Collected Detroit

"Harley" is in the style of Pop-Art and Graffiti. It's a spray painted portrait of a Harlequin in red and white with black accents. Antonio “Shades” Agee, a passionate Detroit native...

This is a collection of six prints from the Pile Series by Jim Crawford, Cass Corridor Artist. They are titled: Low Cost Housing, One Alone, Odd One, Shor, Lumber and Cannon. They ca...

UNTITLED by Fanny Rabel a Mexican artist who was born in Poland in 1922 is a soul wrenching work depicting among other things, the children killed by Nazi bombing in Spain during the Second World War. The lavender and purple surrounding the seated female figure and the kneeling child suggest both grief for the innocents' deaths and the prayers being offered for an end to the carnage. The bright gold and red can be read as either explosions or the hopeful light of redemption after death. Like Picasso's Guernica from 1937, this painting from 1965 can stand as a powerful anti-war painting. Numerous key galleries and museums such as Morton Auctions, Cerro de Mayka have featured Fanny Rabel's work in the past. Her anti-Nazi and anti-Fascism politics resulted in her participation in a mural called Retrato de la Burguesía in 1940 for the Sindicato Mexicano de Electricistas building on Alfonso Caso Street in Mexico City. Rabel met a group of exiled Spaniards in Mexico along with Antonio Pujol, who invited her to take part in a mural project headed by him, David Alfaro Siqueiros, Joseph Renau, Luis Arenal, Antonio Rodríguez Luna and Miguel Prieto. The artist died in 2008. Fanny Rabel born August 27, 1922, in Poland born Fanny Rabinovich, was a Polish-born Mexican artist who is considered to be the first modern female muralist and one of the youngest associated with the Mexican muralism of the early to the mid-20th century. She and her family arrived in Mexico in 1938 from Europe and she studied art at the Escuela Nacional de Pintura, Escultura y Grabado "La Esmeralda", where she met and became friends with Frida Kahlo. She became the only female member of “Los Fridos” a group of students under Kahlo’s tutelage. She also worked as an assistant and apprentice to Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Siqueiros, painting several murals of her own during her career. The most significant of these is "Ronda en el tiempo" at the Museo Nacional de Antropología in Mexico City. She also created canvases and other works, with children often featured in her work, and was one of the first of her generation to work with ecological themes in a series of works begun in 1979. She is considered to be the first female muralist in Mexico. She was an assistant to Diego Rivera while he worked on the frescos for the National Palace and an apprentice to David Alfaro Siqueiros. Her most important mural is Ronda en el tiempo located in the Museo Nacional de Antropología, which was created from 1964 to 1965. She also created murals at the Unidad de Lavaderos Público de Tepalcatitlán (1945), Sobrevivencia, Alfabetización in Coyoacán in 1952 Sobrevivencia de un pueblo at the Centro Deportivo Israelita (1957) Hacia la salud for the Hospital Infantil de México (1982), La familia mexicana at the Registro Público de la Propiedad (1984) (which Rabel preferred to title Abolición de la propiedad privada) and at the Imprenta Artgraf. In collaboration with other artists, she participated in the creation of the murals at the La Rosita pulque bar (disappeared) and at the Casa de la Madre Soltera. She entered the Escuela Nacional de Pintura, Escultura y Grabado "La Esmeralda" shortly after it was established in 1942, taking classes with José Chávez Morado, Feliciano Peña and Frida Kahlo, with whom she became close friends. She changed her last name from Rabinovich to Rabel during her career. Rabel married urologist Jaime Woolrich and had two children Abel and Paloma Woolrich, both of whom became actors. The first exhibition of her work was in 1945 with twenty-four oils, thirteen drawings, and eight engravings at the Liga Popular Israelita with Frida Kahlo writing the presentation. In 1955, she had an individual exhibition at the Salón de la Plástica Mexicana. She had a large exhibition at the Museum of the Palacio de Bellas Artes to commemorate a half-century of her work. Her last exhibition was in 2007 at the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana. Her work can be found in collections in over fifteen countries including those of the New York Public Library, the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., the Royal Academy of Denmark, the National Library in Paris, the Casa de las Américas in Havana, the Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla and the Museo de Arte Moderno in Mexico City. A retrospective of her work after her death called Retrospectiva in Memoriam, Fanny Rabel (1922-2008) was held at the Museum of the Universidad Popular Autónoma del Estado de Puebla . She is considered to be the first modern female muralist in Mexico although she also did significant work in painting, engraving, drawing, and ceramic sculpture. Her work has been classified as poetic Surrealism, Neo-expressionism and is also considered part of the Escuela Mexicana de Pintura (the dominant art movement of the early to mid 20th century in Mexico) as one of the youngest muralists to be associated with it along with Arnold Belkin and José Hernández Delga. Rabel was more drawn to depicting mankind’s pain rather than happiness, sharing other Mexican muralists' concerns about social injustice. However, she stated to Leopoldo Méndez that she could not create combative works, with clenched fists and fierce faces, and she wanted to leave the Taller de Gráfica Popular. Méndez convinced her to stay, saying that more tender images are important to political struggle as well. Children with Mexican faces...

"Untitled" lithograph from Frakenthaler's What Red Lines Can Do Series. Signed and dated, with the numbers 55/9/75 on the lower front right. Color screen print on white arches handmade cold press paper. Helen Frankenthaler was born on December 12, 1928 in New York City, the daughter of a New York Supreme Court judge and a family of Jewish immigrants from Germany who emphasized culture and intellectual pursuits and continue to be active to this day such as through nephew, the artist and photographer Clifford...

"Les Oiseaux", which translates to "The Birds", is an iconic etching and aquatint by the seminal 20th century artist Le Corbusier. The black and white piece is punctuated by small sh...

"La Roussalka" by Georges Rouault is a portrait of a woman from the period of Vichy France when he abandoned watercolor and gouache for oil and his palette became lighter and more je...

"Untitled" by Brenda Goodman is a painting that shows the psychological drama that Brenda brings to her artwork. She is particularly adept at rendering within the dark foreboding black backgrounds struggles that humans often live within. There is a dramatic tension set up between the forms represented here: the large looming over the small, the stronger over the weaker, the smarter over the less capable. This painting is open for and encourages endless interpretations. Brenda Goodman is an American artist and painter currently living and working in Pine Hill, New York. Her artistic practice includes paintings, works on paper and sculptures. She is one of the original Cass Corridor Artists from Detroit, Michigan. Other Cass Corridor Artists include Robert Sestok...

“Untitled Female" is a colorful piece by Richard Wilson that has meaning for native Detroiters through use of the blues and oranges - their "Tiger" baseball team's colors and the "D"...

“Untitled Female" is a colorful piece by Richard Wilson that has meaning for native Detroiters through use of the blues and oranges - their "Tiger" baseball team's colors and the "D"...

"Untitled" portrays a young female nude in an intimate setting within the artist's studio. This painting is done in the classical vein of full portraiture. The model, however, is not posed quietly, but is engaged with a person or object off the frame, or, perhaps in an interior monologue with herself. Regardless of which, the viewer's attention is not only attracted to the beauty of the model's figure, but the intention of her actions. Charles Pompilius...

"Rise to Rewrite the Law" is a silkscreen offset on speckle tone paper that is the second in Shepard Fairey's crowdfunded WE THE FUTURE series. This work features Amanda Nguyen, the Vietnamese-American founder of the civil rights NGO Rise and drafter of the Sexual Assault Survivors' Rights Act. As part of the WE THE FUTURE campaign her portrait was sent to twenty thousand schools in the United States to teach students about activism. The work is signed and dated in the lower right corner, and is unnumbered open edition work. Shepard Fairey is one of America's most well-known living artists. Born Frank Shepard Fairey in Charleston in 1970, Fairey came into prominence as a street artist and graphic designer whose works such as "Andre the Giant Has a Posse" and the Barack Obama "Hope" poster have become iconic within contemporary culture. He began his art career with doing pieces for skateboards and T-shirts before getting an education at the Rhode Island School of Design where he earned his BA in Illustration. Fairey's work draws on influences as diverse as the films of John Carpenter and the philosophy of Marshall McLuhan and Martin Heidegger...

"Pile Series" was completed during the 1970s. It has a tongue-in-cheek affect as all the prints are photographs of stacks, or "piles", of industrial construction items silkscreened o...