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    Mario Moore’s Oil Paintings Bridge Past and Present to Spotlight Black Resilience and Style

    “Pillars” (2024), oil on linen, 84 x 96 inches. All images courtesy of Mario Moore and Library Street Collective, shared with permission

    Mario Moore’s Oil Paintings Bridge Past and Present to Spotlight Black Resilience and Style

    June 4, 2025

    ArtHistorySocial Issues

    Kate Mothes

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    In large-scale works in oil, Detroit-based artist Mario Moore taps into the legacy of European painting traditions to create bold portraits exploring the nature of veneration, self-determination, and the continuum of history.

    Moore’s work is currently on view in Beneath Our Feet at Library Street Collective alongside fellow Detroiter LaKela Brown. His new pieces nod to the Dutch and Flemish tradition of devotional painting, particularly religious garland paintings. Within elegant arrangements of flowers and foliage, he highlights Black figures relaxing or tending to gardens.

    “The Patron Saint of Urban Farming” (2025), oil on linen, 72 x 48 inches

    In “Watermelon Man,” a stone altar is surrounded by hibiscus and watermelons, both symbols of resilience. Historically, the latter represented self-sufficiency and freedom for Southern African Americans following Emancipation, but whites flipped the narrative into a stereotypical exemplar of poverty. Moore reclaims the fruit in the spirit of refined 17th-century still-lifes.

    The artist has long drawn on the culture and legacies of both Detroit and the U.S. more broadly through the lens of the Black diaspora. Earlier works like “Pillars” position Black figures in elegant dress within the vast wildernesses of the American frontier, bridging the past to explore how racial divisions continue to shape the present.

    An exhibition last summer at Grand Rapids Art Museum titled Revolutionary Times took his series A New Republic as a starting point, revisiting the history of Black Union soldiers during the Civil War.

    Moore learned that one of his ancestors, who had been enslaved as a child, later enlisted in the Union Army, spurring the artist’s exploration of the seminal mid-19th-century period of conflict and Western colonization. He positions present-day figures in contemporary dress within historical contexts, interrogating political and racial segregations.

    “Watermelon Man” (2025), oil on linen, 51 1/2 x 42 inches

    Through tropes of European painting like a self-portrait of the artist in mirrored reflections and poses in three-quarter profile, Moore renders individuals whose direct, confident gazes and elegant dress invoke Detroit style and pride.

    For Beneath Our Feet, Brown and Moore collaborated on a five-foot-wide bas-relief bronze coin. Each artist completed one side, with Mario’s contribution taking the form of a portrait of Brown. “Her profile echoes the conventional format of traditional American coinage, confronting the historic absence of Black women in national symbolism and positions of authority,” the gallery says. On the opposite side, Brown depicts a bouquet of collard greens symbolic of nourishment and community.

    For this exhibition, Brown and Moore “reflect on the wealth held in the earth beneath us—and the enduring question of who holds the rights to till, own, and shape that land,” says an exhibition statement. Detroit is home to ambitious urban gardening initiatives that aim for local food sovereignty, mirroring the resourcefulness of Black farmers throughout history. The artists “consider land not just as property but as history, inheritance, and possibility,” the gallery says.

    Beneath Our Feet continues through July 30 in Detroit. See more on Moore’s website and Instagram.

    “International Detroit Playa: Sheefy” (2022), oil on linen, 108 x 96 inches

    “These Are Not Yams But They Are Damn Good” (2025), oil on linen, 51 1/2 x 42 inches

    “Creation of a Revolutionary (Helen Moore)” (2023), oil on linen, 76 x 52 inches

    “Black” (2023), oil on linen, 48 x 48 inches

    “Garland of Resilience” (2025), oil on linen, 51 1/2 x 42 inches

    “Birth of Cool” (2023), oil on linen, 72 x 48 inches

    Installation view of ‘LaKela Brown and Mario Moore: Beneath Our Feet’ at Library Street Collective, Detroit

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    Tiff Massey Celebrates Detroit Culture and Style in Monumental Mixed-Media Installations

    “I’ve Got Bundles and I Got Flewed Out (Green)” (2023). All images courtesy of the artist and Detroit Institute of Arts, shared with permission

    Tiff Massey Celebrates Detroit Culture and Style in Monumental Mixed-Media Installations

    April 23, 2025

    Art

    Kate Mothes

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    From larger-than-life double-bobble hair bands to a wall of elaborate braids, Tiff Massey spotlights distinctive Detroit style. Trained as a metalsmith, the artist employs the power of material and scale to highlight the city’s neighborhoods and Black identity and culture.

