Located in Kerrytown about a fifteen minute walk from the Diag (and only steps away from two other local galleries), WSG Gallery is an artist-owned gallery that displays and sells work by its 14 members. Among their number is Stamps School of Art & Design Professor Nora Venturelli, who teaches many of Stamps’ figure drawing and painting classes. While WSG’s work is priced well above a typical student budget, it can be visited and admired for free, and new shows are installed almost monthly.
For their annual “14+14” show in January, each member of WSG invites one additional artist to join them for a large group exhibition. This year’s invited artists included Stamps professor Lee Marchalonis, who teaches printmaking and artist books classes, and Stamps student Denali Gere. (Disclosure: I’ve worked with three of the artists in this exhibition in the past—with Venturelli and Marchalonis as professors, and with Barbara Brown during a visiting artist workshop.)
With a total of 28 participating artists, the exhibition was packed with colorful artwork. The walls of the main gallery space were covered with artworks that spilled over into a small back room and downstairs into the basement. They covered practically every medium, including painting, drawing, photography, printmaking, fiber arts, and mixed media. Shelves and pedestals also held three-dimensional work like artist books (Barbara Brown) and ceramic sculpture (Monica Rickhoff Wilson, Marcia Pollenberg). One striking fiber installation by Boisali Biswas hung from the ceiling in the center of the room.
It was exciting to see the work of members of the Stamps community on display in a professional, off-campus gallery setting. Nora Venturelli had several expressive, layered figure paintings and drawings on display. Lee Marchalonis’s work included a series of monoprints that depicted the soft glow of candlelight with hazy blue ink. And Denali Gere showed off her talent with astonishingly intricate linocut prints.
It’s difficult to choose standout pieces from an exhibition with so many strong works. There was much to admire in the broad array of media and styles, but I found myself particularly drawn to the fiber works, such as “Canopy” by Cathryn Amidei. Amidei uses a computerized jacquard loom to hand-weave detailed images with a mix of fibers. “Canopy” is filled with beautiful variations in texture that mimic the feeling of looking up through the branches of a forest overhead, with light streaming through the leaves. It was an image that felt immediately familiar and calming to me, captured perfectly in textile. Other works by Amidei in the exhibition depicted human figures, with the same skilled eye for light and form.
Another captivating fiber work was Boisali Biswas’s “Echos of a Left Behind Place,” composed of several textile elements hung in layers to create a domestic scene of a balcony with laundry hung out to dry. The subtleties of color and texture in Biswas’s weaving welcomed me in, but the gauzy fabrics made the scene feel delicate, tinging it with a feeling of nostalgia and memory.
As with any wide-ranging group exhibition, not every piece spoke to me. But the abundance of excellent work made the exhibition as a whole feel like it was bursting with creativity. The 14+14 show left me excited to return to WSG Gallery for future shows. For students looking to expand their horizons, I would absolutely recommend taking a trip off campus to see what the Ann Arbor artistic community has to offer.
