From July 2010 to July 2016, Alonso Delarte was Detroit Event Photography Examiner for Examiner.com.
Whitdel Arts was originally located in the Whitdel Apartments, with free rent from Southwest Solutions and most of the utilities also paid by Southwest Solutions.
March 8, 2014 11:25 AM MST
JenClare Gawaran makes last minute tweaks to Haylee Ebersole's dehydrated gelatin containers. Photo by Alonso del Arte.
It was only a matter of time before a major art gallery in Detroit devoted a show to the vagaries of time: The Temporary Show at Whitdel Arts, the plucky little gallery in Mexicantown, opened last night. Normally, the gallery's top officials roll up their sleeves and work hard at preparing the gallery for each show and installing the artwork in such a way that it will not change during the course of the exhibit. They also worked hard to prepare the current show, but instead of ensuring the artwork remains fixed for the duration of the show, they worked to ensure the pieces in the show will change, some more noticeably than others, over the next few weeks.
"We wanted pieces that would change without viewer input," explained JenClare Gawaran, president of the board running the gallery. There was an open call for artwork and Gawaran led the jury committee to select artwork for the show. The Temporary Show is different from the Engage: Detroit Interactive Art Exhibition of 2012, though The Temporary Show does include artwork that involves viewer participation. For example, Haylee Ebersole made dehydrated gelatin containers and instructed that they be placed near each other on the gallery floor in such a way that patrons will inevitably step on them, causing them to change. However, "I want some of them to last to April," Gawaran said.
But most of the pieces in the show will change even if the gallery's patrons don't come into physical contact with them. Joe Culver made a piece that suspends some bronze with wax over a box of gravel. "I hope the wax will come through the bronze, and that part of it falls through the bronze and into the gravel," Culver said. At 8:30 p.m. last night, the artist and his friends gathered around the piece to simultaneously take a picture of it with their cellphones from different angles.
One of the pieces in the show which will change slowly is a lumen print by Young Kim. "It's like taking a photo out of the developer but not putting it in fixer," explained Terry Hall, one of the gallery's new top officials. As the print is exposed to more and more light, the image will fade. However, they don't want it to fade too fast, so they cover the print with an opaque material before leaving the gallery for the day.
A piece by Christina deRoos will change more quickly and more obviously because it involves ice and glass. "Since it will melt, parts of this piece may topple over and fall off the pedestal. Watch out for falling glass!" the artist warns in a tag on the pedestal. It would have been more difficult to predict how the piece would change if it was an outdoor installation, and extreme weather was a concern for the opening reception as it was for the homage to Prof. Gilda Snowden that preceded the current show. "I would have come through the window," Culver joked in response to a hypothetical scenario in which four or five feet of snow filled the bottom of the stairwell in front of the gallery's front door. "I would have started shoveling," deRoos said.
The wine served seems to have been purchased specifically for the occasion. Leelanau Cellars, based in Omena, Michigan, near the Upper Peninsula, makes four season-themed wines: Winter White, Spring Splendor, Summer Sunset and Autumn Harvest. There were some generic California wines on hand in case they ran out of the season-themed wines. It is too early to tell whether this will be a pattern for Whitdel of buying Michigan wines for their opening receptions (if it is, the pattern started with St. Julian Red Heron and White Heron in January).
Alice Gadzinski with her self-portrait in the Whitdel Arts Emerging Artists space. Photo by Alonso del Arte.
In the Emerging Artists space, Alice Gadzinski is showing work that will probably not change over the next few weeks. But she does see a connection to the main show in her own work. Rachel Bourgault, one of the gallery's top officials, "is a friend of mine, she contacted me about [the Emerging Artists space]. ... I don't think Rachel saw a connection," Gadzinski recalled, and Bourgault confirmed.
The show will be up until April 19, according to the gallery's website. Gallery hours are Saturday from 12 p.m. to 3 p.m., and on Third Thursdays at night. "This is the show to come by and see every time we're open," said Hall, in order to witness how the artwork changes. But there is a shortage of qualified gallery assistants at Whitdel, and the gallery's top officials often take on the important duty of gallery hours.
I originally published the article with the following three additional paragraphs. Later on, as there was a glimmer of the possibility of an actual apology, I deleted these paragraphs. I have retrieved them from my files.
