I have to admit that when I first walked into the gallery last Saturday, I didn’t understand the significance of the young ladies standing on 6-inch pedestals. They were wearing nice evening gowns and seemed taller than me.
Brenda Oelbaum, former president of the Michigan Chapter of the Women's Caucus for Art, explained it to me. Then I understood why those young women were standing on pedestals at the opening of Guns: Artists Respond, an art exhibit at the Swords Into Plowshares Peace Center and Gallery.
The ladies on the pedestals were wearing gowns designed by painter and sculptor Valerie Mann. Each gown features a rendering of a specific gun or rifle used in a recent mass shooting. For the most part, the renderings are to scale.
Mann had already exhibited the dresses in Ann Arbor a few months ago. It was only natural to bring them to this exhibit that opened in Detroit this past Saturday.
Unfortunately, there are too many mass shootings to choose from. It seems to me like Mann only refers to shootings within the past four or five years.
For the black gown Mann had her daughter Ellery Hattop wear at the Detroit reception, Mann chose to depict the Sig Sauer MCX used in the 2016 Orlando, Florida massacre.
There is still a lot of confusion about the gun used in the 2016 Orlando shooting. I spent some time looking around the Sig Sauer website (I’m not going to give a link), and read that the MCX Virtus is “configurable in more than 500 combinations.”
Are any of those configurations suitable for hunting delicious animals? I mean, who wants to clean, cook and eat a duck that some incompetent marksman put a few splintering bullets into after wasting the rest of the magazine on the general area?
We can certainly split hairs about whether the Sig Sauer MCX is a weapon of war or not (Sarah Hauer has, for PolitiFact), but I still have trouble thinking of legitimate civilian uses for weapons like that.
Self defense? More like intimidation. Competitive shooting? I don’t think so either. Some pages I looked at suggest that for skeet shooting you want a dedicated target gun that is longer and heavier than the typical “home defense shotgun.”
Or how about overthrowing the federal government? As in, a motley crew of military wannabes is going to take on even just one batallion of the U. S. Armed Forces? Yeah right. That’s about as realistic as total gun confiscation.
Remember all those right-wing wackos who talked about arresting President Obama throughout his whole two terms? Looks like President Obama was not terribly worried about that.
Certainly not worried enough to take anyone’s guns away. President Obama didn’t do anything at all about this problem of guns being too accessible to people who shouldn’t have them...
Oh, wait, he did, mostly through executive orders. The same Senate that refused to even consider President Obama’s Supreme Court nominee also refused to put any commonsense gun regulation bills on his desk for him to sign.
Of course the so-called current president pretty much undid, just a few weeks after his installation, everything President Obama did on the issue. It’s one of Trump’s very few kept promises.
As I walked into the art gallery last week, I noticed many things about the girls on the pedestals with the gowns, such as that they were barefoot, that their dresses were different colors and of different hem lengths, etc.
That I did not notice the guns depicted on the dresses speaks to the normalization of guns in our society, how we tend not to notice them, but we notice more natural acts, like a woman breastfeeding her baby in public.
I’m reminded of a PSA that shows one of those cute teen romances. Then there’s a school shooting and the video backtracks for you to review and see that there was a disturbed young man obsessed with guns lurking in almost every frame.
I suppose at least it starts a conversation. Knowing the signs is not enough. When you do notice signs, what can you do?
With the more recent shooting in Florida, high school students are organizing, and getting ready to exercise their right to vote. They will not be intimidated by NRA lobbyists who dismiss them as “crisis actors” or “paid protesters.”
At the art gallery, I asked each of the young ladies wearing Mann’s dresses if they’re old enough to vote. Some of them are and have already registered, others will soon be of age and will register at that time.
At something like 7:30 p.m., halfway through the opening reception for the art exhibit, Brenda made a short speech and presented checks to Moms Demand Action and Mothers of Murdered Children.
If I understood correctly, the entry fees artists paid to be considered for the exhibit all went to one of those two organizations.
After the presentation of the checks, Mary Minnock wrote a poem which Mary Duran used for a ceramic piece that was installed one of the building pillars. To quote just two lines of the poem: “Turn on the TV. Ubiquitous shootouts on every channel.”
A lot of the artwork is what you’d expect in an exhibit such as this, focusing on the tragic results of mass murder weapons being available too easily to anyone, or the angst and frustration of a situation that doesn’t seem to have changed all that much after all these years.
Though there are quite a few pieces which take a humorous approach instead. A piece by Stephen Handschu, for example, seems to me to be a take-off on the concept of the “ammosexual,” featuring a contorted cherry wood figure surrounding a World War I era artillery shell.
