SaveArtSpace x PLAYGROUND DETROIT are pleased to present Generations of Multitude, a public art exhibition on billboard ad space in Detroit, MI, opening July 22, 2024. Curated by Martyna Alexander.

Generations of Multitude selected artists are Brandon Slewion, Jessica Alazraki, Lorena Molina, Maria Bologna, Marylu E. Herrera, Michaela Nichelle 'Mike' Martin, Naomi Ning, and Srishti Dass.

Generations of Multitude highlights artwork that demonstrates the beauty and struggles of holding many contrasting priorities close to you and the challenge of finding your whole in a world that asks for concise oneness and the quick read. 

Opening July 22, 2024, SaveArtSpace will launch public art installations for each selected work on digital billboard ad space in Detroit, MI. The public art will be on view for one week.

Selected Artists

Brandon Slewion (b 1997) is an interdisciplinary artist & educator working between Toledo, Ohio and Washington D.C. Raised in the nation capital his relationship with politics, business, tourism, and inner city sports during his youth significantly affected his perspective of identity, competitive culture, and personal branding. This experience often paired with that of his family histories have molded a peculiar relationship with human dislocation & movement shown through abstract portraits and his experimental mannequin motif.

When does one awaken to the truth that they surpass the lines drawn around them? Is it upon outgrowing the boxes that once confined, now too small to contain their essence? Categories fade, phrases fail to capture—a moment when uniqueness dawns. Often, we journey far from our origins, carrying experiences that don’t solely belong to us. Individualism propels us into a new life—or so we think. Eventually we find ourselves face to face with history. We have always been and always will be layered beings. Our complexities bind us, and the mirror serves as our first trip into our collective depth. 

Connect with Brandon on Instagram at @iamslew.

Jessica Alazraki was born and raised in Mexico City, where she earned a bachelor’s degree in communication from Universidad Anáhuac. Since 1998, she’s been based in New York City. Jessica has exhibited her work in six solo exhibitions in the United States and in over 50 group exhibitions. In 2018, she received the Award of Excellence from the Huntington Arts Council and an Honorable Mention Award from the Barrett Art Center. In 2019, she participated in the ARTWorks Fellowship at the Jamaica Center for Arts and Learning (JCAL) and was selected into the Creative Capital NYC “El Taller” in collaboration with the Hemispheric Institute. In 2020, Jessica completed the Trestle Art Space Residency Program, was awarded the New Work Grant by the Queens Art Fund, and won the Diane Etienne Founders Award from the Stamford Art Association. In 2021, she was shortlisted for the Hopper Price Award and was a finalist for the Alexander Rutsch Award. She participated in a group exhibit at MoCa Museum in Westport, Ct. Jessica was named the 2021 MvVo AdArt Show winner and The Jackson Painting Prize Emerging Artist Award 2021. In 2022 she was selected for Fountainhead Artist Residency in Miami Fl. and participated in a group exhibit at Hudson Valley Moca Museum. And in 2023 was a finalist for the Alexander Rutsch Award and she had a solo exhibition at Columbia University. In 2024 she was selected for Anderson Ranch Residency Program in Aspen, Co. and Dot-Ateliers Residency Program in Accra, Ghana. Her work is featured in several publications including New American Paintings, No. 152, Northeast Issue.

Her works are in important collections like the Hort Family Collection, the Rubell Family Collection, the Jorge Perez Collection, the Lipson Collection, the Hornik Collection, the Whitley Collection, the 5M Collection, the Vascovitz Collection, the Gautereaux Collection, Straus Collection and more.

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Jessica Alazraki brings together her experiences as an immigrant and artist to dismantle misconceptions of Latinx identity. By providing glimpses at the intimate moments of everyday life, her paintings immerse viewers in the radiant energy that challenges negatively perpetuated narratives with a celebration of people and culture.

With an in-depth knowledge of design, Alazraki translated her fascination with color palettes and patterns as an association of identity into new ways of communicating the unseen elements of daily life in immigrant households. Breaking apart traditional approaches to painting, she combines gestural and spontaneous elements associated with abstract painting into her figurative scenes. Textures and gestures emerge that heighten the development of not only the narrative of the overarching piece but also intensify the stories of her subjects.

As the abstract and realistic elements fuse together, the scenes teeter between the familiar and the surreal. Furthering this distortion, she plays with anatomical proportions, manipulates a sense of depth and perspective, and brings together unusual palettes of vibrant colors. The whimsical becomes the bizarre in her own collage aesthetic, allowing these characters; stories to differentiate from our own day-to-day.

Here, Alarzaki uses her raw, genuine, and free process of expression to emphasize the beauty and the energy inherent in these concealed displays of culture. Reimagining colors and patterns typically tied to the Latinx or immigrant identity, she creates relatable scenes that evoke shared sentiments of hope, loyalty, and family. She expresses the love, affection, and hardships that unite these families as they work to achieve a better life. In her displays, she invites viewers to rethink the impact and the cultural value of these individuals by recognizing the contributions of their resilient spirit.

Statement by Charles Moore.

Connect with Jessica on Instagram at @jessicaalazraki1.

