Entering Wayne State University’s exhibition Borders of Figuration at the school’s Elaine L. Jacob Gallery, you find yourself walking in on a conversation between two shaggy-haired dudes leaning on a bar and chatting over smokes and beers. It’s a painted plywood cutout made in 1972 by Charles B. Cobb, titled simply John and Michael: Cass Corridor Residents. The sleepy-eyed “John” is John Egner, and his Bud-sipping friend “Michael” is Michael Luchs, both prominent artists in Detroit’s storied early1970s Cass Corridor scene. The pair could be seated just down the street at Cobb’s Corner, then the watering hole of choice for Corridor artists and owned by Charles’s brother, Robert, who adorned the place with art made by the locals.

        Kitty-corner from this laid-back tableau is a depiction of a decidedly less pleasant “conversation” over drinks between two strange characters. In a 2004 painting by the late WSU instructor Peter Williams, a Black man in a heavy coat sits up in bed in a semi-conscious state, surrounded by (has he just vomited it up?) a red slush of twisted faces and pop-culture litter: a McDonald’s cup, a cigarette, a mid-century chair, and other stuff. A pink-faced bald man in a white coat—like something from the Twilight Zone, with red eyes, a piggish nose and no mouth—cradles the sick man in one arm and lifts a glass of water to his lips. The title, Barcelona, suggests the painting might merely describe an illness contracted on a European vacation, though it’s hard not to read cultural and racial tension in the image.

        Their proximity in the gallery puts these two conversations in conversation with each other. (One possible thread: the “story” of that storied Cass Corridor scene has largely featured white artists in the leads, despite Detroit’s demographics; bringing Black artist Williams into the discussion up front expands the narrative.) This sort of juxtaposition is a tactic curator Christopher Stackhouse uses throughout Borders of Figuration, mixing and matching pieces culled from the Wayne State collection to highlight formal, historical, and thematic connections and contrasts. Much of the work is hung in tight clusters, salon style, so compositional elements, stylistic quirks, and color relationships create a “discussion” between the individual pieces.

        I was an intern for WSU’s art collection a few years ago, writing for their website. I’m familiar with several of the pieces in this show and most of the artists; a few were even my teachers when I was getting my BFA in the late 1980s. When the curator of the Wayne State collection, Grace Serra, met me at the opening she said it must be like “seeing old friends.” She was right, but there was a sense of seeing them in a new light—“together again for the first time,” as it were.

        Take “Salon 1,” as the first of these clusters is labeled on the guide sheet, an asymmetrical grouping centered around John Hunter’s 2011 painting, Seated Man #2. Two other figurative paintings, one to the lower left and one to the upper right of Hunter’s work (Untitled [Portrait] by Robert Wilbert and Charles Pompillius’s Clare & Jordan, respectively), feature seated women whose gestures suggest a diagonal line connecting the three works. Two landscapes on the other two corners (Edward Levine’s Rooftop and James Pujdowski’s Brush Fire) do likewise in the opposite direction, drawing an “X” more or less centered on the seated man’s white t-shirt. Above these, a tightly framed “portrait” of the head of a hammer, in grays and browns on a blue background, by Kathleen Rashid, echoes the head of the pensive central figure. The group of five paintings on the right is tapered, seeming to trail behind Seated Man, giving “Salon 1” a leftward thrust, following the man’s gaze. All twelve paintings in the group hang together thanks to a shared palette of greens, browns, orange, and blue. It’s almost as if Stackhouse has created a new work in “Salon 1,” collaged together from the various paintings he’s found in the WSU archive.

        “Salon 2” and “Salon 3” share a corner nearby, and here again Stackhouse’s compositional choices guide us through the images. The angles of Lila Kadaj’s expressive brushwork in her untitled painting of a cherub direct one’s eye up and to the left, from a circular saw blade painted in swirls of color by John Egner, to a small, unassuming self-portrait by Richard J. Bilaitis, then to a scruffier, gloomier picture (painted on an oddly-shaped piece of masonite, perhaps off the back of some appliance) by Miriam Marcus called Stood Up, in which a dejected young man stands alone in an indifferent urban environment. Eyes downcast, he seems to regard the somewhat lumpy subject of Brenda Goodman’s scribbly portrait of someone named Dorothy; Dorothy in turn glances out at us, as if to ask us to get a load of the cocksure, cigar-puffing suit looking down his nose at us in Carol Wald’s colorful Portrait of a Stockbroker.

