Art In America: Osman Khan and Ryan Standfest Recognized
Stamps faculty Osman Khan and Ryan Standfest are included in Art In America’s year-end reflections on the five most significant artworks produced in Detroit over the past year.
Author Lynn Crawford’s article features a review of Stamps Associate Professor and MFA program director Osman Khan’s On Which Side, the Barbarians?, a solo exhibition at Hamtramck’s Public Pool gallery:
Khan uses elements of his Pakistani heritage to investigate immigration, integration, and divisions… [he] reflects on the ambiguities of identities and prejudice as well as cultural production out of the public eye.
The-N-Word, a monograph on African-American painter Peter Williams edited by Stamps Lecturer Ryan Standfest, is also praised:
Williams’s character, The N‑Word, swoops down from the sky to mete out justice in scenes of police brutality. The paintings’ colors evoke their themes: pale blue refers both to police uniforms and the blues genre of music, while shrill tones of red and yellow remind the viewer of all-American ketchup and mustard as well as the packaging of Kodak film (The-N-Word sometimes flies with camera in hand). It’s significant to me that the book is published in Detroit, which has a small but budding number of potent independent presses.