Artful Living

When Isabelle Weiss was growing up, her mother, a local artist, took her and her brother to the Detroit Institute of Arts with sketchbooks in hand. Those artistic excursions “built the foundation of who I am and what’s most important to me,” Weiss says.

Weiss attended Cranbrook as a high school student, and recalls being deeply connected to art and the pertinence of objects. She wove her varied interests together during her undergraduate years, majoring in art history and linguistics, and studying economics at the University of Michigan.  Post-college, Weiss worked for an auction house as a cataloger and art appraiser. In 2014, realizing there was no local platform where craft and design artists could sell their work, she launched NEXT:SPACE, which later evolved into her namesake, the I.M. Weiss Gallery.

A decade later, the I.M. Weiss Gallery is celebrating its 10-year anniversary with three new shows and an experimental new home on Detroit’s east side.  Today, the gallery represents artists whose mediums range from fiber to woodworking, plastic, glass, sculpture, and furniture. “I’m obsessed with the personal connections we have to objects,” Weiss says, “Objects are the artifacts of our lives.”

Earlier this year, Weiss moved her gallery into an innovative location: her own home within Detroit’s Little Village cultural district. As a gallerist, it’s her job to help the artists she represents build financially stable practices; the more work sells, the more work can be made.

Installing new exhibitions every six to eight weeks, however, wasn’t a realistic way to accomplish this goal. The solution? Consolidating the I.M. Weiss Gallery and her home into one.  The gallery is open by appointment, and each month Weiss hosts an open house.  When she hosted her first public event in April, she didn’t know what to expect.  That day,  more than 100 visitors walked through her front door.  “The spirit of supporting local artists and businesses is in the DNA of the neighborhood,” she says.

Weiss’ Belvidere Street home, the living room assumes the responsibility of a showroom.  The curation of her artist’ work in an intimate setting demonstrates how the objects resonate in the familiarity of a home. The collection depends on what sells; so as a result, no exhibition is static. If a piece is sold, Weiss works to replace it.  Like any dwelling, the remainder of her home is styled with belongings and artwork from her personal collection — a demonstration of how art blends into a domestic space.

During September’s Detroit Month of Design, Weiss is opening up her gallery and home for a three part exhibition spotlighting ceramicist Benjamin Teague.  The exhibit begins Sept. 19th.  She’s also working on two additional shows for the month: one with Kresge fellow and ceramicist Lauren Kalman (runs Sept. 6- Oct. 5), and another with sculptor and designer Cody Norman (it opens Sept. 19) at the Edsel & Eleanor Ford House in Grosse Pointe Shores.

Teague’s upcoming exhibition, “Adaptive Objects / or / Terms for Living.” takes on a performative element, divided into three acts representing work made across his career.  In Act I, the gallery will reflect Teague’s Pontiac-based studio, with elements found within his workspace.  In Act II the stage shifts, showcasing Teague’s Offering Vases — created as a physical practice and emotional response to processing grief. Act III is a curation of the artist’s latest vessels and is emblematic of his randomized process of dipping and firing his objects until each is unrecognizable — a metaphor for how memory distorts and reshapes over time. 

In tandem with running the gallery, Weiss is also an accredited art appraiser and the director of CollectorAnonymous, an appraisal and advisory firm that builds collection management solutions for its clients.  Weiss emphasizes the necessity of championing local artists and small businesses.  “It takes a community to support one another,” she notes.  After building I.M Weiss Gallery from the ground up, she says “it feels like I’m giving back.”