Whichever staffer is in the gallery during gallery hours, no matter how high or low on the org chart they may be, completely represents the gallery to the public. Thus, an incompetent gallery assistant can, with one absurd, unthinkable and extremely embarrassing mistake, cause very serious damage to the gallery's reputation.
For example, by insulting and turning away one of the artists in the current show if they showed up during gallery hours. Culver found it implausible that such an atrociously idiotic act could ever happen at Whitdel. "The staff here is amazing," he said, but admitted he has only dealt with the gallery's board and not the rank-and-file gallery assistants, and knows the gallery's officials would not turn him away with an insult. Even if such a thing happened to him, he would not call for that assistant to be fired or forced to resign. "I understand everyone has bad days," he explained.
If only a nincompoop is available to be in the gallery for gallery hours, the officials should cancel gallery hours that day rather than risk the one severely incompetent idiot nullifying the officials' hard work with one disastrous turn-away. Gallery officials have taken steps to prevent offensive turn-aways from happening again. Extreme weather events due to climate change can also cause cancellation of gallery hours. Deviations from gallery hours will be posted on the gallery's website and Facebook page.
COMMENTARY. Oh, Joe, how easy it is to be magnanimous in a hypothetical. Of course, in a hypothetical, you don't set a precedent whereby it becomes acceptable to commit an injustice against you or people like you.
But what if the racist gallery assistant honestly had no idea I was a co-curator of the previous exhibit? And what if she was honestly unaware of the fact that there are black and Latino artists and curators?
The exhibits at Whitdel Arts from 2011 to 2013 would have given her very few examples. As I reviewed my photos of Whitdel Arts from that time period, I finally became aware of Whitdel's racism problem.
In May 2014, I suggested to Southwest Solutions that Whitdel Arts should pay rent if they want to continue to be racist. This led me to a meeting with Phillip Olla of the Contemporary Art Institute of Detroit (CAID) and the racist gallery assistant, who continued to assert she was unaware I was a co-curator and exhibiting artist.
Olla used the word "sorry" five or more times, and the gallery assistant once. I asked her point blank if she had damaged any of the artwork, and I believed her when she said she hadn't. But I remain completely unconvinced of her unawareness on February 15, 2014 of my role in the exhibit at that time, her words were just too brilliantly insulting to have been the result of actual ignorance.
I wrote no more articles about Whitdel Arts for the rest of 2014, and none at all in 2015. But I kept an eye on the gallery, and noticed token gestures towards diversity, like the addition of a black artist to the gallery's board (but of course his being on the board meant he couldn't exhibit in the gallery). Also, there was a show of local artists from the neighborhood that came and went without any notice on the gallery's website.
In August, a show for the 70th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki presented a missed opportunity to exhibit Japanese and Japanese American artists in the gallery. That show was, at best, generically anti-war, and at worst, an unapologetic endorsement of the decision to bomb Japan. The issue of whether America should apologize to Japan is a delicate one, and it should be discussed with words, not with artwork that could too easily be taken as an expression of white cluelessness.
COMMENTARY. The first show of 2014 at Whitdel Arts was Gilded, a special homage to Prof. Gilda Snowden, who taught at CCS for many years. Two of her students, Austin Brady and Fatima Sow, shared the Emerging Artists space. I could not write an article about this show because I was co-curator with Craig Paul Nowak. Thanks however to Tanya Britt, my Examiner.com colleague who wrote an article about this show.
This show had been in planning since 2012. So theoretically, I should not have written any articles about Whitdel Arts from that point forward. But who's going to write about Whitdel Arts in my stead? That was genuinely my worry before my confidence in Whitdel Arts was so thoroughly destroyed by a racist gallery assistant in 2014.
At least the opening night was very nice. Prof. Snowden showed up at about 9:30 p.m., and her almost saintly spirit filled our hearts with goodness. Indeed a sharp contrast to the racist gallery assistant, whose evil spirit had in 2013 given me nightmares and dire premonitions I completely misunderstood.
I went to the first gallery hours for the show the following day, and the following week, and so on and so forth every week the show was up, which was unusual for curators of shows at Whitdel. At the first gallery hours, JenClare Gawaran kept telling everyone that I was the curator. At the time, it seemed unnecessary to me, but supposedly the racist gallery assistant did not get the memo.
