Recent Acquisitions & Selections From the Oakland University Art Collection

COVID-19 Protocols

Over 40 works acquired from six decades of collecting explores the depth of the Oakland University Art Collection, providing the opportunity to preview our most recent acquisitions

Featuring

Horst Antes, John James Audubon, David Barr, Rigaud Benoit, Fernando Botero, Hilo Chen, Eduardo Chillida, Joseph Cornell, Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot, Mary Corse, Piero Dorazio, Lyonel Feininger, Walter Firle, George Fiske, Ed Fraga, Max Gerbier, Jane Hammond, Al Held, Chido Johnson, Alex Katz, Richard Lindner, Eric Mesko, Malcom Morley, Edvard Munch, Alice Neel, Arnold Newman, Gordon Newton, Max Peckstein, John Piet, Carlos Rolón, George Segal, Djanira da Motta e Silva, Gilda Snowden, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, Mark Tobey, Jacques Villon, Terry Winters, and Wayne Higby.

Curated by

Dick Goody and Leo Barnes

Alex Katz
Carlos Rolón
Chido Johnson
Djanira da Motta e Silva
Ed Fraga
Fernando Botero
Gilda Snowden
Gilda Snowden
Jane Hammond
John Piet
John Piet
Karl Schmidt-Rottluff
Malcom Morley
Richard Artschwager

alex katz

America, b.1927

One of America’s greatest living figurative painters, Katz’s paintings resonate because of their enduring stylistically consistency, which so accurately conveys the economic precision of their narratives. The two corporate entities picked out here in Katz’ aesthetic viewfinder, but for the glasses, and the fact that a pandemic has curbed many such activities, could have been standing on that Manhattan corner anytime over the last fifty years. The artist’s bleached dynamic style is timeless in its flattened, elegant, simplicity.

Gift of Dr. George E.F. and Maxine L.R. Brewer

Donald and Roy

oil on canvas31.75”x 46.5”x 2.5" View alex katz's Work

carlos rolón

American, b.1970

As a first-generation immigrant of Puerto Rican decent, Rolón’s oeuvre often addresses his biography by melding memory and the imaginary with carefully crafted, hybrid works that are playfully situated between the contradictory worlds of conspicuous consumption and urban artifact. A culturally specific object, an Afro hair pic, when it includes a clenched fist, becomes a sign of empowerment. The very first fist Afro pic, made of black plastic, was patented in 1976. This pic specifically pertains to the Young Lords Organization and Black Power Movement, which formed at the end of the 1960s in response to the poor living conditions of Puerto Ricans and Latinos in Chicago and New York City. With a simple shift from black to pink, the artist alludes to issues of gender and identity.

Gift of the artist

Afrocomb, 2016

high density urethane, acrylic, resin96”x 48”x 9” View carlos rolón's Work

chido johnson

American, b 1969 -recent acquisition-

Born in Nyadira, Zimbabwe, Johnson, is an associate professor and chair of the Sculpture program at the College of Creative Studies in Detroit. A MacDowell Colony and Kresge Fellow in 2009, he has exhibited his art and conducted educational classes all over the world. He is the founder of the Zimbabwe Cultural Centre in Detroit (ZCCD) that creates cultural exchange and synergy between diverse communities. 

His work explores identity and art as social practice in works that are often interactive, comic, and acerbic. Here, for example, this children’s bike has the words: Oh Lord won’t you buy me a Mercedes Benz imprinted in relief on its tires. Like encoded DNA (from a song written by Janis Joplin, Michael McClure and Bob Neurith in 1970), the tires can be inked and the phrase printed out. The sparkling little bike personifies its precocious ostentatious ambition.

Gift of the artist

Untitled, 2008

chrome-plated bicycle, custom latex tiresDimensions Variable View chido johnson's Work

djanira da motta e silva

Brazilian, 1914-1979

Djanira grew up in Avaré, southern Brazil and learned to draw in her twenties while recovering from tuberculosis. It is difficult to separate the “Brazilian myth” of Djanira from her reality. Essentially self-taught, while it might be tempting to classify her as a “Brazilian primitive” she was not unsophisticated and spent most of her life in Rio. Djanira’s works are flat and geometrized with a bold, vibrant palette. She always remained connected to her origins, touching on the topics of every daily life of common Brazilians: their work, customs, and festivals. This is a stunning example of Djanira’s work both in scale and composition; for maximum effect, it is best viewed from several feet.

