallery is pleased to present Two Painters: Carrie Moyer & Anke Weyer, both are New York based painters working in the abstract. Moyer and Weyer are recognized for their powerful, brilliantly hued, large-scale work, that confirms the relevance of abstraction now and in the future. Each of these artists has their own personal language, using her chosen medium of painting in a unique way. Weyer, with her use of gestural brushstrokes and raw color, is expressionistic in her process. Her instinctive approach is spontaneous and bold. Moyer’s paintings appear to be more refined and illusionistic. Her densely atmospheric imaginary landscapes, invite the viewer into a world saturated with color and wild forms. Carrie Moyer is known for her opulent paintings referencing pop art, color field and 1970s Feminist art which, at the same time, offer an original approach to contemporary abstraction. Her use of color has been described as “…the sole character, playing every role: energy, matter, ooze, architecture, the cosmic and the cosmos”… The selected paintings in this exhibition reveal her ongoing exploration of her medium, her use of gravity, form and color animating her work with a playful and yet infinite range of pictorial illusion. Anke Weyer attacks her canvases with visible physicality, the marks and brushstrokes building up compositions abounding in gesture and intense color. Spontaneous energy is evident in every painting, the work appearing to echo the physical movements of the artist as she takes on her monumentally scaled canvases. Weyer’s expressive brushstrokes and intense multifaceted colors vibrate off the canvas bringing a vibrant energy to the compositions. With influences derived from both landscape and the figure the artist’s mark making offers a nod to the street language of graffiti and leaves interpretation up to the viewer. Carrie Moyer’s work is in numerous public and private collections including the Eli & Edythe Broad Art Museum, East Lansing, MI; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY. Recent museum exhibitions include Three Graces: Polly Apfelbaum, Tony Feher and Carrie Moyer at the Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, NY; Carrie Moyer: Pirate Jenny, organized by the Tang Museum, Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, NY; and Carrie Moyer: Interstellar at the Worcester Art Museum, Worcester, MA. The work of Dyke Action Machine! Moyer’s public art collaboration with photographer Sue Schaffner, is currently on view at the Brooklyn Museum in their exhibition Agitprop! Carrie Moyer is the recipient of multiple awards including the Guggenheim Fellowship in Painting, the Joan Mitchell Foundation’s Anonymous Was a Woman Award, and the Creative Capital Foundation Grant. Moyer lives and works in New York City where she is currently an Associate Professor at Hunter College. Anke Weyer was born in Karlsruhe, Germany in 1974. She attended the Staatliche Hochschule für bildende Künste Städelschule, a highly competitive art school in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. In 1999 Weyer took a semester at Cooper Union, New York, NY, as an exchange student and moved permanently to New York City the following year. Her first solo exhibition was in 2020 at CANADA gallery in Tribeca, NYC. Since that time Weyer has exhibited widely in the U.S. and abroad including recent solo shows at CANADA, New York; Tim Van Laere Gallery, Antwerp, Belgium; Nino Mier Gallery, Los Angeles; and Office Baroque, Brussels; Belgium. She has recently participated in numerous group exhibitions including Women of Abstraction, MOCA Jacksonville, FL; Confronting the Canvas, Women of Abstraction, Museum of Contemporary Art, Jacksonville, FL; The Last Waltz (For Leon), Tim Van Laere Gallery , Antwerp, Belgium; and A Show Yet to be Titled, Lucie Fontaine, Milan, Italy. Weyer currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY and in the Western Catskills, NY. A monograph on the artist is forthcoming this year.