The racist gallery assistant was at those first gallery hours, but I didn't say anything to her face-to-face. Hardly anyone came to the gallery for the later gallery hours, in great part because of the unusually cold weather that winter.
The very first time the racist gallery assistant said anything to my face was on February 15, 2014. I showed up to gallery hours as I had on previous Saturdays. But the door was locked. I knocked.
The racist gallery assistant opened the door. "There's no one here," she said.
Okay, I can't really argue with that. I said nothing.
"I know you come here often."
What the hell? Why the hell do you think I come here often? This was just so puzzling, I couldn't get any words out.
"Safety first." She slowly and deliberately closed the door, so as to give me an opportunity to try to force the door and escalate the situation. But I just stood there, dumbstruck at what had just happened. I had been thoroughly insulted at the door of a gallery where an exhibition that I had been instrumental in planning was on display.
On one level, I was impressed by the racist gallery assistant's genius with words. Any idiot can utter a racial slur. It takes intelligence to insult someone with words that look benign or even inane on paper.
Of course the racist gallery assistant did not invent the dog whistle. But she did use a dog whistle two years before I even knew the term for it. The "safety" dog whistle is one of the most brutally effective. As soon as people start worrying about the safety of a white woman, even an ugly one, facing a non-white man, the worry about her safety completely obliterates any accountability for that white woman's racist actions.
The racist gallery assistant clung to the lie that she did not know who I was. That stuff about knowing I come to Whitdel often, that can only be explained by that she knew I was a co-curator and wanted to belittle and minimize my contribution to the exhibit.
And safety first? What the hell am I, a fallen power line? If the racist gallery assistant was honestly concerned with her own safety, wouldn't she have quickly shut the door as soon as she saw I was not whom she wanted me to be? Instead, she took a good twenty seconds or so to insult me with words so diabolically well-thought everyone just unthinkingly takes her side.
On February 20, at the Third Thursday gallery hours, I thought I was going to hear some kind of an apology. JenClare Gawaran said "We are concerned." But the word "sorry" wasn't uttered even once. And she refused to fire the racist gallery assistant, because she's a volunteer. I'm sure they would fire a volunteer at the DIA if she behaved in a racist manner like the racist gallery assistant at Whitdel Arts.
Still, after reviewing the exhibit to make sure the racist gallery assistant hadn't damaged any of it (I was seriously concerned that I might wind up with the bill for $20,000 worth of artwork, some of it hopelessly irreplaceable), I felt at that moment as if I had actually received a real apology and went home.
Then, on February 22, the racist gallery assistant had the gall to show up at Corktown Studios, where I had curated another exhibit, and insult me there as well. "You curated all this!?" she asked, as if that was amazing and unlikely. It was not a compliment, it was another malicious insult, a perversion of benign words.
At least the show at Whitdel had closed and most of the artwork had been picked up, so I no longer worried about the racist gallery assistant damaging the artwork. Whitdel would then be closed for a couple of weeks as the next exhibition was prepared.
I know the racist gallery assistant's name. I'm not going to write it here because I don't want to bolster her credentials with neo-Nazi groups. But more importantly, since Whitdel Arts refused to disavow the racist gallery assistant, they have endorsed her racism.
Sometimes you just have to let some things go. But I couldn't let this one go. If Joe Culver, a white artist who has perhaps exhibited at Whitdel more than anyone else, had been treated by a gallery assistant at Whitdel the way that I was treated, wouldn't he have demanded that assistant be fired, and wouldn't the Whitdel board have complied?
So why is it okay to treat me that way? It is not okay. That's why I can't let this one go. Dumb, off-the-cuff insults from JenClare, I can forgive and forget those. Diabolically smart insults from the racist gallery assistant, that I can't let go, not as long as the racist gallery assistant is in a position to disrespect other non-white artists.
Besides, Joe Culver can't possibly imagine being disrespected at a gallery he's showing artwork in, or any gallery for that matter.
I couldn't write about this on Examiner.com, though. For one thing, Examiner.com had a rule against writing about yourself, and they were getting tougher on enforcement. And for another, in the previous articles I had written about Whitdel, I might have come across as too flattering of the gallery and too oblivious of its racism problem.
Still, I felt a moral duty to give some kind of indication of this problem. Did I strike the right balance in the article I wrote about the next exhibit at Whitdel Arts? You tell me, read it here next.