Without a doubt, Gabriel Viñas is the most brilliant sculptor in the metro Detroit area, and he’s been flying under the radar. Having appeared in a group show of College for Creative Studies (CCS) at Re:View Contemporary in 2014 helped put him on a few radar screens. Appearing in a group show that opened earlier tonight at the Red Bull House of Art will put him on more radar screens still.
The House of Art space is cavernous, affording Viñas the opportunity to exhibit more work in a group show than he could in a solo show at a gallery like Re:View. The exhibit, titled Re:Semblance and curated by Craig Paul Nowak, features sculptors from around the world. Viñas helped Nowak assemble a large piece by Ledelle Moe shipped from Africa that would not have fit through any of the doors otherwise.
Viñas uses industrial grade oil-based clay for his sculptures, a material that needs to be heated to high temperatures to be workable, and must be worked on quickly as it cools. It’s not obvious until he points it out, but he uses some tools, such as a small rake-like instrument, to sculpt subjects of great naturalness.
I’m pretty sure there’s no time machine in his toolbox, so no prehistoric humans have posed for his very convincing busts of Neanderthals and other early hominids. Viñas also sculpts some more contemporary figures like Auguste Rodin and Bill Maher.
The exhibit includes almost a dozen sculptors and will probably be up until late October, to make way for the Residency 3 exhibit. Gallery hours are on Saturdays from 10:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m., and I think also on the Art Detroit Now Third Thursdays, in the evening.
The Red Bull House of Art got started up back in May 2012. For eleven “rounds” or “cycles,” Matt Eaton would choose six to eight young local artists and then Red Bull would give them free art supplies and free studio space, as well as of course free Red Bull. Nowak was in Round 3, which opened in December 2012.
After Cycle 11, which included graffiti artist Freddy Diaz, the program switched over to residencies for three national artists; there have been two residency exhibits so far and a third one is scheduled to open on Veterans Day.
In between the residency exhibits, a new pattern is emerging of “locally curated exhibits” in which artists who’ve gone through a round or cycle are invited to curate an exhibit. Tylonn Sawyer, who was in Cycle 4, curated 15 Perspectives in Drawing between Residency 1 and Residency 2, and now we have Nowak with a “locally curated exhibit” that includes international artists.
Viñas, having lived in America for almost all his life, must be counted as an American artist. By my count, he’s the fifth Latino artist to exhibit at the Red Bull House of Art. But after the first Latino artist, why do care to keep track of these things? Because a few different bad scenarios can happen afterwards. Maybe the first Latino artist remains the only Latino artist for a long time.
Or maybe there is a second Latino artist, a third, a fourth and a fifth, but when you look at the percentages, they make up a very small portion of the total number of artists exhibited. I estimate that roughly a hundred artists have shown at the Red Bull House of Art. That means about 5% for Latino artists. The House of Art has exhibited more black artists, certainly more than 5%, but less than 83%, which is the percentage of blacks in Detroit’s population.
To be clear, I am not suggesting quotas based on the racial breakdown of the city where the gallery is located, those can be bad in their own way, perhaps encouraging some curators to choose terrible minority artists in order to make the point that they’re not as good as white artists (in any race there are some really awful artists).
When a gallery is privately owned, like What the Pipeline in southwest Detroit or Inner State Gallery (closer to the House of Art), they don't have to answer to anyone for their exhibition choices. In a way, the House of Art is a privately owned gallery, owned by a company that doesn’t trade shares in any stock market that I’m aware of.
Nevertheless, Red Bull is a global corporation, one that hopes to create goodwill for the brand by sponsoring cultural activities like the House of Art. Exhibiting white artists exclusively in a predominantly black city would not help the brand. Carl Swanson from Vulture can tell you that; his 2015 article featuring nine white Detroit artists drew some well-deserved criticism.
When the racial breakdown of artists exhibiting in a gallery seems to be at odds with the racial breakdown of people in the city, we have to wonder if it’s the result of deliberate discrimination or if it’s just a matter of going along with institutional racism, which has many self-reinforcing mechanisms.
If one day we move past racism, it will still happen that the racial breakdown of artists exhibiting in a gallery does not match up exactly with the racial breakdown of people in the city. But such a variance will be the result of innocent coincidence. We’re not going to get to that point by pretending that racism does not exist today.
Viñas can often be seen wearing a shirt that says "We are all African.” Hopefully some day in our lifetimes, it will not matter if he is the first Latino artist to exhibit at a particular gallery or the thousandth.
To see more of Viñas’s sculptures, go to www.pithecusstudios.com.