“I lived in this home from my birth in 1956 until I was almost five years old. My maternal grandmother’s brother Tony built it for her and her family. My grandparents raised three kids here, the first two children, my Aunt Jeannette and Uncle Jim, were born in this house. My mother was the first in her family to have been born in a hospital (1936). My parents married in 1955 and they rented the upper floor of this house until we moved to our own home on Bringard. This house was unique in having an ante-room and a swinging door between the kitchen and dining room. The curtains and the wall paper had the same pattern and it was terribly cold in winters. The house back then was painted green and white, a nod to my family’s Celtic heritage. On the east side of the house was a dog run – we had a dachshund named Hans. Today we have a loving dachshund named Darcy. Our current kitchen table and chairs are the ones I ate at as a child in the house (refinished by my hubby). The house was on a busy street near a large cemetery, Mt. Olivet, and a block from the end of the runway of Coleman Young Airport. To this day, the sound of slow hum and low flying planes makes me recall those days, Sunday dinners and sleep-overs.”

Portraits of Home is an ongoing series of small oval ink on panel paintings first begun in 2018. An offshoot of Homesickness Series, the series is a study of the connections between architecture and portraiture and the connections between the homes of a city and the individual human stories they contained. Each individual work is a portrait of an endangered or lost home within the cities of Detroit and Highland Park, and serves to memorialize threatened histories or serve as stark reminders of the absence left behind by the physical erasure of markers of history in the name of blight removal or gentrification. While images of Detroit’s empty and abandoned industrial behemoths have dominated much of our cultural imagination, the devastating impact of generational disinvestment, corporate abandonment and suburban outmigration is most dramatically seen across the dozens of square miles that are Detroit’s sprawling residential neighborhoods.  Through a focus on specific domestic spaces and lots, the series connects to the experience of individual people and families who occupied each site, exploring connections between identity and the role that home and memory play in its formation. The series is continually expanding-eventually the large scope of the project will be representative of the large scale of abandonment, blight and destruction being experienced within the region’s once densely populated neighborhoods.

Limited edition, signed giclee prints from Portraits of Home Series are available in editions of 30 and are printed at a one-to-one scale to the original panel works, the oval image measuring 5″ x 7″ and the outer dimension of the prints measures 8″ x 10″. A single print costs $45 which includes shipping, and any subsequent prints can be purchased for $35 per print. Contact the artist for purchase inquiries.