David Klein Gallery, 163 Townsend St, Birmingham, Michigan is pleased to present Emmy Bright Alone Together (Views from the Bottom of the Pool). This is Bright’s third solo exhibition with the gallery and will feature a new body of work created during the COVID – 19 Pandemic. In a recent conversation, Emmy Bright explored the origins of this new body of work and explained her elaborate working methods: One of my favorite things to do this past summer was to sit at the bottom of the pool. I would sit on the bottom holding the lowest rung of the ladder. And I’d keep myself there underwater until I was out of breath. I love looking up through the water to a rippled surface - even though you can’t see much from there. It is a very quiet and still place - with little sound too, but a lot can be felt - the temperature and currents of water. And it is very blue, or blue green or even dark depending on the time of day. I’m turning more and more to color for a certain kind of feeling. These drawings use line, movement, color, and removal to evoke intense emotion visually, rather than through text as I’ve done in the past. I use an elaborate inlay process where two sheets are colored, then repeatedly deconstructed and repaired with tape. What was cut from one panel appears in the other panel and vice versa. And the tape picks up tinted fingerprints, revealing my body and the work of repair. Some pieces were colored with special markers and brushes, but more and more I’ve been using my hands to move the ink across the paper. These works pay homage to places of beauty, visual sensuality, rest, and spaces for feeling and sensation. Amidst the fury of the now, I’m trying to make spaces to think, feel and breathe. Emmy Bright works in drawing, writing, print and performance. In all of these mediums, she explores the problems of empathy and the problems of boundaries. She often works with opposing binaries, like aloneness and togetherness, parts and wholes, breakage and repair, distance and connection. By working with opposites, she draws attention to how they connect, intermingle and depend on one another. In this current body of work, these opposites manifest as two sides of each panel (left and right or top and bottom.) The work contains strong variegated strokes of monochromatic color that are repeatedly cut into then reassembled and then taped, and these acts of removal and repair feel especially symbolic in the difficulty of the now. Bright has produced projects and exhibited extensively throughout the United States and Internationally. She has been awarded fellowships and residencies at Ox-Bow School of Art, Vermont Studio Center, New Urban Arts, University of Hawaii, and Haystack School of Crafts. She is currently an Artist in Residence and Head of Print Media at Cranbrook Academy of Art (Bloomfield Hills, MI). She lives and works in Southwest Detroit. Image caption: Emmy Bright, Between Us (This Side of the Blue) - 2020, Marker and tape on Yupo, 43 x 52 inches

David Klein Gallery is pleased to present a new installation by Lucia Hierro. The Bronx-based artist is known for her room-size installations of digital two-dimensional domestic environments that are often accompanied by supersized three-dimensional renditions of familiar grocery items. Hierro acknowledges the iconic mainstays of the Latin American home and table with images of plantains, Mazola corn oil, potted plants, devotional candles, and Fabuloso All Purpose Cleaner. These everyday objects are visual clues to the Dominican American culture the artist seeks to share with her audience. Hierro points out that “the TV in the ‘living Room’ is on a default screensaver of a tropical island reminiscent of the Dominican Republic”. The food items, furniture and decorations “allude to having a little piece of home one way or another. They are a nagging reminder that if not for circumstances American Imperialism brings to the island, we wouldn't need to be here busting our butts in bad weather”. The installation title, Y Quien Quiere ta' Comiendo Mierda e' Hielo, Cuando Puede ta' Bailando Algo Mejor? is named after lyrics in Dominican singer Rita Indiana’s song La Hora de Volver. Roughly translated it means "And who'd want to be eating shit ice when you could be dancing something better?" Lucia Hierro received a BFA from SUNY Purchase and an MFA from Yale School of Art. Her work has been exhibited in museums and galleries in the U.S. and abroad, including the Perez Art Museum, Miami, FL; the Bronx Museum of Arts, Bronx, NY and The Museum of the African Diaspora, San Francisco, CA. Her first solo museum exhibition, Marginal Costs, will open at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT, in June 2021. Residencies include Yaddo, Saratoga Springs, NY; Redbull Arts, Detroit, MI and Casa Quien, Santa Domingo. Lucia Hierro lives and works in New York City. Caption:LUCIA HIERRO IN HER STUDIO, PHOTO BY KEVIN CLAIBORNE