Gift of Dr. George E.F. and Maxine L.R. Brewer

Plantadores de Bananas

gouache on canvas77.5”x 51.5” View djanira da motta e silva's Work

ed fraga

American b. 1956

Ed Fraga's work explores the anxiety of solitude and its inevitable accompanying universal human preoccupation with alienation, mortality, redemption, and transfiguration. This rare monochromatic work was acquired during his retrospective at the gallery in 2002. The single vulnerable figure, with his blunted features and helmet, is a human everyman symbolic of humanity’s moral and intellectual frailty. He sinks into a hole surrounded by a barren forest of spikes entirely unaware of the presence of the omnipresent hand.

Gift of Vivian W. Day and John Stroh III, David Zucca, Stephan & Marian Loginsky, Martha Katz, the Armando & Joan Ortiz Foundation, A. D. Bosley & Betty Woodward-Bosley, Randell & Gail Reed, and Lucy Bates

Omnipresent Hand

oil, highway median on wood67.5"x82.5" View ed fraga's Work

fernando botero

Columbian, b. 1932

Botero studied in Madrid and Florence and lives chiefly in Paris. By the early 1960s he had developed his unique style, characterized by the portly physique and viscous paint handling of his subjects. Many of his works parody Old Master paintings. The prototype for this work is unknown, however, Santa Rita is the patron saint of “impossible causes.” Temptation (the apple) and disaster (the volcano) are placed in diagonal counterpoint to Saint Rita. Despite his interpretations of works by European masters like Velasquez and Caravaggio, Botero has claimed a desire to make a uniquely “Columbian” art with roots in Latin American rather than European culture.

Gift of Dr. George E.F. and Maxine L.R. Brewer

Temptation of Santa Rita

oil on canvas View fernando botero's Work

gilda snowden

American, 1954-2014 -recent acquisition-

Born in Detroit, Gilda Snowden received her MFA from Wayne State University. A professor of painting at the College for Creative Studies for 31 years, she ultimately became Chair of the Fine Arts department. As a teenager, her keen interest in designing and sewing her own clothes later influence her assemblage approach to artmaking. The juxtapositions in the found materials comprising her early work were integrated into the dynamic shifts in her future paintings. This angular works exemplifies Snowden's spontaneous painting practice which fuses abstraction and expressionistic brio with her signature color palette.

Gift of the Gilda Snowden Estate

Fireworks, from the Bright Stars at Night Series, 2006

acrylic on canvas60”x 48” View gilda snowden's Work

gilda snowden

American, 1954-2014 -recent acquisition-

Gilda Snowden often worked on years-long series of particular themes such as: photo “album” assemblages, Detroit manhole covers rubbings, self-portraits documenting hair, and tornados. Overcoming her pathological fear of tornados, she made her first monumental Tornado assemblage in 1988. The tornado motif lent her free reign to deploy her spiraling gestural compositions, so palpable in this painting.

My interest in tornados had always been there. I had nightmares about them when I was little. But in a way, it’s a universal theme. Yet, at the same time, it was a gift because it was my image. It’s in my psyche. My assemblages were more about external emotional things, but the tornados were more about me.

- Gilda Snowden
Gift of the Gilda Snowden Estate

Untitled, from the Tornado Series, 2000

acrylic on canvas44” x 32” View gilda snowden's Work

jane hammond

American, b.1950 -recent acquisition-

A prolific painter and printmaker, Hammond initially studied ceramics and ultimately earned her MFA from Arizona State University in sculpture. She seeks out her imagery rummaging through flea markets, used bookstores, and antique shops. This archive fuels the surreal iconography and juxtapositions within her work. “…as complicated, inconsistent, varied, multifaceted as you are, as I am, as life is,” she says of her practice. She is also drawn to literary phrases gleaned from poetry, leading her to collaborate with poets such as John Ashbery who helped her invent over 60 titles for a body of work. This whimsical three-dimensional print deploys the artist’s considerable interdisciplinary range.

