Urban Grids

Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art

This grouping features three artists whose work engaged with the urban landscape both as a thematic interest and motif. Lois Dodd, who developed her “window” paintings for over fifty years, first depicted the men’s shelter that was visible from her Manhattan walk-up in the spring of 1967. On more than half a dozen canvases, Dodd portrayed the drab cityscape through varying angles, colors, and features, always attuned to the painterly variations prompted by seasonal light changes.

Michelangelo Lovelace’s Trigger Happy offers an unapologetic depiction of violence in America’s inner cities, a problem that the artist knew intimately. The work reflects the stylistic features that he had developed by the late 1990s, from the elevated and tilted vantage point to the middle-grounded brick wall to the cityscape expanding toward the horizon, plastered and interlaced with provocative text and details. As art critic Steven Litt wrote in 2001, “When it comes to depicting hardscrabble Cleveland with bitterness, with affection, and without illusion, he is simply the best.”

Roberto Gil de Montes’ 1987 Woman and Sharp Tongue—especially its plumed serpent—evinces the Mexican-born, Los Angeles-based artist’s personal inflection of Aztec mythology. In 1979, Gil de Montes, who spent eighteen months in Mexico City at the behest of curators from the Museo de Arte Moderno, started to incorporate Mexican and Aztec-inspired motifs into his work.

Sources: Sources: Jeffrey Katzin, ed., Michelangelo Lovelace: Art Saved My Life (Akron Art Museum, 2024), 25.