Windy City Trade

Special to The Oakland Press

    Museum of New Art (MONA) founder Jef Bourgeau wants Detroit's fine arts to be known nationally and internationally.

    A first step is “Changing Cities: Detroit,” an exhibit of five metro-Detroit artists showing until March 22 at ThreeWalls Gallery in Chicago.

      “The outside world isn't aware of the exciting work being created in Detroit's art community,” says the museum director. “This project will export this art to people who are always looking for something fresh and new.”

    A weakening economy has shrunk the number of top-tier Detroit art galleries that can build an artist’s career from about 20 in the 1990s to only a handful today.

    Rebecca Hart, assistant curator of contemporary art at the Detroit Institute of Arts, acknowledges that because state funding dried up, the museum isn’t doing shows exclusively featuring Detroit artists, as it did in the 1980s and 1990s.

    “What Jef is doing is great,” she adds. “Anything that gives Detroit-based artists a wider audience is great.”

Today’s tough market demands creative ways to promote local artists, says Bourgeau. About two years ago, Bourgeau came up with the idea of an artist exchange. He would put together a pool of varied artists and contact galleries looking for curators interested in sampling art from the birthplace of Motown and the automobile.

“Detroit has always had a great reputation for music,” says Bourgeau. “And we have a reputation as being a tough edgy town. It's time to build on both these with our visual arts.”

He found a kindred spirit in Chicago art consultant Paul Klein, 61, who selected eight Chicago area artists to exhibit at the Museum of New Art (MONA) in “Changing Cities: Chicago” last spring. Klein also helped locate the Chicago gallery Three Walls to show Detroit artists, which in addition to Bourgeau, include Mary Fortuna of Royal Oak, Alison Wong of Birmingham, Hartmut Austen of Rochester Hills and Cyrus Karimipour of Bloomfield Hills.

    “The good art in Detroit doesn’t get a fair shake,” agrees Klein.

    ThreeWalls is happy to show art from its sister city of Detroit. “It is important so the Chicago art community can interact with the larger art community, especially their peers in neighboring cities like Detroit,” says Jonathan Rhodes, 28, executive director of ThreeWalls.

    Stig Eklund, 32, will show “Just a Killer for Your Love,” a shadowy installation of black and white photographs and a video. The work communicates a post-Sept. 11 sense of anxiety, isolation and just under-the-surface menace.

    Fortuna, 51, will show six or seven unearthly dolls suspended from the ceiling and pieces from “The Hanging Garden” series. The dolls, made from leather, wood and clay, have animal and human parts, while the “Hanging Garden” pieces have plant, flower, fruit and animal elements. Fortuna, exhibitions director at Paint Creek Center for the Arts in Rochester, understands the importance of showing artwork broadly.

    “It feeds the work,” says the Royal Oak artist, who has shown work in Chicago several times before. “Any opportunity to expose your work is a good thing.”

    Karimipour, a 34-year-old photographer, will display work from his “Invented Memory” series, photographs that combine pieces of different images to create fictional narratives. This will be the first Chicago exhibit for Karimipour, who earned a master’s degree in fine arts from Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills.

    “I think (the art exchange) is a fantastic idea,” he says. “With regard to the arts, Michigan is perhaps the most crippled state. There’s no funding and it’s hard to get people out to shows.”

    Wong, 25, of Birmingham will show several oil paintings and colored pencil drawings that use bright colors, floating animals and iconic imagery to explore romantic love. Wong, who is the exhibition and education coordinator at The Anton Art Center in Mount Clemens, grew up in the Chicago suburb of Park Forest. She is happy to return to her hometown for the Three Walls show.

    “Detroit and Chicago are so similar in a lot of ways, but also so different,” she says. “All of the Midwest has a consistent feeling to it that I love.”

    Austen, a Rochester Hills painter, will show oil paintings that veer between abstract and representational and explore the process of painting while reflecting the artist’s observations and experience.

    German-born and raised, Austen, 40, came to Detroit nine years ago following his girlfriend, a metro Detroiter. He is an adjunct professor at the College for Creative Studies in Detroit and Wayne State University and a nonresident instructor at Maine College of Art and Design in Portland.

    Beyond Chicago, Bourgeau is trying to arrange shows in Toronto, Los Angeles, New York, Berlin and Amsterdam. To avoid high shipping costs, artwork may be taken out of frames and rolled in tubes or sent as digital image files on CDs - to be reprinted at the other end. Also, Bourgeau wants to build up a large pool of artists who represent all of Detroit’s varied art community.

“There is a strong community of artists doing great work in Detroit,” he says. “This will help create an identity

for us all.”

“Bluebird” by Mary Fortuna.