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Hours: Tuesday-Thursday: 3 p.m.-7 p.m.
Friday-Saturday: 1 p.m.-7 p.m.
Sunday: 1 p.m.-5 p.m.
313-833-9901
4160 Woodward Ave. Detroit, MI 48201
©POP Gallery is the Motor City's pre-eminent art showcase. For over a decade. it has been the launching pad for some of the city's most visible, popular and important visual artists of the last 20 years and home to some of the midwest's most exhilarating exhibitions.
Founded in Royal Oak, Michigan in 1995 by ultra-Boheme rock poster publisher, Rick Manore, in the cloisters of a renovated old church where the impetus originally was to sell rock and roll poster art and graphics, Kustom Kulture and a vintage visual memorabilia. ©POP Gallery was born rather ceremoniously when world-renown Cartoon Surrealist, Robert Williams was chosen for the gallery's debut exhibit, "Grab Yer Ankles, Detroit" and a local media frenzy ensued, instantly embossing the familiar "cpopyright" logo into the Detroit cultural psyche, and soon becoming THE gallery in which to be shown or be seen. ©POP exposed the unbelievable range of visual talent fermenting in this "New Munich". Soon local first-timers with names like Niagara, Glenn Barr, Mark Dancey, Tom Thewes, Tristan Eaton, and many more soon-to-be nationally famous Motor City artists would find their first sucessful exhibits in the basement of an old church.
By 1997, some of America's cutting-edge art and culture journals such as "Juxtapoz", "Your Flesh", "Art Alternatives" and "Details" all trumpeted the Gallery and the artists who were emerging from this suburban, "underground-zero" and right into national prominence.
By 1999 ©POP and it's stable of artists -Niagara , Glenn Barr, Mark Dancey,and a retro-futurist named, Tom Thewes, Jr., were more than just, "Detroit's best kept secrets". Now, as they were all beginning to experience national prominence vis a vis exhibits in Los Angeles, New York and all points inbetween.
Unable to meet the demands of the gallery and the increasing interest in the artists he was promoting, Manore was approached by ©POP stablemate, Tom Thewes, Jr (last of the der Lärm boys), who only 3 years earlier had his third successful ©POP Royal Oak exhibit, and now offered his help in taking the gallery and it's burgeoning roster of artists to a whole new level.
Putting his money where his mouth and heart were, Thewes, now ©POP Owner/CEO, renovated a three story former trophy shop, bar and den of iniquity in Detroit's Mid-town Cultural Center, into a world class showplace for art. The newly improved cultural showcase opened to much fanfare and excited expectation with a "Grand Re-Opening" Exhibition entitled , "© Stands For..." which included all of the ©POP regulars plus names like, Mark Ryden , H.R. Giger, Robert Wiilliams, Eric White, Ed "Big Daddy" Roth, Isabel Samaras and many more. More than just a simple re-location, this new version of ©POP created a cultural domino effect of being the first of what soon became an imperssive "gallery row" on the south end of the Cultural Center, which still continues to grow with more galleries every year.
Setting the bar high led to more than 20 exhibits a year for the two-floor gallery with such names as Shag, Shephard Fairey, Bask, Yumiko Kawikawa, Kid Robot, Iggy Pop and some of the most legendary Art openings in the city's history, and helped to build ©POP's mythic status, as patrons came from every continent (except Antarctica) to visit this iconic gallery.
As a perennial award-winner from its inception, acknowledged by local publications' year-end "Best Of" lists, ©POP continues to elevate the art bar to lofty heights - for both artists and viewers alike, with an uncompromising and innovative style which aims to carry the rich and risky tradition of showing both the diamonds and the dirt of contemporary art well into the 21st Century.
Recent Exhibitions
See what The Detroiter said about "Carnivora"
Masters of The Arts & Crafts Exhibition
Russell Keeter Exhibit
style="font-size:12px;text-decoration:underline;line-height: 30px"Camilo Pardo Exhibition
Chris Dean
"Science Shows Us How"
..
Topher Crowder
"Playig God"
"Hundreds of years from now, when scholars look back at the 20th Century to see what art form from that century had the biggest impact - the art that moved people, from the working man to the aesthete, it won't be Cubism, nor Abstract Expressionism, nor even Pop Art - it'll be cartoons and comics."
Robert Williams
©POP Gallery is proud to present the illustrator and comic expressionist, Topher Crowder in the first one-man exhibit of his highly intricate and obsessive works, entitled, "Playing God", with an opening on Saturday, April 14th at 7 PM. The black and white world of Livonia artist, Topher Crowder is both beautifully rendered and unconventionally composed. Absurdity, irony and obsession abound in Crowder's world. An early influence (and cue) came from Basil Wolverton's ultra-morphic 1960's illustrations for the popular, "Whacky Packs" series. His hyper-meticulous detail is akin to an amped-up Robert Crumb, but with the narrative style of outsider icon, Joe Coleman, sans the color. His almost maddeningly obsessive attention to the banal, coupled with his free-flowing composition may seem familiar to some, yet his work is commandingly sui generis in style as well as in concept. Like most gifted comic illustrators, Crowder is a born storyteller. In "Playing God", his choice for a narrative vehicle is the brave individuals who, by choice or not, became pioneers, as the guniea pigs for medical advancement by basically "going where no man or woman had gone before". One of these explorers of uncharted human experience is Barney Clark, the recipient of the first mechanical heart. The brave yet doomed Clark's pathology and mortality are systematically chronicled in Crowder's swirling narrative. Exacted in ink on board, Crowder’s allegory follows Clark’s travails as he makes medical history, becomes famous, and ultimately dies as doctors try to cheat death by attempting to recreate nature and prolong his life. Medical marvels go hand in hand with the consequent horrors in Topher Crowder's world. His analogy to Shelly's Frankenstein is evident throughout, as it is in his piece about the infamous "Icepick Lobotomist, Dr. Walter Freeman, who invented the "ice pick" or transorbital lobotomy. The doctor used this procedure, in which he quite literally uses an ice pick hammered through the back of the eye socket into the brain, with nearly 3500 patients in the 50's and early 60's. The sidebars and detours that Crowder takes in telling these stories are as compelling as the main central images, as he alternately visualizes the lives (and deaths) of these medical sojourners with blind mythic heroism and touching human frailty. Some may remember Crowder from the displays of his unconventional college notebooks in various group shows in 2005 and 2006. He attended the prestigious College For Creative Studies in the mid-eighties and studied under the legendary, Russell Keeter as a freshman and then dropped out. He spent years working dozens of meaningless jobs until the onset of a crushing and debilitative psychological depression caused him to take 250 Tylenols in an unsuccessful suicide attempt. Surviving that, and a stint in a mental facility, prompted Crowder to destroy all his work, throw away all his art supplies, and embark on a career in the computer industry, eventually get married, and building what he describes as a "steady yet torturous life". But after many years of not doing art something happened, and the urge, the innate compulsion to create again, became evident when he began landscaping his backyard with over 230 bowling balls. His wife Hanna understood this as a good sign. Shortly after, Crowder re-enrolled in Wayne State University's Fine Art program, almost 20 years after he'd dropped out. The former drop-out will graduate this Spring and a long and sometimes tortured journey will have been completed, only to find him at a new crossroads, psychologically as well as creatively, ready to express and document his own cryptic yet fascinating view of the world. Topher Crowder's "Playing God" opens Saturday, April 14th and runs through May 19th, 2007.