And of course there were pieces addressing the notion of arming teachers, like Beth Costello’s mixed media collage Classroom Discipline, which shows an elementary school teacher outfitted with an Old West holster and gun in front of a class as if it were the most natural thing.
Riley Vermilya, of Moms Demand Action, being a teacher, has an informed opinion on this matter. “A lot of the time, they’re students,” she said of school shooters. “I’m not shooting one of my students.”
There are a few teachers who are willing to go the extra mile of marksmanship training, but we already expect teachers to go a lot of extra miles. When do we start talking about giving teachers competitive wages and all the supplies they need?
Of course the Republicans in the Michigan Legislature would much rather talk about arming teachers, because supposedly the answer to a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.
Never mind that most likely the bad guy will shoot before the good guy can figure out what the hell’s going on and what needs to be done. All these deaths are too high a price we pay to preserve a perverted misreading of the Second Amendment.
By the refreshments table at the opening reception they had a table with postcards to legislators. They had me write one to U. S. Senator Gary Peters (D-Michigan).
I hadn’t already written to Peters on this particular issue? I can’t remember. I suppose it wouldn’t hurt to send him a reminder.
I am more concerned with sending this message to Republicans in the state legislature, and in Congress: either start enacting commonsense gun regulation or start looking for your post-legislative jobs.
Of course the Republicans have also been on the wrong side of too many other issues, so they should probably be all sent packing regardless.
This art opening at the Swords and Plowshares was yet another omission from the Art Detroit Now newsletter. Supposedly the newsletter will publish any art event that is submitted with enough advance notice, supposedly there is no “valuing” or “curation.”
My experience, however, suggests the opposite. The exhibits that I have put together have only been listed when they occurred at galleries that are taken seriously by Art Detroit Now.
So if, hypothetically, I put something together at the Swords Into Plowshares Peace Center and Gallery, it wouldn’t be listed in Art Detroit Now no matter how far in advance I sent it in to Art Detroit Now.
I put together my own listing of art openings in Detroit at ArtistsofMichigan.org. It’s specifically for art openings in Detroit proper. That page is a frame that also appears on the front page, though with content omitted so as to not have scrollbars.
At some point in the distant future the website might let you choose which Michigan city’s upcoming art openings listing you want to see on the front page of that website.
I tell you upfront that I reserve the right to exclude listings, whether for not being of Michigan artists, not being in a Michigan city, or for completely arbitrary reasons, and I may or may not tell you what those reasons are.
But the thing is, though, that if I do accept your listing, you will see it reflected on the website a day or two after you tell me (and sooner once I get the hang of Amazon AWS Cloudfront cache updating).
And you will see it gradually rise in the listing as past events are removed. The question of whether or not your Detroit art opening is listed is a question that will be answered yes or no long before the week of the opening.
That’s a different experience from Art Detroit Now: if you have an opening in Detroit tomorrow or Saturday that you submitted two months ago, it wouldn’t have been until you checked your e-mail this morning that you would have found out whether it was listed or not.
I don’t know what’s next at the Swords and Plowshares. Almost as soon as I find out about it, it will be listed on the aforementioned ArtistsofMichigan.org page.
I do know the current exhibit will be up until May 25. And also that the dresses by Valerie Mann will be placed on mannequins for gallery hours.
I’m not entirely sure about gallery hours, I think they’re supposed to be Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays from 1:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m. It would be a good idea to call (313) 963-7575 before going there, just in case.
Also there is going to be a pancake breakfast for Mothers of Murdered Children at the Applebee’s at 2111 W. 8 Mile Road on May 19 at 8:00 a.m.
Friday, Apr 20, 2018 · 2:01:34 AM +00:00
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Alonso del Arte
Correction: Originally I put in the title that was on the two postcards that Swords and Plowshares sent me, Guns: In the Hands of Artists. I failed to notice that the title was changed to Guns: Artists Respond.
The new title is less impactful, in my opinion, but both titles lack that head-scratching quality that Art Detroit Now seems to like.
This doesn’t change that the exhibit is great art on an important, timely topic. If you’re in Detroit, you should go see it.
Sunday, Apr 22, 2018 · 4:19:36 PM +00:00
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Alonso del Arte
Update: Gallery director Clara Lawrence reached out to me to let me know the next exhibit is Volunteer Visions 2018, which will feature “the works of artists that volunteer at our Gallery.” The opening will be June 15. ArtistsofMichigan.org will be updated tomorrow if not today.