David Klein Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of new work by Boston based artist Lavaughan Jenkins. He is known for his three dimensional sculptural “paintings” that merge figuration with abstraction. Starting with a wire and foam armature, Jenkins builds up his figures with large dollops of richly colored oil paint, fleshing out the vibrant characters. The women are often portrayed in what appears to be lushly colored ball gowns while the men are casually dressed in a suggestion of contemporary street wear. For this exhibition, the artist has given this particular group of figures titles of songs from his childhood such as I Say a Little Prayer by Aretha Franklin, Ghetto Child by Curtis Mayfield and Who Am I by The O’Jay’s. Jenkins states, “I picked these songs specifically for their story telling. Each one hits hard and tells you exactly how it is and who we are as Black people. These figures, both kneeling and standing, tell our truths, standing for all who can no longer do so.” Lavaughan Jenkins holds a BFA from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design. He has participated in multiple exhibitions in the U.S. and in Beijing China. Jenkins was recently awarded the James and Audrey Foster Prize, presented by the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston. Previous awards include the Blanche E. Colman Award and the Rob Moore Grant in Painting. Lavaughan Jenkins lives and works in Boston, MA Caption: Lavaughan Jenkins in his studio

2020 was a year of uncertainty, but one thing we know that remained constant was artists making art. Maybe there was a pause at the beginning, but ultimately artists found the inspiration to keep moving forward. Whether they continued to explore an ongoing body of work or create something entirely new, their practice endured. We invite you see the results of time spent at home, in the studio, in the city, in the country, on a river. Presenting new work by Ebitenyefa Baralaye, Susan Goethel Campbell, Matthew Hawtin, Scott Hocking, Cooper Holoweski, Kim McCarty, Mario Moore, Marianna Olague, Jason Patterson, Kelly Reemtsen, Robert Schefman, Lauren Semivan, Mark Sengbusch, Rosalind Tallmadge and Ricky Weaver.

David Klein Gallery, 1520 Washington Boulevard, Detroit, Michigan is pleased to announce the opening of Gatekeepers, an exhibition of new paintings by Marianna Olague. A reception for the artist will take place on Saturday, November 7, 1–8 PM, by reservation via Tock. Olague’s work is about living in the borderland desert of El Paso, Texas, a predominately Hispanic city on the Mexican border. The Frontera is almost 2000 miles long, running from southern Texas all the way to southern California. It’s physical and psychological existence has a deep impact on the people who live in the cities and rural towns along the border. In El Paso, the border fence juts up against neighborhoods and playgrounds, it’s looming presence a two-story wire-mesh fence sitting atop a concrete slab. The brutalist structure of the fence blocks the former views of the Rio Grande and its surrounding greenery. Residents say they are used to it now. Throughout art history artists have called upon family members, friends and neighbors to sit for them. Olague continues that tradition, inviting her family to be the subjects of her narrative paintings. She is adept at capturing their likenesses but also their personalities and inner presence. In the painting, Mom Delivers Grubhub, the expression on her mother’s face and her bearing as she climbs the steps tells a story at one glance. The young man’s posture and his t-shirt, spiked necklace and tattoos in Todo Se Vuelve Alma, suggests what might be on his mind and in his heart. "I use portraiture to explore what it means to be Mexican American in the 21st century, providing a glimpse into the private lives of my own family. Like most people of color, my family members were born into poverty and still cling to the idea of the American dream in hopes of rising above their circumstances. This series of portraits captures those moments of minority struggle and labor but also moments of idleness, daydreaming and disillusionment that accompany the Mexican American experience." -Marianna Olague, October 2020 Olague’s use of pure brilliant color adds a dazzling vitality to the sun-bleached landscape of southern Texas. Shedding the expected palette, blue skies become orange, concrete walls look like sunsets and foliage turns cobalt blue. All becomes a celebration of the native culture and community of the borderland city of El Paso. Marianna thinks of her beloved subjects as Gatekeepers: “As children of migrant parents and grandparents, Mexican Americans have little to call their own in a country that finds new ways to deny their existence, but what is most immediate, most undeniably ours is the culture we grew up in. Being Mexican American means family, culture and place become sources of immeasurable pride and security. Within each painting, my loved ones act as gatekeepers of their own private worlds, guarding domestic and public spaces perceived as threats to American white consciousness.” Marianna Olague lives and works in El Paso, Texas. She holds an MFA in painting from Cranbrook Academy of Art, Bloomfield Hills, MI and a BFA from the University of El Paso, El Paso TX. In 2019 Olague was named an Artist in Residence at the Kunstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin, Germany and awarded an Artist in Residence at the Chinati Foundation, Marfa, Texas in 2020. Olague’s work is in multiple private and public collections including the Rubin center for Visual Arts in El Paso, TX and Cranbrook Art Museum in Bloomfield Hills, MI. She will have her first solo exhibition at David Klein Gallery, Detroit, in November 2020.

