Watch Me Work — Portraits of Self is an entirely new series of paintings by Detroit artist Sydney G. James, completed during her residency at the University of Michigan Institute for the Humanities. The paintings in this exhibition reposition the narrative of black women’s visibility and value, honoring the individual and collective contributions and labors of Black women, persistent through the pandemics, through police violence, and whether seen or unseen.

“‘Watch Me Work’ is a celebration of Black Women who get it done! From the event planning Zoom mommy to the USPS mail lady, we work. The world watches and we work. The world turns away, we work. “

– Sydney G. James

As part of her artist residency with the Institute for the Humanities Gallery, James recently completed a mural titled Sarah the Whatevershechoosestobe-(h)er on the first floor of the Modern Languages Building. She also led workshops with youth in Michigan juvenile justice facilities, in collaboration with the Youth Arts Alliance and met with students from the Stamps School of Art & Design. This project was made possible by a grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

“Watch Me Work — Portraits of Self” Online Gallery

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

About the Artist

Detroit-bred and based visual artist and muralist Sydney G. James earned her BFA at the College for Creative Studies in 2001 and began her career as an Art Director in advertising. Sydney moved to Los Angeles in 2004 to work as a visual artist in the film and television industry and earned her master’s degree in secondary education.

Returning to Detroit in 2011, Sydney has become a leading creative voice in Southeast Michigan. Exploring themes of the racial and gender positioning of the black woman in America as “last” or “least among others” in society, has been the central theme in Sydney’s work recently. Her portraits and murals seek to reposition this narrative of the black woman’s visibility and importance bringing them to the forefront of the conversation. Influenced by the artists Barkley L. Hendricks, Hubert Massey, Jenny Saville and the Afri-COBRA collective,  Sydney’s art expands figurative painting with bold brushwork, colors and imagery.

James has displayed her art at MOCAD, the Charles H. Wright Museum, Inner State Gallery, PLAYGROUND DETROIT, Collective Detroit Gallery, Detroit Artist Market, Red Bull House of Art, and Janice Charach gallery. She has completed public murals in Detroit for the 2015-2018 Murals in the Market (recognized by Smithsonian Magazine as one of the world’s best), New Orleans, Atlanta, Los Angeles, Pow Wow Hawaii, Pow Wow Long Beach, Pow Wow Worcester, and Accra, Ghana. Sydney is the recipient of the prestigous 2017 Kresge Fellowship award.  She recently created artwork at Essence Fest 2019 for Ford Motor Company, and is featured as one of the campaign faces of The Lip Bar cosmetics.

Her mural of Malice Green, “The Malice Green Mural Monument,” appears on the side of the Hamilton-Tucker Gallery on the border of Detroit and Hamtramck. Most recently, she completed The Girl with the D Earring, a mural on the Chroma Building in Detroit. She has also painted murals in New Orleans, Atlanta, Los Angeles, Honolulu, and Ghana.

Artist’s Statement

Through utter shock, through grief, through disgust, through fear, through ANGER, through heartbreak…through it all, We work. Through this chaos, we work. For our families, our communities, our sanctuaries, we work. Through exhaustion, we work. Through a pandemic, we are working. We work to fill voids. In our minds, we work to fill the “Void” but we often don’t recognize the “voids” that that very work creates. The chaos surrounds us, yet we push through the heavy weight of all the woes of the hamster wheel of days.

Watch Me Work is a celebration of Black Women who get it done! From the event planning Zoom mommy to the USPS mail lady, we work. The world watches and we work. The world turns away, we work. Even those of us who sit around all day and manage to make it to the next day safely, it took work. Through the daily attacks on the pigmented people of the world, we work. We work. We work. I work.

–Sydney G. James

Curator’s Statement

Sydney G. James is a painter and muralist born and raised in Detroit, Michigan. Her practice is responsive, action-based, repositioning the narrative of Black women in society from ‘marginalized’ to ’revered,’ one portrait at a time. Her recent projects include The Girl with the D Earring, a nine-story tall mural on the Chroma building in Detroit that is a modern take on Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer’s Girl With a Pearl Earring. (A documentary about the making of The Girl with the D Earring is included in this exhibition.)

As part of her artist residency with the Institute for the Humanities Gallery, James recently completed a mural titled Sarah the Whatevershechoosestobe-(h)e on the first floor of the Modern Languages Building. She also led workshops with youth in Michigan juvenile justice facilities, in collaboration with the Youth Arts Alliance. 

As she often does, James looked to women from her immediate circle for inspiration and as models for Watch Me Work — Portraits of Self, an entirely new series of paintings completed during her residency.With the Gallery closed to the public due to COVID, Watch Me Work leaves the predictable institutional building and is completely visible from the street, a public celebration of these meaningful human relationships and connections.

The exhibition also includes self portraits reflective of the artist’s current relationship to her own work, not as a way of processing emotions but as a means of empowerment and protest. 

-Amanda Krugliak, Arts Curator, Institute for the Humanities.

Watch Me Work — Portraits of Self was made possible by a grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to further the Institute for the Humanities Gallery’s longtime mission in support of art as social practice.