EXHIBITIONS / PAST EXHIBITIONS

ART SPIEGELMAN: PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG %@&*!
May 29 - July 26, 2009

“It's a manifesto, a diary, a crumpled suicide note and a still-relevant love letter to the medium I adore."
— Art Spiegelman

In 1978, an alienated and ignored underground cartoonist named Art Spiegelman published Breakdowns. By producing this publication, Spiegelman, a respected but misunderstood fixture of the underground comix scene was attempting to break a long-standing social and cultural taboo by calling himself an artist and his medium an art form.

Breakdowns was instrumental in making comics culturally respectable, helping them to infiltrate mainstream libraries and universities. In Breakdowns Spiegelman explored and expanded comics, their boundaries and limitations, transforming a medium that was generally regarded as cheerful and banal into a site of artistic exploration, biographical testimony and a territory to exorcize personal demons.

The exhibition zooms in on a few excerpts from the now iconic book juxtaposed with film, drawings and mementos that highlight Art Spiegelman's personal history and some of his key influences; it also sheds light on the forces that helped him revolutionize his art form.

Spiegelman's interest in art, experimental films, and popular and underground culture (among other high and low sources) became his inspiration and tools to look incisively at and question the “stuff" of his own medium. This exhibition presents some of the unique, rich and multilayered sources that served as his springboard to embarking on a quest to forever rupture the illusion of time that the drawn boxes had imposed on the printed page until then.

Curated by Luis Croquer

Art Spiegelman: Portrait of the Artist as a Young %@&*! is organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit.

LINKAGE
ARTISTS SELECT ARTISTS
May 29 - July 26, 2009

Art Spiegelman selects Gary Panter
Gary Panter selects Bob Zoell
Bob Zoell selects Roger Herman
Roger Herman selects Eli Langer
Eli Langer selects Michael Rashkow
Michael Rashkow selects Nancy De Holl
Nancy De Holl selects Jesse Chapman
Jesse Chapman selects Michael Delucia

Throughout the history of art, mentoring, influence, appropriation and personal relationships between artists have been crucial to the creation of artworks. Linkage, Artists Select Artists explores the broad and seemingly unrelated influences between a chain of nine artists originated by the creator of the graphic novel, Art Spiegelman.

Each of the artists in the exhibition suggested a fellow artist and also personally selected one or several works of art to represent them in the show, creating through this process a unique network that encompasses diverse generations, approaches, artistic practices and mediums.

The exhibition aims to highlight the strong, functional and enriching relationships, as well as the informal support structures that exist within the artistic community, raising the question not only of who an artist looks at and supports, but also whose work an artist thinks and dialogues with.

The artists in Linkage, Artists Select Artists are bound by friendships, common interests and explicit and/or subtle connections in the works they create, providing the unexpected juxtapositions, the freshness and the free-flowing narrative of exhibitions that are more often found outside institutional frameworks.

Linkage, Artists Select Artists is organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit.
The artworks included were personally selected by the artists in the exhibition. MOCAD is grateful to all those who made this exhibition possible, especially the artists, Art Spiegelman, Gary Panter, Bob Zoell, Roger Herman, Eli Langer, Michael Rashkow, Nancy de Holl, Jesse Chapman and Michael Delucia, whose work and commitment to the show have been crucial to see it realized. We also acknowledge Marsha Miro, Board President and Founding Director, Burt Aaron, the MOCAD Exhibitions and Programming Committee and Chris Byrne for contacting the artists and for the initial ideas that helped to shape this show. Thanks also to Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York, Alan Koppel Gallery, Chicago, Jason and Leslie Pickleman and the Harkey Family Collection for their generous loans to the exhibition.

JESPER JUST | WITH MIXED EMOTIONS
May 29 - July 26, 2009

This exhibition focuses on three works by Danish artist Jesper Just: The Lonely Villa, 2004, No Man Is an Island II, 2004, and A Vicious Undertow, 2007.

Just creates works that explore the interstitial spaces between the visual and sculptural fields, appropriating and reinventing conventions used as narrative devices in avant-garde, noir and mainstream cinema. His films often resist the narrative impulse and are constructed from fragments that usually connect traditional cinematic story lines. The process of linking inconsequential moments creates visual corridors and passages that seduce viewers with sensual and stylized imagery, and guide them into a labyrinthine experience that often contains an invisible but tangible, powerful and cryptic emotional charge.

The three works selected for this exhibition touch upon unresolved human relationships and interactions mostly between men and, in the case of A Vicious Undertow, a triangle composed of an older woman and a younger couple.

In all three films, Just uses popular music as a vehicle to move the viewer in unexpected directions, counteracting and avoiding the linearity and narrative aspect that music imposes in the traditional soundtrack.

The artist uses music, decontextualizing and sometimes transforming it to a point were it is barely recognizable. The juxtaposition of images and pop songs creates a non-hierarchical series of correspondences that at times seem familiar and, at others, impenetrable—engaging the viewer in an experience that is mental, emotional and physical.

Curated by Luis Croquer

Jesper Just | With Mixed Emotions is organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit.