Ronald Griggs – Family Ties is the first solo exhibition surveying Detroit-based artist Ronald Griggs’ art practice from his start in the PASC program in 2021 to now. The exhibition explores Griggs’ detailed and highly skilled mixed-media drawings, employing a baroque-like drawing style to explore human and non-human relationships, family, fantasy, and the complexities of love.
When Griggs started at PASC in the summer of 2021, his initial images were somewhat traditional, mainly portraiture or religious imagery, such as depictions of the Madonna and Child. Yet his portraits, which were often drawn from references, from baroque portrait paintings to images from National Geographic magazine, were always transformed into something more familiar, perhaps the faces of Griggs’ family and friends.
Sometimes, when several figures were placed together, Griggs would include accents unique to his style, such as scent trails, a subtle atmospheric connectivity depicted as thick grey lines traveling from one individual’s nose to the other’s mouth, and sometimes their posterior. These scent lines were delicate indications of the complexities of Griggs’ practice, which staff had not yet scene explored to its fullest. As PASC staff and Griggs became more comfortable and familiar with each other, PASC staff would encourage him to explore his imagination and provided him with diverse reference imagery, until what has become his most signature images, centaurs or human animal hybrids, began to appear.