Lorena Molina is a Salvadoran multidisciplinary artist, educator and curator. She is an Assistant Professor of Photography and Digital Media in the School of Art at the University of Houston. She’s also the founder and the director of Third Space Gallery, a community space and gallery that supports and highlights BIPOC artists.

Through the use of photography, video, performance and installation, she explores identity, intimacy, pain, and how we witness the suffering of others. The work interrogates relationships and the formation of relationships as political acts that are guided by negotiations of power and privilege.

At the core of her work is an exploration of spatial inequalities and the challenges that oppressed groups face in constructing place and establishing a sense of belonging. The work is driven by a deep sense of displacement experienced after a 12-year-old civil war forced her and her family to migrate to the United States. Most of her work stems from a need to find and build community in a way that it’s both tender, accountable, challenging through difficult conversations that makes everybody involved actively question their position and privileges in society.

Her current work looks at identity in the margins. She views the margins both as a place where extreme violence and pain happens, but also as a place for resisting, dreaming, healing, and thriving.

None of us are guaranteed another day. Yet, we spend the majority of our lives numbing ourselves with a plethora of distractions – in the process, we lose sight of the preciousness of life itself. My work attempts to reverence these overlooked moments, by exalting the temporal.

Marylu E. Herrera (she/her) is a Chicago-based Chicana collage, printmedia, craft, and fiber artist who uses the home as a political and personal site where celebration is a form of existence and resistance.

Herrera earned her BFA in Studio Art from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston at Tufts University and her MFA in Printmedia from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She recently became a lecturer in the Printmedia Department at SAIC.

Herrera’s work has been exhibited at the Leedy Voulkous Art Center, Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago Art Department, Comfort Station, RUSCHWOMAN, Woman Made Gallery, SITE Galleries, and Tish & Koppelman Galleries. Her Artist Book, Me Voy, is a part of the Artist Book Special Collections of SMFA & Tufts Library Archive in Boston. Her collage work has been featured in New York Magazine (The Cut), Los Angeles Times, Bitch Media, and Eater.com.

Most recently, Herrera has been part of the 2023 Center Program at Hydepark Art Center, a 2022-2024 Chicago Art Department Resident, recipient of the 2023 Individual Artist Program Grant from Chicago DCASE, and part of the 2024 ACRE Residency.

Connect with Marylu on Instagram at @meh.work.

Michaela Nichelle 'Mike' Martin (She/They) is an interdisciplinary artist whose creative journey is a vibrant exploration of Black expressionism and experience. With an eye for detail and a radical love for the Black Every Day, Martin delves deep into the complexities of identity, culture, and history through their art. Telling stories of resilience, resistance, and celebration.

Connect with Michaela on Instagram at @michaelanichelle.

Naomi Ning is a Chinese American artist, born and raised in Singapore, but currently based in Detroit. She works primarily in mixed media with a focus on acrylic paint, colored pencil, and digital media. She is drawn to vibrant colors as well as crowded scenes in her art. Her current body of work is centered around moments of joy and connectedness between people expressed through food and interactions.

Connect with Naomi on Instagram at @nomiining.

Srishti Dass takes inspiration from the world around her. Her drawings are the tangible result of introspection. She finds ways to connect her inner anxieties and subconscious to the outer world around her. People, places, and nature, all affect her art directly. Using intricate pattern-making and symbols, she tries to give viewers space to explore their inner thoughts. In a world built around the idea of capitalism and working till you’re burnt out, she’s trying to create safe environments to help others leave the path of binary thinking and question the bubble humans live in. Her works are empowering; giving womxn a chance to realize their position in this world that’s built against them. There is an urgency she’s trying to capture. 

Pattern-making is a way to get to her subconscious mind. The repetition is rhythmic, in harmony with the surroundings. The hand makes the patterns as the mind wanders. A need to keep filling the shapes and loop the pattern. This means that every new viewer will have a different reaction to it; their own story.  That’s why she feels it’s pointless to write about her work; the “meaning” ends when the work goes to the public. The “meaning” is the experience.

Connect with Srishti on Instagram at @lostwherever.

Curator

Martyna Alexander is a Detroit-based artist and designer, and daughter of a Polish-Korean immigrant and Michigan local. Her work often compares the strange harmony of the strict and systematic to the expressive, organic, and spontaneous - oppositions that mirror the many tensions of her interests and modern life. Originally, she worked in corporate settings as a designer for over 10 years, now using her design tools to create new abstract and anti-solution-based works of art through painting.

She identifies with the fascination common among her generation for both positive tech and more traditional anti-tech activities and lifestyles, each expressed visually and as contradictions in her work. Her practice is an examination of labor and how to use our time to healthfully survive in modern society in balance with the harsh contrasts of multiple cultures, ideologies, and identities.

Connect with Martyna on Instagram at @martyna_alexander.

Participating Organizations

PLAYGROUND DETROIT is a contemporary art gallery and creative agency based in Detroit, MI established in 2012. As a social enterprise, the mission is to support and develop opportunities for creative professionals, artists and residents in order to enhance and sustain Detroit’s creative economy.

Founded in 2015, SaveArtSpace is a non-profit organization that works to create an urban gallery experience, launching exhibitions that address intersectional themes and foster a progressive message of social change. By placing culture over commercialism, SaveArtSpace aims to empower artists from all walks of life and inspire a new generation of young creatives and activists.