Elizabeth Youngblood: Syntax

Opening Reception: June 20, 6 – 8 p.m.
On View: June 21 — August 3, 2024

Stamps Gallery is proud to present a solo exhibition that celebrates the important work of Detroit-based artist, educator, and designer Elizabeth Youngblood (BFA 1973). This exhibition explores the expansive and experimental nature of her prolific and interstitial art practice. Syntax sheds light on Youngblood’s embodied practice that encompasses a deep commitment and respect for the process and the material with which she is working — be it found objects, fur, hair, surfaces of different types of paper, pigments, ink, wire, porcelain, threads, and/​or clay, that may have inspired her. The work occupies the spaces between art and design, abstract and concrete, making and becoming. In Syntax, the viewers will encounter over 30 works from the last four decades that range from large-scale drawings to intimate mixed-media works, sculptural objects, and weavings. The exhibition will also include Youngblood’s early design work where her explorations with dots, dashes, lines and accumulation of lines and space emerged and became a framework for a way to consider form as ever-evolving and iterative. These recurring forms were the points of departure for her experiments with materiality as they became reconstituted across different mediums and disciplines, transformed over and over again to create Youngblood’s unique visual vocabulary and her Syntax of making and meaning.

Curated by Srimoyee Mitra.

Artist’s Bio

Born in Detroit and educated in southeastern Michigan, Elizabeth Youngblood is an artist, educator, designer and maker of interesting things. From her high school education at Cass Technical High School to her undergraduate education at the University of Michigan, through graduate work at Cranbrook, she has always maintained a dual interest in making by hand and in design for production. Youngblood’s art-making practice includes working in the mediums of drawing, ceramics, weaving, bookbinding and more. She’s been a faculty member at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor and SUNY Purchase, NY, managed branding with Unisys and designed at The New York Times. After a stint on the east coast, Youngblood has returned to Detroit where she maintains a studio practice and continues to investigate the intersection of her range of interests.