The Shepherd has opened. Finally. Adapted from a 1905 Romanesque style church, rectory, and grounds in Detroit’s Little Village neighborhood, this long-awaited cultural project features a skate park designed by Tony Hawk, a bed and breakfast, and a newly landscaped sculpture garden honoring works by revered Detroit artist Charles McGee.

 

 

        The interior of the church houses a Black Art Library and features several imaginatively designed exhibition spaces. The former sanctuary, converted to its new function by the architectural firm Peterson Rich Office, presents unique aesthetic opportunities which have now become a career-defining challenge for Allison Glenn, the newly appointed Artistic Director of the Shepherd. With her first exhibition, “In an effort to be held,” Glenn demonstrates her curatorial mastery, successfully navigating the unusual volumes and details of the church’s interior while optimizing its features to the advantage of the contemporary art installed within. Her choice of artworks, refreshingly diverse in geographic and ethnic origin and in artistic style, bodes well for her future tenure at the Shepherd.

        Surface and its relationship to the body of a human or an artwork is one of the throughlines of “In an effort to be held.” Mundane procedural strategies like wrapping, transfer, and collage mark the boundaries between interior and exterior, between the spiritual and the physical, between myth and the mundane.

 

        In the back of the church’s nave, Glenn anchors the exhibition with Slanting Frieze (2023) by Shane Darwent—a militantly secular wall construction that speaks the language of minimalism and malls. In a more conventional museum or gallery space, I don’t think I would have taken particular notice of what could be seen as a fairly mainstream artwork, but in the context of the Shepherd, it takes on additional meaning. The flat black rectangular awnings lining the wall block the cold fluorescence of the light behind, setting up a dialectic between the human body and the spirit that persists as a subtext throughout the exhibition.

        The unusual exhibition spaces in the Shepherd present a complicated curatorial conundrum for displaying work, requiring judgement, originality, and sensitivity. They consist of two fairly conventional white cube galleries, one located on the right side of the nave and the other in the right transept. A second-floor mezzanine with an oculus sits astride the nave gallery and aligns visually with the altar. The bulk of the narthex is open space suitable for gatherings, with ornate columns and elaborate stained glass windows throughout. The former church’s floors are paved with locally produced Pewabic tile in simple geometric patterns. The elaborately carved former wooden confessionals in the left transept are now repurposed into study carrells for the adjacent reading room and a raised pulpit remains, as well as the original altar in the apse.

 

        Many of the works in the nave gallery reference the body. Works by Wangechi Mutu, and Kellie Romany form a mini-installation in one corner of the room, where Romany’s table installation In an effort to be held (2016-ongoing) invites viewers to experience small clay discs, not just visually, but on a tactile level. The hand-sized shallow vessels hold congealed pigments that reference human flesh in all its variety. The artist describes the hues as idiosyncratic representations of an “early 20th-century chromatic scale of skin tones created by Felix von Luschen.” Mutu’s two small watercolors, Metastasis III and Metastasis IV (2016), are deceptively beautiful, representing, as they do, the “cellular growth and relocation of a pathogenic agent in a host body.” Disease is, after all, another kind of natural process. In two large unstretched canvas pieces that dominate opposite walls of the gallery, Cameron Harvey uses her body to press color derived from natural sources into Ancestor 26 Ceratonia Siliqua V (2023) and Figure 17 lecur (Unknown Species) (2022). In the context of the Shepherd, the folded textiles suggest the character of liturgical vestments.

 

        Moving out of the conventional gallery into the church’s transept, the curator must present contemporary artworks within a previously sacred context, a project Glenn takes on with apparent ease. She has placed a circular canvas by Paul Verdell, Midnight Mover, (2024), all deep blues and purples, next to a darkly murky stained glass window picturing Christ in Gethsemane. Even more pointedly, she hangs a grayscale photo replica of DaVinci’s Salvatore Mundi, bathed in blood-soaked resin from an HIV+ undetectable long-term survivor and activist, by Jordan Eagles, next to a stained-glass window of Jesus as the Good Shepherd, the ultimate blood donor. An intricate rose window high on the wall enters into fruitful conversation with Zak Ove’s DP70 (2023), its elegant complexity echoed in the homely, handmade-yet-cosmic imagery of Ove’s circular fiber work.

