“The Sea and the Sky, and You and I"
The Shepherd
Detroit
July 16, 2025, on display until Aug. 30
Identity is strongly entwined with the physical world around us, shaping our thoughts, actions and overall culture, especially when those landscapes change. That relationship is visually explored in “The Sea and the Sky, and You and I,” an art exhibit currently on display at The Shepherd art gallery in Detroit. The exhibit runs until Aug. 30 and features nearly 30 artists, with over half based in Detroit.
The show, named from a lyric from Miles Davis’ “All Blues,” has a strong focus on Detroit but covers relationships with places from across the world and across history, some literal, some fictional, some visionary, with tones that range from critical to joyous. It features mostly paintings, plus some photography, sculptures and video.
One of the exhibition’s standout pieces is Ashanti Chaplin’s “Soil Map #1,” a large, 96” x 96” brown painting with a butterfly-like shape suggestive of a Rorschach test. On closer look, however, you see the painting has a unique, sandy texture made from soil with historic significance, coming from the 13 remaining All-Black towns in Oklahoma. The towns – originally totaling 50 – were founded in the late 19th and early 20th centuries by freed Black Americans in Indian Territory before Oklahoma’s statehood, which began their decline, a piece of history I hadn’t been aware of before.
Another was Jamea Richmond-Edwards’ “Stax and the O’Greelo Colossal: An Odyssey Beyond the Frozen Veil.” The painting depicts a birds-eye view of a series of snowboarders and skiers on a snowy mountaintop, escaping from an abstract monster above. With bright neon colors, the painting carries a triumph and energy, based on a scene from a Joseph Hall dystopian satire about characters taking down a giant.
Rosha Yaghmai’s three-panel series: “Afterimage, Heart,” “Afterimage, Pulse,” “Afterimage, Vein” is another favorite. The abstract work features rose-dominant blurs of colors that visually move along with you as you walk by, almost like water rushing down a stream, though in different directions, suggestive of aura photography. It was made by digitally altering illustrations which had hung on Yaghmai’s childhood home of “Shahnameh,” an epic poem by Persian poet Ferdawsi about the mythical history of Persia. The work is meant to be a metaphor for collective memory and generational inheritance, according to the artist’s note.
Rosha Yaghmai’s “Afterimage, Heart,” “Afterimage, Pulse,” “Afterimage, Vein”
Two notable Detroit-based paintings were Doug Jones’ “Wata Mama Aaliyah” and Mario Moore’s “Keep On Keeping On, Don’t Look Back.” The former, with simple white sketches on a black background, depicts the late R&B singer and Detroit native Aaliyah – who died in a plane crash in the Bahamas - rising from the water as the Yoruba deity Oshun. The latter is a soothing painting of a dapper Black couple flying over the Detroit River to the safety of Canada, representing a triumphant arrival on the final leg of the Underground Railroad.
The Shepherd itself is an example of the changing, cultural relationship between people and spaces and is worth a visit on its own. Opened in May of 2024, The Shepherd occupies a restored historic church on Detroit’s East Side that was repurposed into a community space. Named after the former Good Shepherd Catholic Church, the 1911 Romanesque-style building is full of beautiful architectural details, including grand facades, tall, domed ceilings and colorful stained glass (including in the bathrooms!). The church itself hosts two art exhibit spaces plus a bed and breakfast and a small library. It is part of the Library Street Collective’s larger Little Village, which also encompasses a sculpture garden and a skatepark, designed by Tony Hawk and McArthur Binion, on the larger grounds.
The art space directly blends into the church, utilizing not just the main exhibit rooms – built in the center and right transept side of the grand church – but its surrounding nooks and crannies (I nearly missed a few pieces, because I didn’t realize they weren’t permanent fixtures). The two found-object sculptures in the exhibit by Scott Hocking and Halima Afi Cassells were displayed across symmetric golden niches in the left side of the church’s transept. Between them, Richmond-Edwards’ video “Leviathan” played inside one of the confessionals.
“The Sea and the Sky, and You and I” is a cool exhibit inside a cool space. The works inside take on an interesting and important concept that ask us to examine the world around us, its history and our place within it.
