Life, Growth, Continuity
Artist
Alvin Loving Jr.
(African-American, 1935 - 2005)
Date1998
MediumPewabic tile mosaic
Dimensions110 × 177 1/2 in. (279.4 × 450.9 cm)
ClassificationsCeramic
Credit LineCommission of Office of the President
Object numberUAC3051
DescriptionOn display just inside the main entrance of the David Adamany Undergraduate Library, Alvin Loving Jr.’s 1998 ceramic mosaic mural, its silver tiles flashing in the sunlight that streams through the foyer windows, greets visitors with three powerful, affirmative words: Life, Growth, Continuity. Swirling beside the text is a number of spiral forms, a trademark of Loving’s late work. Here, they’re rendered in shades of rich, natural green, accented (perhaps in a nod to Wayne State’s school colors) with metallic gold.Those green tiles have a very “Detroit” history. In 1912, the Stroh Brewery Company installed ceramic tiles from the famed Pewabic Pottery in its new facility on Gratiot Avenue; more tiles were ordered in the mid-‘50s for a planned addition to the brewery, but much of that tile went unused and was put into storage. By chance, in the mid-‘80s, company head and philanthropist Peter Stroh found himself seated at a dinner party next to Irene Walt, an advocate for public art who was coordinating the efforts to install artworks in the new People Mover stations downtown. Stroh donated his leftover tiles to the project. Some were incorporated into a mural, at the Cadillac Center station, created by former Pewabic production head Diana Kulisek Pancioli and dedicated to Pewabic founder Mary Chase Stratton. The many tiles still remaining from that mural were used in artworks at other locations around town, including Loving’s piece at the Adamany library.
Loving’s work has its roots in the tenets of abstract expressionism, so any relationship between his images and real-life subjects is likely unintentional; still, these spiral forms could be seen to embody each of mural’s three themes. They might bring to mind branching vines, or sprouting seedlings opening themselves up to the blue sky. They may even recall the coiled bodies of a lineage of creatures, from fossilized ammonites to modern nautiluses. It might seem a strangely organic, even emotional image to grace the staid edifice of an academic library, yet these three concepts — life, growth, and continuity — are at the heart of a library’s mission: providing access to the knowledge and understanding of all aspects of life; fostering intellectual and personal advancement; and instilling a sense of one’s connection to the past and the future.
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Alvin Loving Sr., before his career as a pioneering African American educator, had been an art student and a sign painter. He encouraged his young son’s creativity, but Alvin Jr., born in Detroit in 1935, opted against going into commercial art; soon after graduating from Cass Tech High School (and attending some classes at Wayne State), he became a fine artist instead. Inspired by German painter Hans Hofmann, Loving began creating abstract expressionist works — unusual at a time when many black artists were making figurative, narrative art that directly addressed social issues. In 1969, just four years after earning his MFA from U of M, Loving was given a solo show at the Whitney Museum in New York; but he felt embarrassed by the geometric art he had produced for the exhibit. “I saw it as colonial art,” he told an interviewer in 1989. However, “I found my own roots, my own gravity” soon after, Loving said — but he didn’t find them in painting. He began making constructions in various media: quilt-like works stitched from bits of canvas, environments hung with pieces of dyed cloth, and collages made from torn strips and spirals of cardboard. Loving believed that he — like Howardena Pindell, William T. Williams, and other outside-the-mainstream black artists of the time — had arrived at an art that was both “purely American” and the work of “modern Africans.” In Detroit, his work can be found in the Millender Center People Mover station as well as the DIA. Alvin Loving Jr. died in 2005.
Text by Sean Bieri
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