Cay Bahnmiller
39 Brooks Lumber
December 14, 2024 - February 8, 2025

Images

Winter hours: Saturdays 1-6 PM and by appointment.

What Pipeline presents Cay Bahnmiller 39 Brooks Lumber. This exhibition features 32 extant works from a series of 39 created on Brooks Lumber notepad paper circa 2003. These works on paper were made concurrent with her second and final exhibition at Susanne Hilberry gallery, capturing a prolific moment in the artist’s practice. While Bahnmiller’s work often involved extended periods of layering and transformation, these pieces reflect an exceptional urgency and concentration within her process.

39 Brooks Lumber demonstrates Bahnmiller’s emotional intensity and explosive mark-making. Utilizing a variety of media—latex, acrylic, oil, Sharpie, colored pencil, pastel, watercolor, and collage—her works move across familiar palettes of blacks, grays, and browns, complemented by vibrant reds, greens, purples, and blues. The choice of substrate (Brooks Lumber is one of Detroit’s oldest retail businesses) connects with Bahnmiller’s sensitivity to place, grounding her work within the city’s shifting cultural and physical landscape. This range, both in material and feeling, makes 39 Brooks Lumber a compelling representation of Bahnmiller’s body of work while highlighting her ability to encapsulate a specific time and space.

Selected works will accompany this collection, offering a broader context. The exhibition underscores Bahnmiller’s capacity to blend immediacy with the textural surfaces for which she is recognized. For more information, contact What Pipeline at info@whatpipeline.com.

Cay Bahnmiller (b. 1955 Wayne, MI; d. 2007 Detroit) received a BFA Summa Cum Laude from the University of Michigan in 1976. She was a polymath with a fervent appetite for languages, architecture, philosophy, poetry, literature and art. Her work infused these subjects with an intense lived experience that was at times emotionally fraught. She exhibited at Feigenson Gallery and Susanne Hilberry Gallery, and was collected by Gil and Lila Silverman. Her work is in the collection of Cranbrook Art Museum, the Detroit Institute of Arts and the Whitney Museum of American Art. Recent exhibitions include solo shows at Trautwein Herleth, Berlin, White Columns, New York, and What Pipeline, Detroit. Group exhibitions include READ, Kunsthalle Praha, Prague, and How We Make the Planet Move: The Detroit Collection Part I, on view at Cranbrook Art Museum through March 25, 2025.