Glenn Barr: The Beautiful and the Banal
October 9th through December 30th
Opening: Friday October 9th from 7 to 10pm
Glenn Barr
Glenn Barr’s paintings inhabit the world between memory, myth, and the iconic. His enigmatic figures drift through dreamlike landscapes where beauty and melancholy coexist, inviting viewers into narratives that feel both familiar and elusive. Drawing from a lifelong fascination with comics, pulp illustration, music and cinema, Barr transforms these influences into a deeply personal visual language.
A central figure in the Detroit area's contemporary art community for more than three decades, Barr has exhibited extensively throughout the United States and internationally. His work has been featured in publications including Juxtapoz, Hi-Fructose, and The New York Times, and is the subject of several monographs, including Lowlife Paradise, Haunted Paradise, Faces, and Studies. Barr also contributed artwork to the award-winning graphic novel Brooklyn Dreams, written by J. M. DeMatteis. His self-published works include HEEP
(1,2,3,4 and 5). Working from his studio in Ferndale, Michigan, he continues to create evocative paintings that explore the space between fantasy and lived experience.
Gallery Hours: Wednesday through Friday, 12 to 5pm
Other viewings available by appointment.
Iggy Sumnik: What Endures
September 4th through September 25th
Opening: Friday September 4th from 6 to 9pm
https://artbyiggy.com/profile.php
What Endures brings together the work of Detroit and Omaha-based artist Iggy Sumnik, whose work spanned multiple mediums—sculptures, paintings and drawings. Iggy primarily created in clay, hand-built stoneware; sculptures defined by texture, balance, and physical presence - often life-sized or larger, rooted in forms that feel familiar yet reimagined. His work reflects an ongoing dialogue between the built and natural worlds, and invites consideration of how we shape our environments and how they, in turn, impact us. In a practice guided by resourcefulness and care, he embraced reuse, conservation, and material awareness, embedding these values not only in his art, but in the way he lived and worked. Sumnik’s studio, a modest former boathouse along a Detroit canal, was both a site of production and a point of connection. There, in a space defined by efficiency, adaptability, and proximity to the rhythms of the river, he created with intention. He showed up to the work, again and again, believing that commitment to process was itself a form of meaning. Iggy’s impact extended far beyond the objects he forged in clay. Equally central to his practice was his role as a teacher and mentor.
Across Detroit and Omaha, Sumnik worked with a wide range of communities: youth, students, Native Americans, and individuals often underserved by traditional art spaces, sharing not only technical skill, but a belief in the transformative power of making. For Iggy, art was never only about the finished object; it was about the act of creation, the confidence it builds, and the connections it fosters. This exhibition, his first retrospective in Michigan, returns his work to his hometown, placing it within the community that shaped and sustained him. While his life was cut short in 2023, his presence remains in the objects he formed, the spaces he brightened, and the many hands he guided.
What endures is not only the work itself, but the way it continues to live on: in community, in practice, and in the ongoing act of inspiring creation.
Iggy Sumnik 1982-2023
Iggy Sumnik was a multimedia artist who worked and lived in Detroit, Michigan and Omaha, Nebraska.
Iggy created ceramics, sculptures, prints, and more. His technique focused on texture and balance, and included an intricacy and depth that permeated his work. Sumnik’s art was aimed at provoking thought about the environmental impact of modern culture. Hand building identifiable objects, life size or larger, connected him to our culture and the natural world.
Upon completion of a three-year apprenticeship at Jun Kaneko Studio in 2008, Iggy maintained his own studio, showing work, and teaching the art of ceramics to youth in both Omaha and Detroit. Iggy created art in his studio until his very last day. On August 19, 2023, after several years of battling a rare health condition, Iggy passed away peacefully at home. He was 41 years old.
Gallery Hours: Wednesday through Friday, 12 to 5pm
Other viewings available by appointment.
The Patience of Light
Featuring the work of
Joseph Ferraro and Rick Lieder
August 7th through August 28th
Opening Reception: Friday, August 7 from 7 to 10pm
Artist Talk: Thursday, August 20 at 6:30pm
Joseph Ferraro is a conservation macro photographer walking the naturalist's path, based in Ferndale, Michigan. His yard, planted with native species, doubles as his field studio, and is where the journey began. Working by a "do no harm" credo, he photographs portraits of insects and pollinators as they are in their environment: native bees, ambush bugs, jumping spiders, and the countless other tiny creatures most people walk past without a second glance. Shortlisted for the Wildlife Photographer of the Year 61 People's Choice Award, his work asks viewers to look more closely at the intricate world around them, one that doesn't require a plane ticket, just patience.