    7 Mile + Livernois, Massey’s solo exhibition at the Detroit Institute of Arts, takes inspiration from the crossroads at the heart of the city’s Black business and fashion district, where the artist grew up. The area will soon be home to a new arts and community space that Massey is spearheading in an effort to guide and celebrate local kinship.

    “Everyday Arsenal” (2018)

    Personal adornment is central to the artist’s expression, which she channels through jewelry, sculptures, and mixed-media assemblages to underscore Black style with a focus on her hometown. “Whatupdoe” and “Everyday Arsenal,” for example, respectively transform a contemporary chain necklace and silver rings into monumental installations, creating terrains of portal-like tunnels and interlocked angles.

    The “ancestral flyness” of the artist’s parents and previous generations also provides a limitless well of inspiration. “How they adorned themselves has definitely been influential not only to how I adorn myself but also to the ideas that I have within the works,” Massey says in an interview for the DIA exhibition catalogue. “Detroiters, when we step outside, we step outside. We want people to see it. We want people to see us. And that has left a tremendous impression on me.”

    7 Mile + Livernois continues through May 11. Find more on the artist’s website and Instagram.

    “Baby Bling” (2023)

    “Whatupdoe” (2024)

    Detail of “I’ve Got Bundles and I Got Flewed Out (Green)”

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    Reconnecting with the Earth, Cyrah Dardas Collages Paintings with Handmade Pigments

    Images courtesy of Cyrah Dardas, Shana Merola, Na Forrest Lim, Library Street Collective, and CCS gallery, shared with permission

    Reconnecting with the Earth, Cyrah Dardas Collages Paintings with Handmade Pigments

    February 24, 2025

    ArtNature

    Kate Mothes

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    From oxidized metals, foraged plants, and botanical inks and dyes, Cyrah Dardas derives colors and textures from materials found in the earth. Based in Detroit, the artist reflects the juxtapositions of her surrounding landscape in paintings on cotton paper, merging human-made and organic materials in works redolent of Persian tapestries.

    In abstract compositions evocative of Georgia O’Keeffe’s sensual flower forms or the symbol-rich paintings of Hilma af Klint vis-à-vis the spiritualist movement, Dardas collages paper painted with handmade watercolors and quilts textiles with hand-dyed fabrics.

    “For the last few years, I have been thinking a lot about belonging and seeking to understand it through a more loving relationship to place,” she tells Colossal. “All of my work as an artist flows from this seeking.”

    Dardas employs the language of abstraction to explore the human psyche and the “patterns, behaviors, forms, colors, and movements I see in the living world,” she says. Recently, she’s been considering the impact of humans seeing ourselves as increasingly separate from both nature and one another, simultaneously fascinated and grieved by the fallacy of individualism—the confusion between the freedom to make good decisions and the perceived right to do whatever we want with no empathy or regard for how it will affect others.

    “In my practice, I ask myself, could I possibly foster some level of reciprocity with any—or all—of the many elements and beings that have brought me here and taken care of me?” Dardas says. “In order to do that, I know I need to at least find a way to connect to them differently than the models that modernity offers us. Art is my portal for that, a different type of connection.”

    Dardas invokes ancient, ancestral ways of being in the world by consciously connecting to her natural surroundings. She honors ecosystems and relationships that are naturally cooperative, nourishing, and sustaining, drawing contrasts between processes she views as extractive, like capitalism, patriarchal attitudes, or over-reliance on technology. She uses locally available materials and relies on analog techniques to prepare and process them.

