Southfield Public Arts Commission to open ‘Convergence: Where Mastery Meets Vision’

SOUTHFIELD — The Southfield Public Arts Commission will open its first exhibition of 2025 with an opening reception at 6 p.m. Feb. 13 in the main lobby of Southfield City Hall, 26000 Evergreen Road.

The exhibit is called “Convergence: Where Mastery Meets Vision.” It is set to run through April 30, with works of art from nine different artists featured.

The artists are Felle Art, IJania Cortez, Bill Gosa, Jonathan Kimble, Glenn Kujansuu, Jenn K. Maples, Hubert Massey, James C. Morris and Joshua Rainer.

Gosa is a Southfield resident of 26 years and an artist who specializes in photography and watercolor. He combined his love of figuring out how things work into a 35-year engineering career by day at General Motors Technical Center, while running a photography studio by night in Ypsilanti.

Each day, he would commute from where he lived in Ann Arbor to Warren, and then back west to Ypsilanti to run his studio.

“My love of engineering, I did that for maybe eight, nine hours a day, and then I would leave there,” Gosa said. “Then I went directly to my studio until 11 o’clock. Then I was in the dark room. I was a younger man then, so you tend to have more energy when you’re younger than you do when you’re older.”

Gosa joked that he was drinking a lot of coffee during this period of his life.

He did this for a number of years until the demands of both became too much to balance, and he began traveling more.

As a photographer and an avid traveler, Gosa is also passionate about history as another means of understanding the world around him.

Much of his work is inspired by his travels and has a deep historical significance, including the four pieces he will be showing in the upcoming exhibit, “Elmina Castle,” “Frada,” “Venizia” and “Windows.”

All of the images were taken during Gosa’s travels, ranging in location from Ghana, Canada, Italy and Haiti.

“Elmina Castle” draws from Gosa’s three-week-long visit to Ghana in the ‘80s, where he described the visit to the historical location as “transformative.”

Gosa explained that “Elmina Castle was built in 1482 by the Portuguese and was the first trading post built on the Gulf of Guinea, where it became a stop on the Atlantic slave trade.

He shared a profound experience he had with his travel companion and host in the dungeon of the castle.

“We’re in this dungeon, and we’re talking about the history,” Gosa said. “They’re sharing all this information. I’m standing there, and it was so overwhelming learning what transpired there that the other person, he said, ‘I’m going to just unscrew the bulb that is illuminating this room.’”

Gosa explained that while in the darkness of the 25 square-foot-room, he pictured the 2,000 people that would have been held there in the darkness with so little room that they couldn’t lift their arms.

“We held each other’s hands and said the prayer in three different languages,” Gosa said. “One person said it in Twi, which is one of the indigenous languages there that the Ashanti speak. And they also said a prayer in Fante, which is another tribe that’s there, and I was saying my version in English. We’re standing there saying this prayer and it was so emotional, so overwhelming, that I could hear cries. I could feel the intense heat.”

Massey is a multimedia artist and a Flint native who has lived in Detroit for over 40 years, specializing in frescoes. Massey has created over 30 commissioned pieces throughout the state, including a 30-by-30-foot fresco that weighs over six tons in Huntington Place called “Detroit: Crossroad of Innovation.”

His piece “Earth, Wind, and Fire” at the Flint Institute of Arts Museum, which is 17-by-88-feet, is the second largest fresco in Michigan after Diego Rivera’s “Detroit Industry” at the Detroit Institute of Arts.

“Because nobody else is doing frescos in Michigan,” Massey joked.

Massey explained that he started doing frescos because he happened to be in the right place at the right time. After Rivera’s cartoon drawings were discovered underneath the stairwell at the DIA, a show was held, and he attended.

“Diego Rivera’s assistants were still living at the time,” Massey said. “They were in their 80s, so they invited them to come back and help do some restoration on the frescoes.”

He explained that restorations on frescoes are really low maintenance because they just need to be dusted off and touched up.

“They decided to give a workshop. In this workshop, there were 12 artists,” Massey said. “I was one of the 12. Out of 12 artists, I was the one that actually saw the need to continue to do fresco painting.”

Massey also has done six pieces in Southfield that were inspired by community forums that were submitted to him. His work includes “Tapestry of a Community,” a six-piece mosaic mural located on Lawrence Technological University’s campus, along the nonmotorized Southfield City Centre Trail, as well as a 14-foot obelisk made of handmade tiles mounted on a 4-foot base that is currently being restored to be placed back at 11 Mile Road, east of Lahser Road, where it stood before it was struck in a fatal accident.

Massey will show two pieces in the upcoming exhibit. One is called “Otis,” inspired by a roofer he knew from Mississippi with an interesting face who always wore a derby hat, and another one called “James,” which is inspired by his uncle James, who is 95 years old.

“My uncle is an athlete and an artist and a vocalist, and he was just multidimensional to me, and he inspired me on a lot of different things because of his diversity,” Massey said.

Delores Flagg, the chair for the Southfield Public Arts Commission, said that Southfield is home to around 28 pieces of public art thanks to the Friends of the Southfield Public Arts,  a nonprofit dedicated to raising funds to support the efforts of the Arts Commission.

“When we put an art piece in the community, it is a way of us communicating and saying, ‘Here we have something to educate you, to make you aware of,’ and it’s ongoing, and it also adds an aesthetic quality to our community. So it’s our task,” Flagg said.

Flagg added that in addition to the quarterly art exhibits at City Hall, the Arts Commission has more exciting things in the works for 2025, including a silent auction, more community engagement art events, and the installation of “Nine Mile Crossing” by Sebastian (Enrique Carbajal), a 98-foot-tall piece that will stand at the corner of the Southfield Freeway and Nine Mile Road.

For more information on the Southfield Public Arts Commission, visit their Facebook page or contact Delores Flagg at daf4now@aol.com.