Familiar is a show that explores interconnected personal and diasporic histories. The title of this exhibition uses the word Familiar to examine our understandings and perceptions of what we believe we know. What is our understanding of American history in the context of Black lives? How can we expand our concepts of the personal, domestic and historical? Each artist allows the viewer an inside look beyond negative tropes of how blackness is portrayed historically and through contemporary lenses. Familiar includes photography, paintings and drawings that explore an intersection where the intimacy of Black culture meets. Some of the work quarries the archives of history to highlight specific individuals and stories, while others focus on spaces that are familiar in our everyday lives—a commonality outside viewers may be estranged to. This show gives each artist the room to explore their own ideas while also forming a shared overlapping and understanding of relationships.

Viewing art history through a female lens, Elise Ansel translates Old Master paintings into vibrant contemporary abstractions. Improvising on the historical artworks, Ansel implements the color and composition of the masterpieces adding gestural expression to her interpretations. Her brushstrokes make a visible map of her movements as she vigorously applies the paint to canvas.

David Klein Gallery is pleased to present Al Held: Watercolors. This exhibition offers the opportunity to view rare watercolor paintings by Held, which were created at his studio in Camerata di Todi, Italy in the early 1990s.

Alternative Testimony features the work of four artists who use traditional and historical photographic processes in alternative ways. Experimenting with early techniques such as Cyanotype, Photogram, Mordancage and Bromoil, Cyrus Karimipour, Aspen Mays, Brittany Nelson and Meghann Riepenhoff move these techniques into the present tense, disregarding or obscuring representational imagery in the final results.

David Klein Gallery is pleased to kick off 2020 with a presentation of recent paintings, photographs, and sculpture by gallery artists both new and familiar: Ebitenyefa Baralaye, Matthew Hawtin, Scott Hocking, Jisoo Hur, Mario Moore, Marianna Olague, Robert Schefman, and Corine Vermeulen.

Kenny Scharf is widely known for his pop culture murals, paintings, sculpture, and installations. Scharf considers himself a “Pop Surrealist”. As Scharf states: In the early 1980’s, Scharf was a prominent member of the East Village art scene along with his friends and contemporaries Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring. Scharf participated in many significant exhibitions in New York at that time including the Times Square Show, Club 57 at Club 57, the Open Studio Show at P.S.1 and the 1985 Whitney Biennial. Most recently, Scharf was included in Club 57: Film, Performance and Art in the East Village, 1978-1983 at the Museum of Modern Art and Fast Forward: Paintings from the 1980’s at the Whitney Museum of American Art, both in New York, NY. His murals can be found in multiple cities in the U.S. and abroad, including Los Angeles, CA; New York, NY; Wynwood, FL; Careyes, Mexico; Paris, France; Sao Paulo, Brazil; and Malaga, Spain. Scharf’s Detroit exhibition will feature a number of seminal works including Handy Andy, 2008, Bearjungle, 2010, and Probz, 2018. As a child growing up in 1950s and 60s, Scharf was intrigued and inspired by popular TV culture, especially the saturated color and imagery of daytime cartoons like The Jetsons and The Flintstones. These characters and the wildly imaginative landscapes they inhabit have had a profound influence on Scharf’s work. The cartoons’ playfulness and sunny optimism continue to a provide a foundation for his best work.

