Although we don’t often acknowledge it, there are fashions in fine arts. For African American artists, right now in particular, figurative painting and overt political messaging are very much the dominant trends. Detroit artist Elizabeth Youngblood finds herself in an exclusive club these days, not out of contrariness but because she has, over the course of her career, remained consistently fascinated by the creation of abstract objects and images that live at the crossroads of conceptual art and craft. She belongs to a small but important cohort of Detroit artists such as Allie McGhee, Lester Johnson, Carole Harris and others, who have chosen formal abstraction as their visual language.

        “Syntax,” is a mid-career survey of Youngblood’s work at the Penny Stamps Gallery in Ann Arbor, Michigan, on view from June 21 through August 3, 2024. The exhibition details the progress of her art practice from early explorations of the playful-yet-serious semantics of her work in commercial graphics to the transcendent visual koans of her current fine art output. Gallery director Srimoyee Mitra describes the significance of Youngblood’s art career and the gallery’s decision to show her work now: “This exhibition highlights Elizabeth’s experimental and exploratory methodology, consistently developed over decades. It informs her hybrid visual vocabulary, bringing together art and design, the abstract and the concrete, making and becoming.”

        Though her artworks are conceptually robust, Youngblood insists on the primacy of the making of things, basing it upon her childhood exposure to family members who were themselves skilled craftsmen. “My mother made many of our clothes. She was a maker. In fact, I come from a family of makers. My aunts cooked, knitted, crocheted; my uncle Oliver was a craftsman. He taught me how to make things, how to plan and execute a job so it’s done right from the beginning. So first, before anything else, I’m concerned with craft.”

        Youngblood began her creative studies at the famously rigorous Cass Tech High School in Detroit, where she was one of the first students of legendary Black arts educator Shirley Woodson. Later, she attended the University of Michigan, where she earned a BFA in 1973, following that with a transformative course of study with Katherine McCoy, co-chair in the design department at the Cranbrook Academy of Art, where she received her MFA in graphics. Youngblood credits McCoy with teaching her how to question the real meaning in every element in graphic design, a habit of thought that she carried with her into her fine art practice. Youngblood continues to apply conceptual rigor based upon McCoy’s influence, whether in drawing, weaving, ceramics or graphics, to each design decision that informs her artworks.

        Included in the over 30 artworks in “Syntax” are a few of Youngblood’s early commercial graphic projects. A poster for the Detroit Symphony’s European tour of 1979 features one of Youngblood’s characteristic horizontal line works, and demonstrates the remarkable consistency of her esthetic over many years in both her commercial and fine art work.

        Youngblood’s choice of materials is often humble—simple graphite on paper, hardware store-sourced aluminum paint on mylar, lumps of barely formed porcelain beads threaded on wire. Color is used sparingly, sometimes with a single hue obscured by graphite overlay, or a strip of yellow tape running along the base of a composition as in The Sky Will Still Be There Tomorrow (2024) In spite of the unassuming provenance of the materials, the effect of the works is rendered elegant by the artist’s formal restraint. In scale too, Youngblood opts for small gestures, repeated until they achieve critical compositional mass, as is the case with Of and For Repose (2024). Some of Youngblood’s more impressively large pieces are a series of drawings made from poured aluminum paint on mylar. Improbably luxurious, these swaths of satiny silver manage to seem both provisional and inevitable.

        Four recent pieces from 2022, graphite on paper, demonstrate the defining qualities of Youngblood’s precise yet intuitive methodology. Hazy shapes coalesce into flat geometries of chunky circles, and arcs or suggestively architectural rectangles softened by the graphite surfaces. Youngblood seems able to tease out infinite variety within the narrow formal parameters she has chosen for her explorations.

        She has been defined by an esthetic that refuses banal fashion in favor of deep thought and sees “Syntax” as an opportunity to take stock of her history and her current practice. “I see these artworks, representing 40+ years of my creative output, all displayed in a single venue, as an opportunity to reflect upon my path forward,” she says. “This exhibition comes at a perfect time. I was about to begin a new body of work. “Syntax” will animate and inform the work to come.”

K.A. Letts is the Great Lakes Region editor of the New Art Examiner, a working artist (kalettsart.com) and art blogger (rustbeltarts.com). She has shown her paintings and drawings in galleries and museums in Toledo, Detroit, Chicago, and New York. She writes frequently about art in the Detroit area.