 

        Kennedy Yanko’s Intimacy of throes (2024) is the focal point of the somewhat amorphous space– the luxurious folds and irregular stooped forms marching forward somehow reminiscent of The Burghers of Calais. The sculpture is made from a rectangular metal container painted by the artist, cut up and then intuitively draped with smooth and velvety paint skins. The teal and white palette of the Yanko grouping is echoed and amplified by Christina Quarles’ nearby painting Honey N’ Smoke which also references the human figure as it crosses and shape-shifts within the picture plane.

 

        The artworks in the small side chapel in the right transept bring us briefly back into a recognizable gallery format. A large abstract artwork by Angel Otero, Splintered (2019), made of painstakingly cut and wired together paint skins, dominates the space. The artwork is a collage in which the figure and the ground are one and the same—a beefy, yet fragile-seeming coalescence of salvaged bits from the artist’s studio and the occasional woven cane fragment. Its earthy ochre, white, tan, and gray tones undulate across the wall. Osage Shield, Physical Landscape (2024), by Yatika Starr Fields, seems to be based upon a similar procedural strategy. Fields has salvaged scraps from Native American tents and other elements and has shaped them into an iconic shield typical of artifacts from Indigenous American tribes of the Central Plains.

 

        Last, but certainly not least, we come to the altar and apse of the Shepherd, where five individual artworks carry on a call-and-response with the permanent architectural elements. As we move up into the choir section of the sanctuary, the artworks enter further into the territory of mythic narrative. At the very top of the curving wall of the apse, seven small, stained-glass windows picture narratives of Christian saints. Their intimate scale and vivid colors are repeated in the two surrealist paintings that flank the altar below. On the right, Karen Seapker’s Sisyphus with Seedling (2024) retells the Greek myth of a cursed king condemned to push a stone up a mountain eternally. The introduction of a small but insistent sprout into the composition implies hope from desolation. Crocodile Tears (2021), by Ilana Savdie, complements Sisyphus on the left in both palette and theme. A different mythic tradition—that of Carnival—is evoked, itself a hybrid of beliefs from South America, Africa, and Europe. The images on the stained-glass windows, the Greek myth, and the mythologies of the New World combine and mutually re-enforce each other on a formal and narrative level. Perched atop the altar’s tabernacle, and looking very much at home, is Creatures of Love, (2022) by Naudline Pierre. As our eyes travel heavenward, we encounter a billowing fiber work La constelaci’on que viene, (2023) by Celeste (Fernanda Camarena and Gabriel Rosas Alema) which swoops and plunges over the space. The eclectic assembly of disparate media and imagery suggests an expanding universe beyond our everyday realities.

 

          In addition to the varied pleasures of work by the 20 artists in the exhibition, “In an effort to be held” introduces the aesthetic philosophy of Allison Glenn. Her wide-ranging interests and her sensitivity to the possibilities and peculiarities of the space that she will be programming are apparent as she describes her inclusive curatorial philosophy: “Nothing I do is in a silo, it’s in deep collaboration with my colleagues, and I’m really looking forward to also collaborating with other organizations and finding ways to come together to create meaningful art experiences.”

Artists: Kevin Beasley, Celeste, Bethany Collins, Ed Clark, Shane Darwent, Jordan Eagles, Yatika Starr Fields, Sam Friedman, Genevieve Gaignard, Cameron Harvey, Evan Holloway, Lotus L. Kang, Wangechi Mutu, Natani Notah, Angel Otero, Zak Ové, Naudline Pierre, Christina Quarles, Kellie Romany, Ilana Savdie, Karen Seapker, Manal Shoukair, Richard Tuttle, Paul Verdell, Kennedy Yanko, Cullen Washington, Jr. 

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.