South Artist Featured In Grosse Pointe Art Center Exhibit

For the second year in a row, recent South graduate and Grosse Pointe Park resident Melissa Bryan has been singled out by the as worthy of a solo exhibition.

Bryan’s two-week installation kicked off Friday evening, concurrent with the opening of the Grosse Pointe Art Center special exhibition “Our Rivers, Our Lakes.” The exhibit features roughly two dozen works in various media, the majority produced by Bryan during her senior-year coursework.

“Smart” and “mature” is how Art Center Director Amy DeBrunner describes Bryan’s work. Her themes are sophisticated, DeBrunner said, and her content and composition unexpected. Bryan’s innovation shows even “in the way she chooses to mount her work,” which includes placing items on seasoned, nail-scarred wood.

But more astonishing than that, said DeBrunner, is Bryan’s facility with varied media. At only 17, Bryan is equally at ease with painting, drawing, sculpture, illustration, jewelry, photography, and even the poetry she incorporates in some of her pieces.

“Technically she’s a master already,” DeBrunner said of Bryan, who in the fall will attend Carnegie Mellon University School of Art in Pittsburgh. “That’s one reason we’re so excited about her career and her art path.”

Bryan came to DeBrunner’s attention in the spring of 2010, when DeBrunner attended ’s annual Art Fest Exhibition to bestow Art Center awards on student works. DeBrunner said she and some colleagues each assigned themselves a different medium and split up with the task of finding the best work in that category. When they met back up later, she said, all of them had selected a work by the same artist: Melissa Bryan.

Consequently, the Grosse Pointe Art Center awarded Bryan the Art Fest’s “Best of Show” and then invited her to exhibit her work at the center for two weeks in the summer of 2010. After again taking Grosse Pointe Art Center's “Best of Show” at South’s 2011 Art Fest, Bryan was again invited to exhibit her works at the center this summer. With only a few exceptions, the work on display through Aug. 6 is new. Only a few pieces, brought back at DeBrunner’s request, were featured in Bryan’s 2010 show.

Bryan’s work, stressed DeBrunner, is on a par with works by much more experienced artists. In addition to her two solo exhibits, her pieces have appeared in two professional juried shows at Grosse Pointe Art Center: “The Green Show,” which ran March 1-April 2, and “Word Play,” which ran June 10-July 9. The works in these shows were selected blind, DeBrunner stressed, meaning the panel chose them without knowing which artists had submitted them.

Though Bryan has always loved art, she said began to apply herself in earnest during her high school years, taking advantage of survey courses to try as many media as possible. She has received instruction at the Center for Creative Studies and Pewabic Pottery in Detroit as well as at Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills and from private instructors. Her studies at South culminated last year in AP 3D design and drawing courses, with her focus in the later being portraiture. Her approach to her portraits, many of which can be seen in her current exhibit, was to present her subjects conventionally while adding elements of abstraction in the background or foreground, she said.

DeBrunner said there is a lot of “struggle” in Bryan’s work, noting a profusion of skeletons or skulls and anguished expressions, and the symbolic use of organs, such as hearts, lungs or viscera. Bryan, who is the oldest of three children and the daughter of two architects, acknowledges that her older work was often “dark” but said she’s “moving away from that” in her more recent work.

“Each piece in my show is its own work, with a separate meaning, and can be looked at individually, but at the same time my work can be viewed as a whole because it is fairly cohesive,” she said.

Bryan, who began volunteering at Grosse Pointe Art Center after her 2010 show, now works at the center on Saturdays as a gallery coordinator. The position, she said, has given her valuable insight into the business side of the art world.

“It’s important to see how a gallery works and how art is sold,” she said, adding that she has is considering a number of career paths including teaching and design.

Bryan has won numerous Scholastic Art & Writing awards, received accolades from the Detroit News and won national honors in Creative Self Expression show. She said she looks forward to the challenges her studies at Carnegie Mellon will present.

“I’m looking forward to being with other artistic people and being challenged in art classes and by other artists who are equally competitive or more,” she said.