A Michigan Homecoming for Gerome Kamrowski’s Work

November, The Michigan Art Gallery in Ypsilanti will present a substantial group of Gerome Kamrowski’s early New York works, many returning to the region for the first time in decades. These will be shown alongside paintings from his long career in Ann Arbor, where he joined the University of Michigan faculty in 1946. Organized with the artist’s estate, “Gerome Kamrowski: Works from the 1930s–2000s” opens November 20 with more than 50 paintings, drawings, prints and constructions dating from 1938 to 2003.

Kamrowski, whom Robert Motherwell called “the most Surrealist of us all,” took part in the experiments from which Abstract Expressionism emerged. His New York studio was the setting for one such collaboration in the winter of 1940–41, when he, William Baziotes and Jackson Pollock poured and dripped quick-drying lacquer paint onto canvases laid on the floor.

Visits with Baziotes to the American Museum of Natural History informed Kamrowski’s shadowboxes. One of the boxes on view in Ypsilanti, Fossils (1943), gives the museum diorama a Surrealist setting, with a variety of prehistoric specimens in a cutaway display. Other examples appeared in Peggy Guggenheim’s 1943 collage exhibition at Art of This Century.

Throughout the exhibition, the imagined bodies and landscapes of Kamrowski’s New York years find echoes in the layered color and shifting patterns of his later paintings.

The public opening reception is Friday, November 20, 2026, from 6 to 9 p.m. Opening weekend hours are Saturday, November 21, from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., and Sunday, November 22, from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. The exhibition continues through December.

The Michigan Art Gallery occupies several floors of a converted early 20th-century barn at Schmidt’s Antiques, 5138 W. Michigan Ave., Ypsilanti. Works will be available for purchase in the gallery and online at michiganartgallery.com. The gallery can be reached at 734-434-2660 or info@schmidtsantiques.com.