In the Motor City, a quaint, old nickname for auto workers used to be “metal-benders.” They shaped it into attractive forms, colored it with pretty paint, and sent it down the assembly line for folks to buy and admire decades later at the Dream Cruise.
In this sense, the Detroit sculptor Lois Teicher is a notable and productive metal bender — but she doesn’t build cars. Teicher creates abstract sculpture, in small models and massive, site-specific installations, many of them in steel and aluminum. Some are 14-feet tall, others weigh two tons.
At the moment, Teicher is displaying small models of her work in her show Quiet Performance: The Stillness of Shape at Midtown’s Galerie Camille, her first major show since her big hit at the Scarab Club in 2019, described then by The Detroit News as “electrifying.” The current show closes Saturday.
In the near future, Teicher will undertake a 10-foot-tall project at 12 Mile Road and Northwestern Highway for the Southfield Public Arts Commission. It is a jagged, red circle called “Burst” which is obviously, you see, it looks just like . . . Well, exactly what do you think it might mean?
“It’s like a focused one, a burst of energy,” Teicher says. Of this and other of her works, she adds: “If people say, ‘I like it, but I don’t understand it,’ it’s fine! Because they feel it on a body level. I love that.”
Teicher — herself a focused, 86-year-old burst of energy — will host a free, public dialogue at the gallery at 5 p.m. on Friday and take questions after a brief speech.
“I want to talk a little bit about what inspires me,” she says. “People wonder about that all the time. I don’t want people to be bored.”
Her work certainly does not bore. As to what specifically inspires her, Teicher says it is “the fundamental structure of the universe” and, to her, “the larger picture, the umbrella, and not all the little stuff underneath it.
“To me, it’s about relationships that seem universal to me,” Teicher says. “It’s all about holes, it’s about gravity, it’s about space, it’s about energy, it’s about light . . . That’s what I mean by universal . . . It’s about shape and relationships in a context . . . Does that make sense?”
Perhaps she will discuss her 2000 Scarab Club outdoor installation “Curved Form with Rectangle and Space,” in the Hudson’s Art Park near the Detroit Institute of Arts. It is stainless steel, one inch thick, painted white, a study in balance that looks almost fragile and vulnerable.
Gaze at it long enough and it starts to look like a portal to time travel. Or, maybe, Gumby. Or the upper-case letter “D.” Scarab Club executive director MaryAnn Wilkinson — who gave Teicher the nickname “Woman of Steel” — once wrote of its balance between heavy and light, right outside her office.
“I’d look out at that piece so light and buoyant,” she wrote, “but probably weighing a ton and a half. Lois’ works look weightless. They create their own space and their own sense of movement.” Teicher says it has sustained winds of 60 miles per hour without damage.
“Never, it’s not going anywhere, because Lois does overkill,” Teicher says, explaining that it is held by huge bolts anchored into the cement. “It’s been there for 24 years,” she says. “I think we’re good.”
Or, perhaps, at her talk, Teicher will explain one of her more whimsical installations, “Paper Airplanes with Deep Groove,” at Bishop Airport in Flint, from 1996. Although they look like folded paper planes flying about the lobby, they are made of steel and aluminum. The largest weighs two tons.
And, maybe, on a personal level, Teicher will explain her mid-life transition from a mother who raised three children to adulthood, then became a middle-aged student at the College for Creative Studies, and then grew into an acclaimed sculptor with a studio in the Eastern Market.
Biographically, she describes herself as a little kid from Northwest Detroit — and Mumford High School — who used to work alone in the empty lot next to her home, building forts with neighborhood scraps, including logs and big branches.
“My parents let me do it,” she recalls. “They didn’t say, ‘Girls don’t do that.’ I just had to do it. I loved doing it.”
When most people think of outdoor, public, sculpture, they think of the human form — Michelangelo’s David, perhaps, or “The Thinker” by Rodin, or of the faces of the presidents on Mount Rushmore. Not Teicher, who doesn’t sculpt the faces or physiques of people or objects found in nature.
“No, I never have,” she says. “I never wanted to and I never want to.”
She dreaded those courses in college.
“It made me actually nauseous to think about it at CCS,” Teicher says. “I don’t know why. I got a sick feeling about it. It was a body thing.”
So what does Teicher think of the Joe Louis “Fist,” perhaps Detroit’s most symbolic work of public sculpture and its civic homage to a body part?
“Interesting question,” she says, before answering carefully. “At first, I didn’t like it. I thought, ‘Oh, gosh, a big fist, what kind of a connotation is that for Detroit. Tough city?’ But it’s grown on me, I have to admit . . . I can accept it as a Detroit icon. I’m O.K. with it. It’s well-done. I’ve learned to accept it.”
The Louis Fist — there since 1986 — may be symbolic on several levels, but its initial impression is as subtle as a punch in the nose. Teicher’s work searches for something different, sometimes puzzling the beholder.
“Some people don’t like ambiguity,” she says. “Some people need things black and white. To me, healthier people are OK with uncertainty.”
As an older student at CCS, Teicher recalls with no false modesty, “I was a star student. I have to say I worked harder than anybody.” After getting her masters at Eastern Michigan University, Teicher gradually shed her personal career ambiguity.
“Slowly, I would ask myself, ‘Why am I doing this? What is it for? Who cares?’” she says. “I was very shy, very quiet. I had to find my voice. And I found my voice through art.”
