1. Clara Beckmann - is the grand-niece of German painter Max Beckmann. She was born outside London in 1978, and has recently served a residency at Detroit’s Museum of New Art. She lives and works between London and Detroit.

Throughout her young life Clara Beckmann has traveled the globe immortalizing art figures of the early 20th century with her camera. In the Face of Art: Famous Dead Artists, Beckmann's lens is focused exclusively on these early innovators of modern art.

Beckmann’s portraits are known for their dark clarity and simple texture. Her lack of personable knowledge and insensitivity toward her subjects combined with her self-taught technical skills allow us to intimately view some of the outstanding personalities of our era. The power of Beckman's portraits lies in the fact that they are memories of our existence. They reveal something of the nature of our age.

2. Hanne Bloot - was born 1980 in Maastricht, Netherlands. She attended art school in Michigan, and currently is living in Detroit with her American husband.

Bloot discovered photography in her early teens, beginning her studies at Ritvald Academy in Amsterdam at just seventeen. By the age of nineteen she was a P.S.1 grant recipient, where her series My Life As A Film (2000) was created and first exhibited.

Hanne Bloot’s application of light and color in her photography is painterly and yet contemporary at the same time, hinting at dark emotions. There is a sense of forced isolation, of two people sharing space yet disconnected, of a room within rooms.

Her work is a quiet poetry of understatement and misdirection. As our eyes drift across Bloot’s photographs in search of a resting point, we invest the dark spaces between with a symbolic value: the alienation of life in an increasingly urban world.

3. Stig Eklund - was born in Bergen, Norway in 1976. He has lived and worked in Detroit since 2004.

An undiagnosed dyslexic, Stig Eklund left Secondary education at the age of sixteen. He spent his remaining teen years working at a cardboard factory in his home town. During that time, utilizing the materials at hand, he began to make and experiment with several pinhole cameras. The work from these rudimentary cameras developed into dark, moody photographs. He has remarked that he can only see "right" through a camera lens. 

Eklund's mature camera style is so strong that it can even shroud a street lamp, so that, instead of light, it seemingly emits darkness and shadows. His vision drapes geometrically clashing urban beauty with the sooty persona of its denizens, succinctly captured by a Norwegian artist who spends much of the year in Detroit's glowering twilight.

4. Thomas Poe - is a member of an elite group of artists working for museums, private collectors and insurance companies. These artists execute exact reproductions of famous masterpieces to be put on public display or loan, while the priceless originals are stored and preserved in a safe vault.

All such artists are highly skilled, with years of academic training in the different styles, movements and periods in the history of art. Such expert technicians paint copies using only the traditional artistic techniques and materials -- many of which are no longer available, except to professional restorers. Poe began his career as a top conservator working at the Art Conservation Department of one of the largest detailers in all the tri-state area.

"I prefer the term innuendos,” Poe argues, when asked if the artwork in this exhibition might be considered forgeries. "Forgery indicates intent to defraud. And I never made anything with that intent. Everything is in the open and above board. I always guarantee that any painting I produce will be a faithful original. I even have business cards which say: Thomas Poe, Authentic Reproductions.”

5. Missy Wiggins - was born in Detroit, 1982. Her family moved to London when she was five, and where she received her schooling. She currently lives and works in Detroit

Her series of portraits and cityscapes represents the explosive effects of post 9/11 fear and neo-urbanization in the 21st Century, both in our environment and psyche - observed by the artist in Detroit and London.

6. Shen-Ba Wong - was born in the Fujian Province in the year of the horse 1978. Wong’s father a Shanghai professor of art and her mother a doctor were victims of the Cultural Revolution, forced to relocate to the countryside as manual laborers in 1967. Her father worked at a farm distribution center, and would bring home broken planks from shipping pallets with which both he and eventually the young Wong would carve their first woodcuts.

Later at Xiamen University, she reacted violently against the Xiamen Dada movement founded in 1986 by embracing still older techniques (the blockprint) combined with newer Western ideas (abstraction). She is now at the vanguard of those younger Chinese artists emerging today.

7. Emerick Sousa - street name “Cootchie”, is a Brazilian national who has been living in the USA since the age of 12. Sousa did not become an artist until late in his life (58). As the manager of several parking lot flea markets, Sousa has had easy access to an encyclopedia of found objects that now inform his work. Still, it was only after his name had made the national pedophile registry that he achieved some prominence as a sculptor.

His career was officially launched while serving a two month jail term for having kissed his 8 year old daughter on the mouth at a municipal swimming pool in West Melvindale. The county psychologist and, later, his parole officer encouraged Sousa to transfer this "paternal" passion into his art. His first such success was aptly titled “Push me, Daddy” and was quickly purchased by the jail librarian. Sousa has since had several solo exhibitions in Thailand, Amsterdam, and his home country of Brazil.