Gift of Corrine Lemberg

Clown Suit

3D lithograph and silkscreen on handmade Chiri paper55”x 39” x 10” View jane hammond's Work

john piet

American, 1946-2016 -recent acquisition-

Born in Detroit, John Piet was educated at the Detroit Society of Arts and Crafts (College for Creative Studies) and Wayne State University. An integral member of Detroit’s Cass Corridor art movement in the 1960s, Piet’s modernist steel sculptures were like platforms inflected with a nuanced engineering ethos. He approached his work like writing a piece of sheet music. Each phrase was built upon the previous one to produce a complete composition rather than a collection of individual high notes. The newly acquired Midwest Sweep is a preparatory drawing for the same-named maquette sculpture also featured in his exhibition. As such, it is one of the working drawings for Telegraph Exchange, the black steel sculpture located near Sunset Terrace, on the east campus of Oakland University.

Gift of Corrine Lemberg

Midwest Sweep, 1981

graphite on paper13.5”x 13.5” View john piet's Work

john piet

American, 1946-2016 -recent acquisition-

Midwest Sweep is a newly acquired maquette for Telegraph Exchange, which is part of the Oakland University Sculpture Collection located on the east campus between Meadowbrook Hall and Sunset Terrace. Both the maquette and Telegraph Exchange possess a paradoxically robust yet delicate mechanical appearance, alluding to the engineering and manufacturing ethos of Detroit where the artist was born and educated.

As one who grew up in the industrial Midwest, powerful influences came from the character of the streets, factories and the music of Detroit. It is here where I can draw ideas from a wealth of technology and raw materials, essential in providing my art with material and inspiration.

-John Piet

Gift of Corrine Lemberg

Midwest Sweep, 1980-81

painted steel23”x 20”x 12” View john piet's Work

karl schmidt-rottluff

German, 1884-1976

The woodcut process pushes the staccato interplay of positive and negative space; in this charged composition black and white vie directly and expressively to maximum dynamic effect. “Brust,” the name of the book being read by the “pensive man,” was Alfred Brust (1891-1934) the German Expressionist poet and playwright. Schmidt-Rottluff’s woodcuts are unsurpassed in the oeuvre of German Expressionist printmaking. Schmidt-Rottluff was a painter and a founding member of Die Brücke (The Bridge) in Dresden in 1905, along with co-founders Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Eric Heckel. They were inspired by Nietzche, who wrote in Also Sprach Zaratrusta: “What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal.”

University Purchase

Pensive Man

wood engraving11in"x 7.75" View karl schmidt-rottluff's Work

malcom morley

British, 1931-2018

Morley took up painting in prison while serving three years at for burglary. In 1958, after attending the Royal College of Art in London, he settled in New York City. Continuing the abstract mode of his college years, he came under the wing of Barnett Newman. This painting, done the year The Beatles first visited the United States, comprises horizontal bands with vague nautical themes. Later, after a stylistic shift to a photorealistic mode of painting, he was to invent the term “Superrealism.” Something of a maverick, in 1984 he was the first recipient of the prestigious Turner Prize, awarded for the “greatest contribution to British art.”

Gift of Mr. and Mrs. S. Brooks Barron

Untitled, 1964

oil on canvas44”x 42.5” View malcom morley's Work

richard artschwager

American 1923-2013

Richard Artschwager was an American painter, illustrator and sculptor. His early career as a furniture designer is visible in his sculptures, which often mimicked the forms of furniture and used synthetic materials such as Formica. Using a Minimalist aesthetic, he pushed the distinction between art and design.

Sculpture is for the touch, painting is for the eye. I wanted to make a sculpture for the eye and a painting for the touch. - Richard Artschwager

Gift of Florence and S. Brooks Barron

Wall

Formica on wood View richard artschwager's Work

GALLERY HOURS

NOON - 5 P.M.

Tuesday - Sunday (September - May)

Featuring

Curated by

Moving Forward: The Artists

alex katz

Donald and Roy

carlos rolón

Afrocomb, 2016

chido johnson

Untitled, 2008

djanira da motta e silva

Plantadores de Bananas

ed fraga

Omnipresent Hand

fernando botero

Temptation of Santa Rita

gilda snowden

Fireworks, from the Bright Stars at Night Series, 2006

gilda snowden

Untitled, from the Tornado Series, 2000

jane hammond

Clown Suit

john piet

Midwest Sweep, 1981

john piet

Midwest Sweep, 1980-81

karl schmidt-rottluff

Pensive Man

malcom morley

Untitled, 1964

richard artschwager

Wall

GALLERY HOURS

NOON - 5 P.M.

OPEN IN EVENINGS DURINGMEADOW BROOK THEATRE EVENTS

OPEN IN EVENINGS DURING
MEADOW BROOK THEATRE EVENTS