Detroit Art Review: Lakela Brown, Parts and Labor (Eight Collard Green Leaves, Five Hands) 2024, urethane resin.
This month, as we honor Black History Month, we are featuring a few of the Black women artists in the collection whose work is not only a celebration of cultural legacy but also artistic excellence that serves as a venue for necessary visibility - especially during a time when individuals of color face increased scrutiny and turmoil.
The mission of the permanent collection at Bader+Simon is to create a thoughtful, considered collection that emphasizes the powerful resilience, insight, and artistic innovation of underrepresented artists. By centering visual storytelling by artists of color, amongst many other talented individuals, Bader+Simon reaffirms its commitment to amplifying voices and perspectives that are often silenced in the broader art world.
While we have a few artists from our permanent collection featured in this month’s exhibition, Vision and Power: Works by Black Women Artists from the Permanent Collection, there are many other noteworthy individuals within the collection we would like to spotlight.
Sable Elyse Smith is an interdisciplinary artist and writer based in New York. Her creative practice spans the visual, literary, moving image, and performing arts. Her piece, Riot III, is in our permanent collection. According to Regan Projects, “the piece is composed of a group of standard-issue stools designed for prison visiting rooms. Joined together at the center, the round seats jut outward radially, like a toy jack, rendering the design playful, yet functionless. In so doing, Smith heightens a core feature of correctional infrastructure, which is designed to be, first and foremost, prohibitive.”
Several works by Zanele Muholi are a part of the Bader+Simon permanent collection, with both photographs and paintings. Muholi is a visual activist, humanitarian, and art practitioner who focuses on documenting the celebration of the LGBTQ+ community, primarily those within her native South Africa. Muholi states that if they “wait for someone else to validate [their] existence, it will mean that [they] are shortchanging [themselves]."
Betye Saar is a prolific American Artist known for assemblage art that centers on myths and stereotypes about race and femininity. As part of the Black Arts Movement of the 1970s, Saar is credited with helping spark the Black women’s movement. She has since influenced generations of artists to continue creating work that addresses social justice, race, and feminist issues.
KING COBRA (documented as Doreen Lynette Garner) is a sculptor and performance artist whose practice confronts colonial histories of violence. Her art practice explores where history, power, and violence meet on the body via beauty or medicine.
LaKela Brown is a Brooklyn-based artist who works in sculpture and plaster relief to create impressions of cultural artifacts associated with Black femininity in pieces resembling cuneiform tablets. Her work is strongly influenced by hip-hop culture and African American aesthetics.
Please explore the work by these incredible artists, and we will continue to share our collection as we prepare to welcome you into our physical space later in the year.