Library Street Collective and The Bunker Artspace: Collection of Beth Rudin DeWoody are delighted to present their collaboration Grace Under Fire, a group exhibition of over forty artists that explores how we continue to find hope in difficult times.

Curated by Laura Dvorkin and Maynard Monrow (Co-curators of the BRD Collection) and Kyle DeWoody ( 2024 Bunker Guest Curator), Grace Under Fire is a companion show to A Wing and a Prayer, opening at The Bunker Artspace in December 2024 and curated by Kyle DeWoody and Zoe Lukov.  Primarily through the lens of community, spirituality, and connection to nature, the two exhibitions feature art that reflects avenues to both respite and resilience. 

At a moment when every perspective of the world’s pain and injustices are just a click away, where can we turn to find consolation and healing?

It feels significant to explore this question in a decommissioned church in Detroit, a city that has experienced both great ebullience and great hardship. The church, a place that witnessed generations in prayer, pain, and transcendence is a pinnacle space for community to gather, to share both burdens and celebration, to revel and soothe together. It is also a place for spiritual sustenance. In the spiritual realm, we can look to the divine, the signs or the cosmos for answers beyond the material. Whether through meditation, prayer, ritual or practice, we can be both centered and elevated in spite of the trials we face. For some, nature is their church, where we look to the earth for its creativity, its wisdom, its healing.

Touching on many of these ideas is Soul Arch Fixed by Nari Ward. With his highly considered assemblage of seemingly non-related materials, Ward combines a surfboard, a former Harlem church pew, and a firehose to “convey hope, energy, and transformation.” While the title references a surfing move that requires a “casual confidence” or faith, the literal buoyancy of the surfboard material incites resilience, and affixing the patinated board on a church pew affords it an elevated status. He seems to offer surfing as a means to both spiritual and metaphorical salvation and survival.

The influence of church also appears in Detroit-based artist Rashaun Rucker’s piece Holy Trinity. A set of three tambourines embellished with original family photographs, crystals and sequins, the work offers a very personal reflection on music, worship and family and how embedded the three are with each other, a sentiment many share. Beyond religious import, there is commemoration of lineage and shared expression through music and prayer.

Sometimes the family we share both ecstasy and agony with is not by birth but chosen. In Lesbian Dance Party, artist Ryan McNamara’s drawn and collaged outlines of fabulous fitted figures honors the connection between church and queer dance floors. In his words, “both are places where one finds community and moments of transcendence.”

Making art in itself can be a search for transcendence. Brittney Leanne Williams’ Interruption 8 is part of her recent series of redacted angels that reference the classical, Christian Visitation while presenting the angels faceless. In these works Williams is not reflecting on a divine experience, but rather attempting to induce one, summoning a divine intervention with “blind faith”

Art also allows us the viewer to transcend, to experience new and different worlds that might help us navigate life in this one. Where The Clouds Gather by Simphiwe Ndzube invites us into a colorful, earthly world, one inhabited by figures that are mysteriously part human and part animal. At home amongst rainbows, sunshine, and thriving nature, their eyes are shut as they appear to sing, to pray even. What is it they pray for? 

The power of the shared prayer is felt in Singing Everything: Crescendo (Staccato) by Marie Watt. During a series of “sewing circles”, Watt invited contributors to answer, “What do you want to sing a song for in this moment?” Watt and her collaborators embroidered the words on panels of wool, which were then quilted together. The individual voices form a powerful chorus. The “chorus” is also present in Raúl de Nieves’ The Gift, which is made from a medley of materials, a vintage silk robe, sequins and plastic toys—all gifted to the artist by friends.

In a similar act of transformation, Minga Opazo creates sculptures out of used textiles and oyster mushroom mycelium, that she then captures in Re-dress I & II. As a fourth-generation Chilean textile crafter, Opazo is concerned with the relationship between contemporary textile production and climate change -and in particular how she can respect her ancestry while tending to our fragile future. Recent study of mushrooms has opened a world of new ideas for tackling some of our climate needs. This work reminds us of the restorative and adaptable qualities of the natural world (which we are a part of), if given the chance. 

The minimalistic and contemplative tone of Maya Lin’s Arctic Circle, which renders the topography of the region in stark Blanco Macael Marble, is a beautiful visualization of “the different states and constant flux of the environment”. Similarly, Michelle Stuart has been an important voice for the natural world through the lens of modernity. Her work Roman Seed Calendar III is from a series showing seeds exceeding an imposed grid. Her work with earth materials is “aiming to contain their energetic potential as well as to underscore their fragility as beacons of the dire environmental crisis we currently face”.

If we don’t save the planet, Sylvie Fleury’s, First Spaceship on Venus (Exstatic Prismatic) suggests we might journey to a different one, one associated with the goddess of love where beauty and femininity reign supreme. Can dreams of another perhaps better reality hold us over until we create that here? Or better yet inspire action to do so?

Composed of three ladders over twenty feet-high and inspired by the medieval symbols for how to reach the divine, Dawn DeDeaux, Ladders for Fragile Ascents offers escape through the gallery’s oculus but the broken rungs and rustic finish include the challenges and struggles for survival, but there is still a way. 

A reference to Félix González-Torres’ Perfect Lovers, Bat-Ami Rivlin’s piece isolates a double inflatable kayak seat. It evokes the individual versus partnered journey and where and how we find lifelines and how somewhat commonplace objects in our life might hold symbolic power when recontextualized, similar to Ward’s buoyant and exalted surfboard.

Overall, Grace Under Fire explores the paths back to ourselves—as a collective, as beings of the earth, as spirits. It offers these as places where we can find grounding, restoration, sanity and ultimately strength to persevere in light of all we face.

Perhaps despite everything, we might just build something better.

And in the end if all else fails, “Sing [& shout] the Body Electric…” - Walt Whitman