Brock Ailes/ Courtesy photo
Intimacy: The Artistic Community of PASC is on view at MOCAD until Jan. 14, with an artist walkthrough slated for Jan. 12.
Metro Detroit’s art studio for artists with developmental disabilities and mental health differences has only been around for three years and has already landed a museum exhibit.
Progressive Art Studio Collective (PASC) was launched in 2021 and is the first art studio and program of its kind in Detroit and Wayne County. In Intimacy: The Artistic Community of PASC at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, 37 of PASC’s 175 artists present works across mediums.
PASC Program Manager Anthony Marcellini says the program’s goal is support these artists with developmental and mental health challenges in developing successful contemporary careers.
At PASC’s open studios, rather than steer the artists in any way, the staff encourage them to create freely focusing on positive reinforcement. The organization, a program through Services to Enhance Potential (STEP), has three studios in Detroit, Southgate, and Warren. In the spring, PASC will move its Detroit studio to a gallery space in Library Street Collective’s forthcoming Lantern project.
“It’s not like art school, where they tell you, ‘That’s been done before,’ or ‘only one of you will ever make it as artist,’ which is what my teachers told me in art school,” Marcellini says. “It’s more like, ‘Keep going. Do more. Would you like to try this new material? How about experimenting with this thing.’”
He adds, “It’s really about developing a space of independence, autonomy, and freedom for people who don’t often get that, who then use creative expression to communicate in another way… Verbal communication or written communication sometimes, for some of them, is not always the primary form of communication. Making art is also a very therapeutic activity. So that aspect of the studios is very important. It’s a very healing space in that sense.”
Intimacy is part of MOCAD’s Mike Kelley’s Space for Public Good programming.
When Abel González Fernández came on as assistant curator at MOCAD roughly six months ago, he was tasked with creating programming relative to the Mike Kelly Mobile Homestead’s legacy of community care. After being thoroughly impressed by PASC’s mission and the work in a show they had at Library Street Collective at the time, he decided to work with Marcellini to curate the group’s first museum show.
“For MOCAD it was important to understand a museum as a social body that provides accessibility for these artists,” González Fernández says.
The show ranges from large-scale abstract works to sculptures of pop iconography and paintings that offer modern commentary on art history. PASC artist Ronald Griggs, for example, offers a depiction of Madonna and Child, with the child appearing to be nonbinary.
“I was struck by the fact that these artists were like actually having a dialogue with classic art history, and bringing their input to the art,” González Fernández says. “Marquise Rucker has this piece that I love that is an abstraction that reminds me of the vanguard art of the ’20s and ’30s.”
The show also has a joyous overtone, like the exuberance of wonder and play. Santina Dionisi’s sculptures of figures like Zero from The Nightmare Before Christmas and Piglet and the honey pot from Winnie the Pooh made us smile.
“Having our first museum show in just three years, I think, is a testament to the quality of the work and certainly the space of the studio itself that really allows that work to flourish,” Marcellini says. “But also having audiences understand that a program like this exists [is important] because almost everybody either knows somebody who has a friend [or] a relative who has a disability. This is a great way to broaden the community so that they know that there are spaces where things are being created by people with disabilities in a very positive, supportive environments.”
On January 12 at 6:30 p.m., MOCAD will host an artist walkthrough of the show before it closes on January 14. Prints of several of the works are available in MOCAD’s museum shop and all original work is for sale on PASC’s website.
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