Curated by Christopher Stackhouse
January 23rd  - March 7th, 2025

The University Art Collection at Wayne State includes a wide range of expression in the traditional mediums and modes of modernist and contemporary art. It continues to grow in cultural representation, thematic interests, and technological and conceptual import. This exhibition offers a chance to revisit various social attitudes about form and content in painting and drawing which have for several decades sustained an influential regional sensibility. Gathered together are paintings, drawings, prints, and a handful of three-dimensional objects that demonstrate expansive notions of painting. 

Among works by local Detroit artists like Tyree Guyton, Gordon Newton, Gilda Snowden, and Ed Fraga, there are two indices by international contemporary artists, a lithograph by Thomas Bayrle of Germany, and a painting by Takeshi Kawashima of Japan. Floral still lifes from various members of the Cass Corridor group are in the inventory, showing an academic temperament that complements the urban toughness for which those artists are known. Paintings have also been gathered from across generations, showing how painters working in Detroit have been probing the possibilities of figuration over time: the earliest from 1890, a Great Lakes marinescape by Seth Arca Whipple, to the most recent, a monochromatic portrait of Hughie Lee-Smith by Joshua Rainer, acquired by the University Art Collection in 2025.

Responding to the collection, the curatorial motif probes the perceptual delineations between figuration and abstraction. There are concise representational images like Robert Kogge’s Untitled Still Life with Curtain from 1984; and then, there is Richard Kozlow’s ably rendered Clouds from 1970, that can be read as both a cropped section of a partly sunny sky, and, as a minimalist monochromatic light blue painting. Artist Michael Luchs further tests the boundaries of figuration in a selection of drawings from 1988 that study the geometric properties of eyeglasses. Luchs reduces the eyewear down to basic compositions of curves, circles, polygons, and lines. Some painters negotiating figuration and abstraction through expressive paint handling are Shirley Reid Woodson, Lila Kadaj, Irma Cavat, and James Pujdowski.

In the salon tradition, near 100 works by 77 artists brought together in such concentrated proximity reveal a lively conversation among a community of painters in, around and affiliated with the University Art Collection and its Fine Arts program.

– Christopher Stackhouse, Curator

Robert Bailey, Untitled, n.d., graphite and ink on paper collage, 16 1/2 × 13 7/8 in
Courtesy of Wayne State University Art Collection
Gift of the artist, 2024

Nancy Mitchnick, Untitled, 1980, charcoal on paper, 12 x 9 in
Courtesy of Wayne State University Art Collection
Gift of James Pearson Duffy, 2008

Mel Rosas, Old and New Dreams, 1987, oil on panel, 18 × 23 in.
Courtesy of Wayne State University Art Collection
Gift of Virginia Johnstone in memory of William Johnstone, 2019

Joshua Rainer, Portrait of Hughie Lee-Smith, 2025, oil on canvas mounted on board, 18 × 14 in.
Wayne State University Art Collection, Purchase, 2025

Shirley Woodson Reid, I'll Be Watching You, No. 2, 1996, acrylic on canvas, 66 × 52 in.
Wayne State University Art Collection,
Purchase Art Collection Endowment Acquisitions Fund, 2022

Wayne State University Art Collection and Galleries has received the Joyce Foundation’s 2025 Creative Impact Award, an award that celebrates artists and organizations that have significantly contributed to the cultural and creative vibrancy ofthe Great Lakes region. This unrestricted award acknowledges the university's dedication to advancing creative practicesand programs. This grant has supported the efforts of curator Christopher Stackhouse.