Jay Hollands passes away June 15th, 2016 at the age of 87
admin
http://www.freep.com/story/entertainment/arts/2016/06/17/detroit-sculptor-jay-holland-dies/85998416/
Jay Holland, a Detroit sculptor best known for his mastery of the human form and a 34-year teaching career at what is now the College for Creative Studies, died Thursday. He was 87 and lived in Oak Park.
His death was confirmed by the college.
Holland, who taught sculpture at the school in 1964-98, was in many ways a traditionalist. In an era dominated by abstract art, he remained committed to figurative work and a disciplined understanding of anatomy. But his sculptures also made use of fragmentary limbs and roughly worked surfaces that packed the psychological punch of the anxieties, alienation and dislocation of much of American life in the decades after World War II.
"Holland is an extraordinary sculptor of the human figure," Free Press art critic Marsha Miro wrote in 1989. "His male sculptures, life-size and smaller, are reassembled of fragments of a once complete form. Prey to broken edges, chipped limbs and unnatural shifts in posture, they are poignant remnants of once bold, muscular forms and suggest the battered state of the urban male, particularly in Detroit."
Holland worked in bronze, steel, cement and other materials, and he also sometimes ventured beyond figures into masks, helmets and more abstract forms.
Though Holland was widely respected within the local art community, his work generally flew below the radar of the general public. One high-profile exception, however, came when his standing bronze nude called "Decision Pending" was acquired by the City of Brighton in 2006 and displayed outdoors as part of a public art initiative. Some residents thought the male figure's frank nudity was inappropriate.
A bemused Holland told the Free Press in 2008 that he thought the controversy was "silly," adding: "It would be very pretentious of me to get outraged about it."
Holland was born in Detroit on Nov. 16, 1928. He graduated from Cass Tech and the school of the Detroit Society of Arts and Crafts (now the College for Creative Studies). After two years of army service in Korea in 1952-53, he studied at the Cranbrook Academy of Art and then settled into a long career of teaching sculpture and making and exhibiting work.
Holland had one-man shows at the Flint Institute of Art (1960), Michigan State University (1985), Delta College in Saginaw (1985) and the Bloomfield-Birmingham Art Center (2006). Most recently, in a show that closed in January, the Marshall M. Fredericks Sculpture Museum at Saginaw Valley State University showcased Holland's work in a major two-artist exhibition, "Fragmenta," with fellow sculptor Sergio DeGiusti.
Holland is survived by brothers Craig and Arden Holland. Holland's wife of 50 years, Lois Sundberg Holland, died in 2002. Visitation will be from 4-9 p.m. Tuesday at Wm. Sullivan & Sons Funeral Home, 705 W 11 Mile Road, Royal Oak.