Detroit embedded history in Tyrrell Winston’s Cranbrook Art Museum exhibit

BLOOMFIELD HILLS — Earlier this year, Tyrrell Winston moved to Detroit with his family. Since his big move from New York, he has created a body of work inspired by the city of Detroit.

Cranbrook Art Museum is showing Winston’s first solo museum presentation “A Tiger’s Stripes” through Sept. 25.

“Tyrrell Winston is a really fascinating artist who is able to create work within the contemporary art world but also touches upon things like sports that are universal,” said Laura Mott, the chief curator of Cranbrook Art Museum.  “I think that his work is really interesting and accessible for a lot of audiences at different ages.”

The title “A Tiger’s Stripes” is an homage to the Detroit Tigers and a reflection of the biological makeup of a tiger and the camouflaging nature of its stripes.

Winston said a lot of the materials he uses in his work are in a way camouflaged, since he said people usually are not paying attention to a ball in a gutter, a cigarette on the ground, or a tarp that is hanging by a thread on a construction site.

“‘A Tiger’s Stripes’ is pointing out the kind of beauty in the mundane,” Winston said.

Embedded history is an underlying theme throughout Winston’s work.

“Embedded history is this notion that there is history involved in all of the objects that I work with and that history does not have anything to do with me until I elevate the objects into a new context,” Winston said.

Winston uses found objects such as lost or abandoned basketballs and tattered tarps that hold a vast history of human touch and use that we will never fully know.

One of his goals as an artist is to explore embedded history further in other cities. Detroit is the first city he has done this outside of New York, but he hopes to do projects in the future in London and Paris.

In Winston’s piece “Everything I’ve Ever Let Go of Has Claw Marks on It,” he uses old weathered basketball nets that he gathered from basketball courts around Detroit. During this project, he incorporated a community service element into his art by replacing these old nets with new ones.

“It’s this whole idea of, if you see something broken, fix it,” Winston said.

The “Punishment Paintings” in this show consist of repeated recreations of famous athletes’ signatures.

This work was partly inspired by Winston’s fascination with American mythology and the idea that athletes are viewed as gods.

His “Protection Paintings” are also incorporated into the show. These paintings are about the idea of protecting value and are inspired by car culture. The color schemes of these paintings reflect the colors of Michigan and Detroit sports teams.

At the center of this exhibit are two bleachers facing one another. These pieces are titled “The Kiss” in reference to “Romeo and Juliet.”

In this piece, Winston considers the intimacy that happens on the bleachers, referring to the gathering of sports fans, and the intimacy that happens under the bleachers, referring to the high school scene where kids might have their first kiss.

In this piece, he also takes the playing field out of the equation and pushes the bleaches together to show that we are more similar than different.

“I think recently, at least in the U.S., sports has become quite divisive, and that’s unfortunate, because even though there are two opposing teams, sports is supposed to be the great unifier.”

For a more in-depth look at his work, a conversation with Tyrrell Winston and Che Pope will take place at 6 p.m. Sept. 24 at Cranbrook. More information on this event can be found at cranbrookartmuseum.org.