        Some local legends are represented here with rather uncharacteristic works. Gordon Newton, the poster boy for the Cass Corridor scene, is maybe best known for grungy assemblages like the one hanging in the lobby of a nearby theater, consisting of a stuffed sailfish attached to a Big Wheel and adorned with maracas and tin foil. Nancy Mitchnick is a painter known, in part, for large, expressionistic images of some of Detroit’s many dilapidated, abandoned houses. Each artist is represented here, however, by a row of five floral studies: impressionistic watercolors of flowering potted plants by Newton, and vigorous charcoal drawings of lilies by Mitchnick. The two groupings harmonize with one another from opposite sides of the first floor of the gallery.

        A few artworks here are placed in surprising locations. For example, at the top of the spiral staircase to the second floor, just above the handrail, Brenda Goodman’s Untitled Still Life (Tiger) is waiting to pounce—not the big cat, but tiger lilies, a jagged red-orange bouquet bursting from a cobalt pitcher. It and Jim Chatelain’s large painting Water Wheel—with the anachronistic skyscrapers of the Detroit skyline lurking in the background behind the titular antique structure, as if to collapse the architectural history of the city into one image—are the last moments of full color before the show turns muted, almost monochromatic for a while.

         “Salon 4” features three untitled studies of eyeglasses, in slashes of graphite and black paint by Corridor artist Michael Luchs, along with a diptych by Luchs depicting birds, flattened and punched full of holes, laid out on grids as if prepped for analysis. Dennis Jones’s hand-drawn text piece (“Sometimes Aren’t You Intrigued By My Words”) sits next to a stippled ink drawing called Braindeath, of a distinctly phallic Dirty Harry-style handgun, by the late Ann Mikolowski (she and her husband Ken headed up the Alternative Press, which originally published this drawing on the cover of a chapbook of two-fisted prose). Taken as a whole, there’s an air of menace and cold scrutiny about the grouping.

        Before the sixth and final salon-style display, there are a few intriguing works, including: two woodcuts, a portrait and a figure, by Detroit’s own Arthur Danto, better known as a philosopher and critic than an artist; an arresting serigraph triptych by Jefferson Pinder featuring gold-toothed skulls superimposed over multiple images of Huey Newton; and the newest acquisition in the show, a portrait by Joshua Rainer of Detroit artist Hughie Lee-Smith that looks more like a damaged tintype photo than an oil painting.

        The oldest work here, a maritime scene from 1890 of a steamer plying Lake Huron, is positioned at the peak of “Salon 6.” Perhaps echoing its combination of nature and machine, the images in the group range from hard-edged, geometric illustrations such as Takeshi Kawashima’s New York Series (1967), to softer landscapes and still lifes, like Wildflower by local favorite, Charles Culver. Likewise, four portraits of women that bracket the group vary from the high-tech wireframe-like bust in Anarchy in Construction by Thomas Bayrle, to the whimsical watercolor earth goddess in the late Wayne State professor Stanley Rosenthal’s Clara D.

        In recent years, Grace Serra has worked to install more art from Wayne State’s deep, broad, and growing collection into more and more sites on campus, keeping the Detroit region’s artistic legacy in the public eye. Stackhouse, who was recently hired thanks to a grant awarded to the university, has assembled not a “greatest hits” compilation but a dynamic and eclectic guest list of voices and approaches from more than a century’s worth of creative output, and allowed them to mix and mingle, introducing some to others like an expert host, knowing the resulting interactions would prove interesting. Eavesdropping on those conversations is a large part of the fun in this wonderfully diverse show.

Sean Bieri, a cartoonist and graphic designer, has written on art for the Detroit Metro Times, Wayne State University, and the Erb Family Foundation among other outlets. He received both his BFA and a BA in Art History—28 years apart—from Wayne State. He is a founding member of Hatch, an arts collective based in the Detroit enclave of Hamtramck, where he lives. He is currently assisting Hatch in the renovation of the “Hamtramck Disneyland” folk art site.