Artists: Nina Chanel Abney, Doug Aitken, Hernan Bas, McArthur Binion, Amoako Boafo, Akea Brionne, Davariz Broaden, Marcus Brutus, Nick Cave, Jack Craig, Arthur Dove, Conrad Egyir, Olafur Eliasson, Beverly Fishman, Helen Frankenthaler, Jeffrey Gibson, Barkley L. Hendricks, Jammie Holmes, Anthony James, Lester Johnson, Rashid Johnson, Fidelis Joseph, Ewa Juszkiewicz, Kerry James Marshall, Tiff Massey, Tony Matelli, A.H. Maurer, Allie McGhee, Mario Moore, Sara Nickleson, A.F. Oehmke, Anders Ruhwald, Henry Taylor, Mickalene Thomas, Matt Wedel, and Tom Wesselmann.
Seen/Scene: Artwork from the Jennifer Gilbert Collection is an exhibition that features the work of thirty-six contemporary artists and is the exciting premiere of Gilbert’s private collection to a public audience. The selection and curation is by Laura Mott, Chief Curator at Cranbrook Art Museum, and the seminal artist Nick Cave. The title of the exhibition—Seen/Scene—nods to the thematic focus on portraiture and also an homage to Cave’s epic and culture-changing Detroit project Here Hear presented throughout the city a decade ago.
The exhibition asks: how do we see each other? What does it mean to really truly look at each other and ourselves as neighbors and a community? The subjects of the portraits selected for this exhibition all inhabit their own internal worlds that we can parse through the artists’ visual styles—some starkly representational, others allude to the body in more abstract ways—which collectively present a spectrum of human experience and self-exploration.
The Jennifer Gilbert collection also has extensive holdings of Detroit-based artists and alumni/Artists-In-Residence from the Cranbrook Academy of Art, a historically significant graduate program located in Metro Detroit in the fields of art, craft, and design. The exhibition features exceptional examples from both these holdings, including Allie McGhee, Mario Moore, Fidelis Joseph, Jack Craig, Sara Nickleson, McArthur Binion, Beverly Fishman, Conrad Egyir, Tiff Massey, Anders Ruhwald, Akea Brionne, and Nick Cave. Collectively, they highlight the brilliant ingenuity and inventiveness that comes from the minds of Cranbrook and Detroit artists and designers.
As a special commission, Cave has created a two-story virtual-reality sculpture from his recent series Amalgams. Under the soaring dome of The Shepherd, the towering self-portrait is the virtual draft of an upcoming bronze public monument, a continuation of his social engagement that asks us: who do we see? Who is revered and who is invisible in our civic spaces?
Ultimately, the exhibition will be a theater of the gaze—audience to artworks, to themselves, and to their surroundings. The aim is for the gaze to continue beyond the building, into the growing neighborhood of Little Village, into the city of Detroit and beyond.
Seen/Scene: Artwork from the Jennifer Gilbert Collection is presented at the Shepherd with support from Cranbrook Art Museum and Library Street Collective. The exhibition is complemented by an upcoming publication with an essay by Laura Mott and designed by Bob Faust.