    Describing herself as a “queer, eco-romantic artist and care worker,” Dardas examines the nuances of interdependency, growth, and life cycles. Much of her recent work is a reflection of her own pregnancy as she is currently in the “fleeting baby phase” of new parenthood. She says:

    I got curious about other beings that swell and gorge to create life—all the plant bodies of water holding seeds, feeding and nurturing them. I wanted to mirror them, thinking of myself as a gourd, a seed pod, a fruit. Like the many facets and expressions of queerness, I felt the experience of pregnancy was vast and delightfully undefinable, and I wanted to translate that feeling or mirroring into something visual.

    Dardas’s work is on view in the group exhibition Warp and Weft: Technologies within Textiles, presented by Library Street Collective at The Shepherd in Detroit, which continues through May 3. Find more on her website and Instagram.

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    Launched in Detroit This Summer, A Black-Led Mural Festival Wants to Revitalize Neighborhoods with Public Art

    
    Art

    #Detroit
    #murals
    #public art
    #street art

    September 1, 2021
    Grace Ebert

    Max Sansing. All images courtesy of BLKOUT Walls, shared with permission
    Murals have long been associated with placemaking because of their unparalleled ability to transform underutilized corridors and city stretches into spaces primed for cultural gatherings, tourism, and subsequently, economic growth. This revitalizing potential is what drives a biannual festival that launched in Detroit earlier this summer as it dramatically altered the urban landscape of the city’s central North End neighborhood.
    Back in July, BLKOUT Walls saw the work of 19 muralists produced across the area, which was once regarded as an entertainment hub that produced famed Motown talents like including Smokey Robinson, Diana Ross, the Four Tops, and Aretha Franklin. Participating were visiting artists like Sentrock (previously) and Detroit natives like Tylonn J. Sawyer, Bakpak Durden, and Sydney James, who co-founded the festival with Chicago’s Max Sansing (previously) and Thomas Evans, aka Detour 303.
    The resulting works span a range of themes and styles from Sansing’s sprawling technicolor creations to Tony Whgln’s whimsical botanicals to James’s contemporary twist on “Girl with the Pearl Earring,” which turns the iconic Vermeer into a subversive portrait of artist Halima Cassells. Swapping the white gem for a large “D” and cloaking her garment in patches, James’s revision is an homage to Detroit and its people.

    Sentrock. Image courtesy of the artist
    Whereas other festivals don’t always prioritize racial diversity or pay their artists, organizers wanted to bake those tenets into BLKOUT Walls’s mission. The Black-led event prioritizes artists of color with the idea of “mirroring the demographics of the city of Detroit and thereby creating a cohort of artists representing equity and inclusion,” a statement says. Beyond representation, though, organizers also recognize the necessity of monetary support as key to lasting change, which James explains:
    As an artist, I understand the importance of being paid for my experience and ability, especially as artists are often treated like we are supposed to work for free. What we do as public artists brings economic value to the area as economic development tends to follow, so it is imperative that we be compensated for not only the work we do but also the impact we have on the community and economy.
    In addition to rejuvenating the area, BLKOUT Walls was designed for public engagement, with the weeklong festival schedule packed with live painting sessions, talks, walking tours, and a block party to celebrate its close. On the final day alone, it attracted more than 8,000 visitors, a testament to its power to draw patrons to nearby establishments and have a reverberating impact on the local economy.

    Rick Williams
    Now having completed the inaugural event, co-organizer Che Anderson tells Colossal that the team envisions BLKOUT Walls traveling to cities like Chicago, Oakland, Memphis, Boston, Atlanta, and Charleston. “Our intent is to have a biannual festival in Detroit like a family reunion. In between those events, we’d like to host a festival somewhere else in the world to engage other Black communities,” he says.
    If you’re in Detroit, check out the BLKOUT Walls map to tour the completed works, and follow the festival on Instagram to find out where it’s headed next. (via Hyperallergic)

    Tony Whgln
    Bakpak Durden
    Zoë Boston
    Just

    #Detroit
    #murals
    #public art
    #street art

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