Rick Lieder is a photographer and painter whose work has been shown in art and zoological galleries in the Midwest and Canada, featured on PBS, and anchors an award-winning series of picture books.
He lives and works in urban nature, surrounded by trees, bees, and birds."
Gallery Hours: Wednesday through Friday, 12 to 5pm
Other viewings available by appointment.
Midsummer
Featuring the work of
Rachel Delmotte, Berkeley Oceguera Hustebout, Shaina Kasztelan, Dawn Smith
July 10th through July 31st
Opening Reception: Friday July 10 from 7 to 10pm
Midsummer
Midsummer is a season of extremes. Days stretch long into twilight, growth reaches its peak, and the world appears saturated with light. Across cultures and throughout time, this moment has inspired celebration, ritual, and reflection.
Intense brilliance often reveals what might otherwise remain unseen as brightest sun casts the deepest shadow. Summer welcomes abundance: flowers bloom, fruits ripen, and life flourishes. At the same time, we inhabit a world where forests burn and oceans grow warmer each year.
The dissonance between beauty and catastrophe is palpable. Still, we continue to dream, create, and make meaning from contradiction.
Art can be a gesture of hope, a form of witness, an act of critique, or a way of processing what is difficult to name. In the space between radiance and shadow, beauty and unease this exhibition invites reflection on what emerges when opposites coexist.
Dawn Smith is a Metro Detroit-based interdisciplinary artist whose creative practice includes painting, tattooing, sculpture, performance, and music. With over 20 years of experience as a tattoo artist and more than a decade immersed in oil painting, her work reflects a fusion of technical skill and imaginative storytelling. Raised in the Detroit area by a blue-collar tradesman and an Italian immigrant father, her early memories of watching her father practice pinstriping and lettering sparked her lifelong fascination with artistic craftsmanship.
Smith uses metaphor and symbolism to examine complex themes such as female agency, social hierarchies, environmental fragility, consumerism and social stratification. Her work has been recognized with awards and features in publications such as Beautiful Bizarre Magazine, where her bold and imaginative vision has garnered recognition in the Neo-surrealist genre.
Berkeley Oceguera Hutsebout is an interdisciplinary artist with a studio practice grounded in craft and the everyday. She works across mediums incorporating drawing, printmaking, sculpture, video and installation. Highlighting intimacy, sensuality, and care she explores the human condition particularly as it relates to the natural world. Berkeley’s work has been exhibited at Notre Dame Center for Arts and Culture (IN), Hammes Gallery at Saint Mary’s College (IN), and Fernwood Botanical Garden (MI). She holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Oregon College of Art and Craft (2015) and is currently pursuing a Master of Fine Arts at Cranbrook Academy of Art in Print Media (2027).
Rachel Delmotte (b. 1988) is an artist and printmaker in Detroit, Michigan. Rachel's work explores the unpredictable terrain of becoming alongside and the unstable medium of color. Drawn to the psychological space where perception, memory, and emotion shape our realities, her work resists fixed narratives and instead embraces multiplicity as a generative condition.
Shaina Kasztelan is a multidisciplinary artist based in Detroit, Michigan. Kasztelan received a BFA from the College for Creative Studies in 2012 and an MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art in 2024. In addition to her formal education, the artist has worked as a muralist, built theater sets, worked as a prop maker, and spent years building parade floats for America’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. Her work has been exhibited in many places including The Detroit Institute of Arts (Detroit, MI), the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (Detroit, MI), and the University of Michigan Institute for the Humanities (Ann Arbor, MI).
Gallery Hours: Wednesday through Friday, 12 to 5pm
Other viewings available by appointment.
Interiority
A Solo Exhibit Featuring the work of Kelly Burke
May 8th- May 29th
Opening Reception: Friday May 8th 7 to 10pm
Kelly Burke’s artwork explores the dissolution of material and figurative imagery, revealing the abstract essence and energy of her lived experience. Drawing from her inner world and psyche, she reflects on moments shaped by mental health—both deeply challenging and profoundly beautiful. These experiences are translated into her work through color, form, and the physicality of paint itself.
Through repetitive processes of layering, removal, and reapplication, Burke builds complex surfaces marked by automatic scrawling, scratching, and gestural mark-making. These actions mirror her internal landscape and way of thinking—at times rough and abrasive, at others gentle and fluid.
Burke received her B.F.A. in Painting and Art History from Siena Heights University in 2007. Her studies led to an interest in abstraction, as well as South and East Asian Buddhist art and thought. Without a religious upbringing, she began to see how spiritual exploration could merge with her art-making practice. This way of thinking informs her life beyond the studio, influencing other aspects of her life, including her relationship to food, nature, and empathy toward others.
