About TGo{R}

By providing a "cool" space to exhibit, material support for their exhibition preparation, financial resources, the opportunity to collaborate with the curator in selecting panelists to engage with them in riveting conversations during their opening receptions, The Gallery of Revolution (TGo{R}) strives to catalyze positive transformational change through empowering social justice and revolutionary Detroit artists.

TGo{R} is on the second floor of the historic James and Grace Lee Boggs Center to Nurture Community Leadership, nestled on the corner of Field Street and Goethe on the eastside of Detroit. Recently renovated featuring newly sanded oak wood floors and padded window sitting, the museum is intimate and powerful. 

Charles Ezra Ferrell, Executive Director at the Boggs Center, is TGo{R}'s founder and curator. He leverages his experience as an artist, human rights activist, tenured Vice-President of Public Programs and Community Engagement at the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History and as SVP at Keiga Foundation, where he garnered an international reputation for his consistent creative programming and revolutionary social justice work.

TGo{R} launched in January of 2023 and features four social justice / revolutionary exhibitions annually in January, April, July, and October. The first exhibition, I.C. BLACK APPLE PIE, opened on January 15, 2023, featuring the artistry of Wayne Curtis. Curtis, a former Black Panther Party member, founder of Feedom Freedom Growers, and Boggs Center member,  stated, " I.C. Black Apple Pie is a visual representation of the unitarian movement between globally dispersed oppressed communities. This new global revolutionary inter-communal (I.C.) movement seeks to unify its forces and secure its cultural sustainability by withdrawing from the brutality of local and global capitalism."

Katie A. Pfohl, the recently named Associate Curator of Contemporary Art for the Detroit Institute of Arts, said the following: "Wayne Curtis's powerful exhibition at The Gallery of Revolution reflects the artist's decades-long exploration of the relationship between art and activism. Curtis's delicate pastel drawings and newsprint collages respond to histories of Black organizing in Detroit and the precarity of political progress against the forces of capitalism. Working in pastel—a medium notoriously difficult to fix on paper—the artist's Work embodies both the possibilities and challenges of true and lasting change. In one compelling Work from 2000, slave ships shadow columns of numbers reporting record highs on the stock exchange as a commanding portrait of Dr. Charles H. Wright—a Detroit physician and founder of the city's Museum of African American History—stands up against a vast sea of corporate logos, colonialist enterprises, and capitalist forces. Drawing upon the artist's history as a foundational community organizer in Detroit, Curtis's art is like activism: often precarious, provisional, and contested, but also urgent, transformational, and deeply necessary." 

TGoR's second exhibition, From the Body to Collective Experience, featured the artistry of Sterling Toles and opened on April 15, 2023. Toles escape descriptive boundaries. Not only is he a Kresge Artist, but he also commands multiple arenas in the arts as he is a DJ, MC, and an award-winning producer of Hip Hop artists. 

From the Body to Collective Experience is an installation from Toles’ solo exhibition s(h)elves? “which uses community-based activation, found objects, original music, and image-based works to explore the connection between matter and spirit as constituent parts of identity construction. s(h)elves? questions the degree to which we define who we are by trauma and limiting beliefs held by containers of selfhood and the impact of our reluctance to change what rests on these shelves of identity." Toles is a shaman and educator who loves all human beings.

In tune with the warm summer days, Solvent, the artistry of Halima Afi Cassells, a Kresge Fellow artist and activist,  and Shanna Merola, a Gilda Snowden artist, opened at TGoR on Saturday, July 15, 2023. These two Detroit artists manifest liberation from the climate crisis through their immersive collages. Solvent  "invokes the world between memory, history, collective storytelling, and liberation at the water's edge." The exhibit was replete with collages, found objects, plant samplings, and spiritual portrayals of stalwart Detroit water warriors and human rights activists Lila Cabbil and Charity Hicks. 

Solvent was lauded by students who visited from the Center of Creative Studies and an African delegation who traveled from Michigan State University's African Center led by Upenyu Majee, Ph.D., the Inaugural Director of the Institute of Ubuntu Thought and Practice. Metro Times also covered it; these two Detroit artists manifest liberation from the climate crisis through collages. 

As the earth turned and the chill of Michigan's fall weather fell upon us, we ventured inside to find transformative art at The Gallery of Revolution, closed out our first exhibition year on October 15, 2023, with “Wake Work* always to rupture the present,” featuring the artistry of Lauren Williams. Williams explains, "Wake Work* examines violence visited on Black people at the hands of the American state and attends to the paradoxes of Black life and death in this anti-Black world. 

TGo{R}’s 2024 line-up is exhilarating. It features the social justice photography of activist photojournalist Valerie Blakely (February 3rd - March 31st); the powerful “Basquiat artistry” of Konstance Patton, a native Detroit Black, Indigenous muralist and painter who also resides in New York (April 13th - June 30th); the iconic photography of the revolutionary Kresge Eminent Artist Leni Sinclair July 13th - September 30th); and the multifaceted Afro-futurist Bryce Detroit (October 12th - December 31st).

The James and Grace Lee Boggs Center to Nurture Community Leadership sits above the former residence of the late James and Grace Lee Boggs.  During their lifetime It was known as “Field Street University,” and was the meeting place of some of Detroit's and America's leading revolutionists like Robert F. Williams, General Gordon Baker, Jr., Reverend Albert Cleage, Milton and Richard Henry, Muhammad Ahmad, Vincent Harding, Gloria House, Carl Edwards, Alice Jennings, William Strickland, Danny Glover, Robin D. G. Kelley, Charles Simmons, Frank Joyce,  and many others. 

The gallery aims to inspire the next generation of social justice activists and revolutionists to envision a world that advances the interests of all humanity. Ferrell believes we must all provide space and resources to nurture our treasured activist artists so they can create influential works that expand our perspectives of current realities and a better world. Please join us on our journey of exploration.