The show ‘I don’t believe in art. I believe in artists’ only has 2 Saturdays left before the show comes down on May 22nd (Or you could always setup an appointment)! Here is an excerpt from the catalog which is available for $5. Mary Fortuna also contributed to the catalog, but you’ll have to get your hands on it to read it!

Opening Night

[Sarah Turner] Borrowing a statement attributed to Marcel Duchamp, curator Cedric Tai puts himself in good company – and declares the mission of this exhibition: artists first.

Even though I know this title statement is taken out of context, from another time and another place – and probably said to incite, not to advocate – I can’t help turning it over in my head and wondering which I believe in. Then, I remember: I don’t believe in quotes.

But, when I meet Cedric Tai on a Sunday night in the bright white space that is Whitdel Arts, I believe in him. And he believes in artists. Giving them carte blanche to install their work on their own terms and in their own ways, Cedric holds back as a curator. In this, he allows another role that he values to come forward – that of facilitator and advocate, “In Detroit it seems that the more people you know…, not the more money you have, the more [power] you have. Detroit is like a poor paying job with a lot of perks”.

In the gallery, each artist takes a discreet and separate space and for the most part, the exhibition sticks to conventions in presentation- sculptures are on the floor, in vitrines and on pedestals. Paintings are on the walls and video is projected with ample room to stand back and view it (one large and notable exception to these conventions is the work of Megan Heeres: colorful breathing bellows that force the transition from one space to another by expanding out of the walls and pressing against the interior structure of the building itself).

But between the individual artist displays, there are thresholds, windows, corners and edges. And in these areas, Tai steps back in. Not as a curator, but as a connector and collaborator – inviting the artists to make pieces with him that bridge the distinct bodies of work. As I walk from the grid of Janine Surma’s photographs into Justin Marshall’s living room, I am made aware of the dusty new concrete floor and small steps. Scattered animal stickers cover the threshold and lead from Surma’s cats and dogs to Marshall’s purple room of stylized motifs. Scuff marks from the many feet at the opening the night before have dulled the bright colors of the vinyl and the stickers are fading into the floor.

A collaboration in a window by Ian Swanson and Cedric Tai

Turning the corner, Ian Swanson’s paintings seem to be a solid version of pooling and evaporating industrial liquid. Bounced against Adrian Hatfield’s deep blue painted myth-scape, the room is delicately anchored by a set of bicycle handlebars wrapped in blue tape. Perhaps seizing the opportunity of the blue, the tape and of painting, Tai and Swanson have created ‘Interference’ which presents as a painting, but is a graphic flattening of the recessed window between two rooms.

This method continues: free-spirited interventions, each a collaboration with the artists, move me from room to room. Small cast ‘gemstones’ stick to the wall and serve as concentrated punctuation points between Heeres’ large air-filled sculptures and Isaac Richard’s grainy self-portraits. Next, delicate wood tines build a geometric structure that literally bridges space, reaching from the walls of Richard’s photographs to the pedestal supporting his video’s projector – making a physical connection between the still and the moving images.

These collaborative pieces of the exhibition are quick and straight-forward, serving simultaneously as a transition and a pause as I move through the rooms. And these pieces are the material manifestation of Tai’s ambitions beyond this project – to link artists, develop shared opportunities and “insist through as many ways as possible that everything is connected”.

So, for at least one cool Sunday night in southwest Detroit, I don’t have to choose between believing in art or believing in artists – I can believe in the spaces between.

Isaac Richard’s Video and Megan Heeres’ breathing walls

About the contributing writers of the catalog:

Mary Fortuna has been active in the Detroit art community for twenty-plus years. She graduated from Wayne State University with a BFA in 1992. She has exhibited her work extensively all over Michigan; in Berlin, Germany; Bregenze, Austria; Beijing, China; and elsewhere in the United States. Over a period of many years, she has served on the Forum for Contemporary Art at the Detroit Institute of Arts, and on the exhibition committees for the Detroit Artist Market, Detroit Focus and Paint Creek Center for the Arts. She is a member of artist collectives The Slippery Weasel Society and Changing Cities/Moving Walls. She has worked as a gallery director; picture framer; group home program coordinator; cook on a dive boat and on the midnight shift at a long series of greasy spoons; and as a part-time reindeer. She is currently employed as the Exhibition Director at Paint Creek Center for the Arts in Rochester, Michigan. When she’s not at work she sews and knits and plays with dolls.

Sarah Turner is the Assistant Director for Academic Affairs at the Cranbrook Academy of Art. She holds a BA in Sociology from Smith College, studied jewelry and furniture at the Oregon College of Art & Craft in Portland and received an MFA in Metalsmithing from the Cranbrook Academy of Art. Following a 2004 Fulbright Fellowship to the Netherlands, where she produced the exhibition, ‘Long Strides In Tiny Shoes’, Sarah taught in the Art Departments of SUNY New Paltz and the Rhode Island School of Design. A recent project is the exhibition ‘to be (determined) : an exhibition of the first five’ which she co-curated with artist Maria Phillips at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Currently, Sarah is on the advisory committee of the Society of North American Goldsmiths and a new board member of the Southeast Michigan Fulbright Association.

‘I don’t believe in art. I believe in artists’ walkthrough from Cedric Tai on Vimeo.