She has exhibited and sold her work for decades, and her paintings are held in private collections and businesses in the Detroit area and across the country. Her work was recently acquired by the Kresge Foundation.
About the Exhibition
Interiority is Kelly Burke’s first major solo show.
Her work centers on painting as an act of self-preservation. In a world that is increasingly fast, immaterial, and digitally mediated, the physical act of making—of touching, layering, scraping, and reworking paint by hand—becomes a necessary return to the body. The studio is a space of retreat, where the inward self can take form beyond the constraints of language.
These works emerge through an intuitive process of accumulation and erasure. Layers are built up and broken down, marked by scrawling gestures, abrasions, and moments of stillness. The surfaces hold a record of this push and pull—of tension and release, fragmentation and cohesion. Painting, in this sense, becomes both a solitary and deeply personal act, at times even a selfish one, rooted in the need to process, to hold, and to continue.
Yet the work is not closed. While grounded in an internal landscape, each painting extends an invitation outward. Viewers are encouraged to engage with the formal elements—color, form, texture, and movement—and to encounter their own emotional responses within the work. Meaning is not fixed, but felt: shifting, subjective, and open.
Interiority proposes painting as both refuge and offering—an embodied practice that resists disconnection, and a space where inner experience can be shared without needing to be explained.
Gallery Hours: Wednesday through Friday, 12 to 5pm
Other viewings available by appointment.
No Sense But to Make it
A Solo Exhibit Featuring the work of Allison Vince
April 3- April 30th
Opening Reception: Friday April 3rd 7 to 10pm
Allison Vince is a self-taught painter from Detroit. College programs proved less inspiring than a 2006 internship at C-Pop Gallery where Allison was introduced to Lowbrow Detroit art, and esteemed local artists like Niagara, Glenn Barr and Tristan Eaton. Initially eschewing traditional pigments for cosmetics, she went on to first exhibit her own work at the Red Bull House of Art in 2012. After a decade of experimenting, and painting for herself, she began participating in group shows at The Voyeur Bordello Gallery, where she would later go on to present her first solo show in 2025
When not reaching for her paintbrushes, Allison can be found surveying the nearest estate sale, gardening, and spending time with her two cats.
About the Exhibition
No Sense but to Make It is the second solo show from Detroit-based artist Allison Vince.
Her latest exhibition brings together a group of paintings that moves between subjects, palettes, and approaches—sometimes abruptly. More akin to a collection of short stories than a novel, No Sense but to Make It contains a menagerie of whimsical moments: some quick, some more composed; some playful, some slightly strange. Together they represent an inventory of ideas from the last year—an artist trying things out, following her instincts, and occasionally surprising herself. The only theme is the compulsion to put color to canvas.
Every bit as idiosyncratic as the artist herself, Allison’s latest work is less about a single revealing rubric than about her swelling drive to create. So much so that this variety of work came to feel inevitable. Despite the lack of a grand thesis for her exhibition, it simply made no sense but to make it.
Gallery Hours: Wednesday through Friday, 12 to 5pm
Other viewings available by appointment.
Orange II: The Art of Community
March 6th - March 27th
Opening Reception: Friday March 6th 7 to 10pm
The Gallery at Ideation Orange is pleased to present Orange II - The Art of Community. Featuring the work of 26 local artists working in the Southeast Michigan area, The Art of Community explores a diverse range of mediums including painting, sculpture and photography, reminding us that art is all around us. Come in and see what your local artists have to offer in this exciting group exhibition!
Participating Artists:
Timothy Seppala
Catherine Peet
Will Legg
Meagan Shein
Michael Smith
Brittanie Bondie
Grace Leonard
Terence Cover
Scott Dolan
Doug Cannell
Gary Eleinko
Rory Reynolds
Megan Lui
Tryst Red
Kiki Martin
Ronald Rodriguez
Sue Schneider
Kristie Haas
Tisch Mikhail Lewis
Kayce Gifford
Cecilia Montgomery
Lindsey Sherline
Spencer Orenstein
Claudia Hershman
Stacy Hunt
Megan Major
Opening Reception: Friday March 6th 7 to 10pm
Gallery Hours: Wednesday through Friday, 12 to 5pm
Other viewings available by appointment.
A Non Linear Pursuit, featuring the work of FFTY
February 6 - February 28
A non linear pursuit explores the efforts of the travel and how it dictates the destination.
This exploration of art is omnidirectional, not moving in a straight line, as my past influences my future.
In this exploration of my craft, I aim to create more expansive work that invites the viewer in. With each new attempt, I find new patterns and ways for lines to flow on a small scale while reading differently in the big picture.
