The College of Fine, Performing, and Communication Arts, Wayne State University, is pleased to present Borders of Figuration – Painting & Drawing from the University Art Collection at Wayne State, curated by Christopher Stackhouse, at the Elaine L. Jacob Gallery from January 23 through March 7, 2026. 

Wayne State University Art Collection and Galleries has received the Joyce Foundation’s 2025 Creative Impact Award, an award that celebrates artists and organizations that have significantly contributed to the cultural and creative vibrancy ofthe Great Lakes region. This unrestricted award acknowledges the university's dedication to advancing creative practicesand programs. This grant has supported the efforts of curator Christopher Stackhouse.

Curatorial Statement

The University Art Collection at Wayne State includes a wide range of expression in the traditional mediums and modes of modernist and contemporary art. It continues to grow in cultural representation, thematic interests, and technological and conceptual import. This exhibition offers a chance to revisit various social attitudes about form and content in painting and drawing which have for several decades sustained an influential regional sensibility. Gathered together are paintings, drawings, prints, and a handful of three-dimensional objects that demonstrate expansive notions of painting.

Among works by local Detroit artists like Tyree Guyton, Gordon Newton, Gilda Snowden, and Ed Fraga, there are two indices by international contemporary artists, a lithograph by Thomas Bayrle of Germany, and a painting by Takeshi Kawashima of Japan. Floral still lifes from various members of the Cass Corridor group are in the inventory, showing an academic temperament that complements the urban toughness for which those artists are known. Paintings have also been gathered from across generations, showing how painters working in Detroit have been probing the possibilities of figuration over time: the earliest from 1890, a Great Lakes marinescape by Seth Arca Whipple, to the most recent, a monochromatic portrait of Hughie Lee-Smith by Joshua Rainer, acquired by the University Art Collection in 2025.

Responding to the collection, the curatorial motif probes the perceptual delineations between figuration and abstraction. There are concise representational images like Robert Kogge’s Untitled Still Life with Curtain from 1984; and then, there is Richard Kozlow’s ably rendered Clouds from 1970, that can be read as both a cropped section of a partly sunny sky, and, as a minimalist monochromatic light blue painting. Artist Michael Luchs further tests the boundaries of figuration in a selection of drawings from 1988 that study the geometric properties of eyeglasses. Luchs reduces the eyewear down to basic compositions of curves, circles, polygons, and lines. Some painters negotiating figuration and abstraction through expressive paint handling are Shirley Reid Woodson, Lila Kadaj, Irma Cavat, and James Pujdowski.

In the salon tradition, near 100 works by 77 artists brought together in such concentrated proximity reveal a lively conversation among a community of painters in, around and affiliated with the University Art Collection and its Fine Arts program.  
– Christopher Stackhouse, Curator

Visit https://www.waynestategalleries.org for more information.