There’s an east side-west side divide in metro Detroit’s art world

Where does art thrive in metro Detroit? Hint: Not in boathouses.

Spring art shows are opening across metro Detroit although, by far and away, most are west of Woodward. What about that, east-siders? Don't you gotta have art?

In Birmingham on Monday, artist David Bloom had three assistants help him set up Bloom's big mixed-media piece, which can't help but get attention this week. Its brilliant colors overlaid by 48 electric guitar strings, and rigged to an amplifier, are the first thing visitors will see as they enter the annual “Our Town Art Show & Sale" at The Community House, 380 S. Bates. Bloom's hefty 350-pound artwork has a hefty price: $333,000, most of which will go to charity if it sells, the artist says.

Bloom, a Ford analyst by day, is among 120 Michigan artists with works on display. "Our Town" has free admission, 10 a.m.-6 p.m., on Friday and Saturday. Go to www.communityhouse.com to see the art, starting Friday. There were 700 entries from all over Michigan, winnowed to 300 for the show by two jurors, both of them prominent art experts at the Detroit Institute of Arts.

Elsewhere on the west side of metro Detroit, other art shows are opening or planned this spring. And the usual bevy of galleries are busy in Birmingham, Ferndale, Pontiac, and Southfield, as well as south of Eight Mile, in Detroit's Corktown, the city's downtown Woodward Corridor and its creative corridor on Grand River.

But on metro Detroit’s east side? There’s not much art. Most art in southeast Michigan, for more than a century, has been taught, created, bought, sold and displayed on the west side or in downtown Detroit. Is the spare cash on the east side just pouring into Lake St. Clair — into its boats, that is? Cynical west-siders find a grain of truth in that. Another factor may be history. In the early 1900s, despite a proliferation of summer mansions and boathouses in the Grosse Pointes, the east side's founding years made it a cradle of automaking and heavy industry. Artists fled to the west side, so that theory goes.

One east-side refuge for art is the Anton Art Center, 125 Macomb in Mount Clemens, although its inventory is limited. A display of student art from middle schools and high schools art runs through April 13; on April 27, the center opens a display of elementary school student art, said Peggy DiMercurio, interim executive director. Pondering the east-west divide in metro Detroit's art world, DiMercurio said: "It is hard to explain. Art just doesn't take that high a priority" on the east side.

Still, there are hopeful signs this spring for art-receptive east-siders. A big center for the arts is under construction in Grosse Pointe Park, right at the Detroit border. The Grosse Pointe War Memorial, 32 Lake Shore Drive, has spring art classes planned, such as "Learn to Paint Like Bob Ross," a three-hour blitz on April 19 that aims to teach anyone how to emulate the landscape paintings of the late Floridian who hosted television's "Joy of Painting."

But there are no art supply shops nearby and the east side has no notable galleries, said Donald Cronkhite, a former art teacher at the Grosse Pointe War Memorial. Most of Cronkhite's teaching is at the large and bustling Birmingham-Bloomfield Art Center, where classes and exhibits happen six days a week. His classes in oil painting start on April 2. The center, 1516 S. Cranbrook, is in Birmingham and just a stone's throw from Beverly Hills and Bloomfield Township.

"When I come to the War Memorial for my classes, people are really grateful because the the Grosse Pointes are lacking this," Cronkhite said. His work highlights tensions in nature, often with foreboding cloud formations that would scare any sailor. Cronkhite's art is sold by the Robert Kidd Gallery in Birmingham. His 16-foot cloudscape hangs in the MacKenzie Fine Arts Center at Henry Ford College, 5101 Evergreen Road in Dearborn. Cronkhite's day job is operating his firm, Devonshire Exhibit Design.

Much of metro Detroit's art world is in Oakland County, which doesn't have Lake St. Clair and Mackinac race yachts but does have 1,000 smaller lakes, floating umpteen pontoon boats. It also supports umpteen art galleries, such as Ferndale's busy Lawrence Street Gallery, 22620 Woodward Ave., where a show of paintings by Laura Whitesides Host, of Birmingham, runs through March 29.

"There's just so much art going on in this area, it's incredible," Whitesides Host said, giving a shoutout to the Color/Ink Studio, a visual art and photo gallery along with teaching space at 20919 John R in Hazel Park, where a new show called "Expressionism of Composition" is scheduled to host an artist's talk at 2 p.m. Sunday. Also in Oakland County, "Art Walk at MDC" takes place Friday, 10 a.m.-3 p.m., at the Michigan Design Center, 1700 Stutz Drive in Troy. The theme? To view art not just for itself but for how a piece can create a mood — steamy, cool or calm — inside a home, according to the center's website.

Heading south to Detroit's west side, the art-curious can visit Norwest Gallery of Art, 19556 Grand River, for a display called "Heavy Melanin," through April 28. This Black-owned gallery shows the work of numerous Detroit artists. Not far away, still west of Woodward, Detroit's Corktown area is known for its many studio lofts, whose art ranges from delicately painted dioramas to welded steel towers. Farther west, Dearborn is known for exhibits of Middle Eastern art and tapestries.

Back in Birmingham, where in 1990 there were 25 galleries, today there are just half a dozen, said David Klein, owner of the prestigious Klein Gallery, 163 Townsend.

"Unfortunately, the market has shrunk," in part because many buyers purchase art on the internet, Klein said. Still, the region's west side, plus downtown Detroit, continue to draw collectors to their galleries, for sophisticated pieces at higher price points than those found at summer art fairs.

"The collector base for some reason is on the west side," Klein said, diplomatically skirting a reporter's quip about boaters. He opened his Birmingham gallery in 1990 and then in 2015 opened a Detroit location, 1520 Washington Blvd. Downtown Detroit has a storied history of selling fine art, topped in the 1950s when the J.L. Hudson Co. had the Midwest's finest and largest gallery, Klein said. At his Detroit gallery, a six-week show of art by Franklin native Benjamin Pritchard is scheduled to open on Saturday. Pritchard's work uses abstract forms and bold colors to create "a meditation on Michigan and time," the artist said Wednesday, as he helped to hang his art in the Detroit space.

At The Community House in Birmingham, Bloom's piece, titled VIBE GL, is named after a woman he still loves even after she betrayed him, the artist said. The title's first part "stands for vibrations inspired by" a woman whose initials are EGL, he said. The two were a couple before Bloom discovered she was married, he said, adding: "I'll love her forever." The second part of the title, "GL," also stands for "grand lasso," referring to the rock song "Lasso" by Phoenix that "was on the radio when I came up with the idea for attaching the magnetic sine wave panels," symbolic vertical components that divide his piece into thirds. Bloom collaborated with Rob Wilson of Wilson Fine Violins in Birmingham over two and a half years to complete the work.

So, what is it about the east side's relative dearth of art? Those willing to drive 20 miles from the fleets of Lake St. Clair to Romeo can find several art spots, including the RJD Gallery, 227 N. Main, which is celebrated on four pages of American Art Collector magazine's March issue. RJD Gallery is showing, through April 4, the oil paintings of Spanish painter Jose Antonio Bernad, which are "beautiful and full of mystery" with "elements of mild danger," says the magazine's review.

Still, the east side is clearly, in sailor's parlance, the pickle boat in this art duel of metro Detroit.

To avoid a pitched battle with people in boat shoes, it must be said: Metro Detroit’s biggest and best art collection is right in the middle of the east and west sides. It's the DIA on Woodward Avenue, recently voted by USA Today’s readers as the nation’s best art museum.

Contact Bill Laytner: blaitner@freepress.com

This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: In metro Detroit, go west for fine art, go east for big boats