My work explores how much variation can emerge from a single line. Through embroidery and painting, I investigate pattern, volume, and depth, drawing inspiration from African-American hairstyles.
To break up the monotony, I found myself using different hairstyles, which influenced my approach to mark-making and composition.
The dense colors and intricate textures in my work are intended to slow the viewer down. In this way, I am offering time - asking for a pause to consider what is truly worth attention and care.
Opening Reception: Friday, February 6 from 7 - 10pm
Gallery Hours: Wednesday - Friday, 12pm - 5pm
Other viewings available by appointment.
When The Wolf Comes Home
November 8 - January 24
Anna van Schaap’s work overlaps surrealist paintings with traditional portraiture, while exploring ideas of women’s representation, experiences, identity, grief, symbolism, subversive forms of communication, and the psychopathology that arises from being silenced.
The work in this exhibition is an exploration of the desire to represent women’s lived experiences.
The Show title, “When the Wolf Comes Home” is a continuation of the cultural expression of ‘the wolf at the door”, a metaphor for impending danger.
Opening Reception: Saturday, November 8 from 7-10pm
Gallery Hours: Wednesday - Friday, 12pm - 5pm
Other viewings available by appointment.
Hungry Ghosts
October 3 - October 30
Gallery at Ideation Orange is pleased to present Hungry Ghosts, featuring the work of Marie Awn and Clinton Snider.
Hungry Ghosts is a series of paintings inspired by the Buddhist idea of spirits who are constantly searching but never satisfied. The work examines how this concept relates to human experience, our desires, longings, and the gaps we try to fill in our lives. These paintings explore the tension between emptiness and abundance, as well as the contrast between beauty and discomfort. The “hungry ghost’ serves as a metaphor for how we constantly strive for more, whether it is emotional, spiritual, or material. This exhibit encourages viewers to reflect on their own desires and how they influence both our inner worlds and the worlds we build.
Opening Reception: Friday, October 3 from 7-10pm
Gallery Hours: Wednesday - Friday, 12pm - 5pm
Other viewings available by appointment.
Design Journey Home - China and Back
September 12 - September 26, 2025
The exhibition, themed “Beauty of Design,” showcases a collection of design works created by alumni of the College for Creative Studies (CCS) connected to China, as well as designs by students based in China.
Curator Jie Ji (CCS Alumni, MFA 2020) collected 44 works for the exhibition, including new energy vehicle designs, collaborative projects between artists and designers, student work, and more. The exhibition demonstrates the significant contributions CCS graduates have made to the development of new energy vehicles and the future of the design industry, showcasing the unique design characteristics and achievements emerging from China.
Throughout this showcase, Detroit’s outstanding success in cultivating design talent is presented from multiple perspectives, reinforcing its reputation as a globally recognized design center.
The exhibition also plays an important role in establishing connections between designers, fostering international education cooperation, and serving as a bridge for continued creative exchange.
CCS Alumni Reception: Friday, September 12 / 6pm — 9pm
Public Reception: Saturday, September 13 / 6pm — 9pm
Gallery Hours: September 15-26, Mon - Fri: 10am - 4pm
July 11 - August 31, 2025
Lines of Detroit
The Gallery at Ideation Orange is pleased to present "Lines of Detroit, an Exhibition of Form and Design,” featuring the work of Jay Holladay and Dan Christie.
Opening Reception: Friday, July 11 / 6pm — 10pm
Other viewings available by appointment.
Join us for a special exhibit featuring four of the best concert and music photographers in Michigan. Experience the work of Leni Sinclair, Frank Pettis, Doug Coombe, and Paul Jendrasiak.
Photographs feature Bob Seger, The Grateful Dead, MC5, The Stooges, The Romantics, St. Vincent, David Bowie and more.
Opening Reception: Saturday, June 7 / 7pm — 10pm
Other viewings available by appointment.
A Photography Retrospective
June 7 - June 30, 2025
Sound in Motion
Orange 1: The Art of Community
May 2 - May 31, 2025
The Gallery at Ideation Orange is pleased to present "Orange I: The Art of Community", featuring the work of thirteen artists. "The Art of Community" explores a diverse range of mediums, including painting, sculpture, and digital art.
Featured artists include: Natasha Jaffar, Blight Hernandez, Julie Lambert, Michael Ross, Brandon Tester, Michael Donovan, Kelly Burke, Ash Guzman, Amber George, Ilham Mafouz, Miles Rene, TIffany Wisnieski, Iggy Sumnik, Amber George, Marie Awn, Anna van Schaap
Opening Reception: Friday, May 2 / 6pm — 10pm
Other viewings available by appointment.