John Hilberry
Artist
Ann Mikolowski
(American, 1940-1999)
Date1987
MediumOil on canvas
Dimensions2 3/4 × 3 in. (7 × 7.6 cm)
ClassificationsPainting
Credit LineGift of John Hilberry, 2015
Object numberUAC6408
DescriptionAnn Mikolowski portraitsPortrait paintings tend to be on the big side, their size connoting the importance of their subjects — witness the recent larger-than-life portraits of Barack and Michelle Obama, or the sizable images of the presidents of Wayne State that grace the walls of the Adamany undergraduate library. Once, however, there was a vogue for just the opposite; beginning in the early 16th century, European artists who perhaps would have been illuminating manuscripts in the days before the printing press, instead made their livings creating locket-sized likenesses of nobles and royalty. These portable portraits were popular luxury items for centuries, only falling out of fashion with the advent of photography in the mid-1800s.
Today, the smartphone screen has replaced the locket as the repository for our favorite faces, but before social media made tiny portraits ubiquitous, artist Ann Mikolowski was known for her meticulous, intimate oil paintings, no bigger than the palm of one’s hand, depicting various local art scene luminaries. The Detroit Institute of Arts has four of them, including two of the Wayne State Art & Art History Department’s namesake, James Duffy (in one, he stands in his famous pipefitting warehouse/de facto art gallery; in the other he shows off his Ferrari 308). Using her own snapshots as reference, Mikolowski painted her portraits in a straightforward fashion, free of stylistic flourishes; perhaps she wished to “step aside,” as poet and portrait subject John Yau put it, and “enable the everyday world of nature and friends to memorialize their own existence.”
The Mikolowski miniatures in the Wayne State collection depict two more figures crucial to the university’s art collection: attorney Andronike “Nicky” Tsagaris, and her husband, John Hilberry. Hilberry ran an architectural firm in Detroit, and taught interior architecture at Wayne for several years in the ‘70s. (His father, former WSU president Clarence Hilberry, is among those whose portrait hangs in the undergrad library.) Tsagaris worked as a civil rights advocate while putting herself through law school at Wayne State. The couple amassed a wide-ranging collection of works from the heyday of the Cass Corridor arts movement (Detroit sculptor Robert Sestok’s Assemblage #4 can be seen behind Tsagaris in her portrait.) In 2015, they donated much of their collection — over 60 pieces — to WSU, where it’s now on display at the Tierney Alumni House (5510 Woodward Avenue). Tsagaris died in 2012; her husband attributed their collection’s quality and depth to his wife’s eye and passion for the work. “This Cass Corridor stuff is pretty adventuresome,” Hilberry said. “There’s a kind of exhilaration about it all.”
Text by Sean Bieri
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Born in Detroit in 1940, one-time Wayne State art student Ann Mikolowski co-founded, with her husband Ken, the Alternative Press, a letterpress publishing and mail art project that lasted for thirty years and featured the work of countless local and nationally known artists, authors, and poets. Ann illustrated many of their publications with her finely stippled ink drawings. She also created large-scale landscape paintings, as well as her series of tiny portraits. She died after a prolonged battle with cancer in 1999.
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