Seen/Scene: Artwork from the Jennifer Gilbert Collection

'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 onportraiture 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.

Artist Barkley L. Hendricks often painted members of his own community, including strangers who caught his attention on the street like the two besuited men in Yock (1975), a nickname for a “a dude who knew how to ‘rag’,” the artist explained. Mickalene Thomas’s series of her character Clarivel (2023) is an homage to this same 1970s aesthetic and is simultaneously a critique on the figure of there clining woman in traditional art history, which Tom Wesselmann’s Great American Nude (1961) also confronts through his faceless female form. Kerry James Marshall stares directly at the viewer inan uncompromising gaze in Untitled (Painter) (2010) to reimagine “the mythic image of the paint-er”—we are called upon to stare back and witness his process of creation with reverence. 

Accompanying the varied portraits throughout the exhibition will be reflective and mirrored art-works, such as Doug Aiken’s EVERYTHING (flag) (2015) with its fractal surface that contorts the viewer and the surrounding artworks through a poetic and problematic lens of citizenship. Olafur Eliasson’slarge reflective work function as a “device for the experience of reality,” prompting a greater sense ofawareness with how we interpret the world.