Recovery features silverpoint drawings of significant African-American artists, writers, musicians and revolutionaries at rest or enjoying a leisurely activity. Moore, who often paints on copper panels, presents a group of intimately sized portraits of close friends as well as a self-portrait. A focal point of the show is a large-scale oil on canvas titled A Student’s Dream, which depicts Moore lying on a table in what appears to be an early operating theater. The painting is a reference to Moore’s recent awake craniotomy, a surgery he underwent to remove a benign brain tumor. Also included in the exhibition are two recent videos: I Wish It Was Mine and Sorry for the Interruption, produced during Moore’s 2017 residency at the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation. After enduring his own physical trauma and surgery, Moore sought to examine the nature of recovery from trauma and stress and how it is experienced by black men in our contemporary society. He states: “The process of recovery is imperative for a body that has endured a certain trauma or physical strain. Yet, In America, there is an expectation for Black men to perpetually prevail—to keep working, keep fighting, and deny the body rest – despite the pains they may endure. Throughout history, Black men in America have been bombarded with endless conflict against their minds and bodies, rarely ever having opportunity to consider self-care.” Mario Moore, was born and raised in Detroit. He holds a BFA from College for Creative Studies, Detroit and an MFA from Yale, New Haven, CT. His work is in numerous private and public collections including the Detroit Institute of Arts, Winston-Salem State University and Knox College. He was recently awarded the prestigious Hodder Fellowship by Princeton University.

A sixth-generation Detroiter, Hocking is descended from generations of Baltic Polish immigrants and Cornish copper miners who settled in the Upper Peninsula’s Copper Harbor. Hocking states: “The idea of copper mining being a huge part of my family history connected to an overall theme for me. Copper mining in the Upper Peninsula has been going on for thousands of years. The earliest natives living in this region around the Great Lakes were classified as the Old Copper Complex and copper artifacts from this culture can be dated up to 6000 or more years ago...In my time making art in Detroit, copper has always been the most coveted scrap metal, scavenged from any place possible. Scrapping has slowed in Detroit in the last 10 years, but the importance of copper in Detroit is a system that’s thousands of years old, moreover, it’ s a continual form of currency, trade, and a coveted material.” Hocking considers the exhibition to be a culmination of two decades of producing his work in Detroit. The various stages of his practice as an artist are represented by iconic artifacts and sculptures as well as photographic images of several of his significant projects including the Tower of Babel and the Celestial Ship of the North (Emergency Ark) aka The Barnboat. He notes that all of the projects in the show tie into the concept of all that is OLD. With OLD, Hocking addresses the looming presence of a large column in the middle of the gallery with a site- specific installation inspired by a visit he made to the Paris Catacombs in 2015. Throughout history mankind has built cities on top of the cities and graves of the people who came before them. Hocking states that in Detroit, ancient Native-American burial mound sites are in the more industrialized and worked over parts of the city. “...There's a connection to the ancient past, tied in with my familial past, tied in with my personal history.” Hocking is recognized internationally for his interventions into urban and rural landscapes that reference mythology, mysticism and folklore. He has produced and documented numerous site-specific installations in Australia, France, Germany, and Mexico, as well as in multiple locations in the U.S. including Georgia, Indiana, Pennsylvania, Texas and Michigan. His work has been included in numerous exhibitions both nationally and internationally including the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, The Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts Museum, The Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the Smart Museum of Art and the Kunst-Werk Institute of Contemporary Art in Berlin, among others.