This story is part of a series about arts and culture in Washtenaw County. It is made possible by the Ann Arbor Art Center, the Ann Arbor Summer Festival, Destination Ann Arbor, Larry and Lucie Nisson, and the University Musical Society.
Rogério Pinto, a University of Michigan (U-M) social work and art professor, was on his way to work one day when he spotted something unexpected hanging on the wall of the third floor of U-M's School of Social Work building. He knew immediately what he was seeing.
"Oh my God — it's a Keith Haring," Pinto recalls thinking.
Haring, an artist and activist who died from AIDS-related complications in 1990, was one of the most celebrated and recognizable artists of the '80s. His 1989 "Silence Equals Death" screenprints, one of which is owned by the School of Social Work, depict a pink triangle against a black background, with Haring's trademark stick-figures massed across the surface. Some of the figures cover their mouths while others cover their eyes or ears.
Pinto soon learned that Haring's print was just one of many valuable artworks owned by the School of Social Work. The school's art collection is hidden in plain sight in the hallways and rooms of the Social Work building, as it has been for more than two decades.
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Doug CoombeUniversity of Michigan social work and art professor Rogério Pinto.
"We'll have people come to our desk saying, 'I hear you have a Keith Haring,' you know?" says Jerome Rork, the building's assistant director.
According to Rork, visitors often ask about more than a few of the pieces in the Social Work collection, but none so often as the Haring. Rork's best guess is that professors across U-M's campus — from social work classes to art history, gender, and women's studies — might be teaching about these artists in their courses, and casually mention that an original piece can be viewed for free on campus.
It's worth noting just how unusual this all is. The School of Social Work is unique as a U-M department that houses an art collection under its own auspices, rather than through a university-owned museum. Even aside from the most recognizable artists, the Social Work collection includes not only paintings, prints, and photographs, but quilts, conceptual pieces, and sculptures, some of them quite large.
Rork calls the Social Work collection, which also includes original work by Diane Arbus, William Kentridge, Gerome Kamrowski, and Robert Rauschenberg, a "source of pride for the school."
"Is she having a midlife crisis?"
The School of Social Work's art collection can be traced back to the efforts of the school's former dean, Paula Allen-Meares. She made an enormous effort to prioritize university funding for art, beginning in the late '90s.
Growing up in Buffalo, N.Y., Allen-Meares often visited the Albright-Knox Art Gallery on Sunday afternoons.
"It was soothing to walk through the galleries and reflect on the art," she says.
She says that practice informed not only her lifelong appreciation for art, but also her belief that art could "[remind] us about the complexities of life," and, ultimately, deeply enrich our lives.
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courtesy University of MichiganFormer U-M School of Social Work dean Paula Allen-Meares.
Allen-Meares moved to Ann Arbor in the mid-'90s for a position at the School of Social Work, where she became dean. Early in her time there, she found herself in the process of raising funds for a new Social Work building. Allen-Meares proposed that 5% of the overall building costs be set aside to spend on art.
"At first, I think people thought, 'Is she having a midlife crisis?'" Allen-Meares says. "They were worried about brick-and-mortar [issues] because the building had been a priority for an extended period of time and had not materialized. People were beginning to lose faith that it would ever materialize."
At first, she says, "not everyone was enthusiastic about … the art acquisition program." But as time went on, and as art began to go up in various parts of the building, she says, "there were faculty and students complaining, 'We don't have enough art in our [area].'"
The school hired two art consultants who Allen-Meares says "guided the acquisition" of the collection. But what "drove" that acquisition, she adds, were "our professional values." In meetings with the consultants, Allen-Meares says, she and others from the School of Social Work "talked about our values and the missions of the school … and how we wanted the art to reflect those important characteristics."
The consultants would present various works of art to the art acquisition committee, whose members would discuss the work at length. Allen-Meares remembers those conversations as one of the great pleasures of her work at the time. She even went on her own acquisition missions, visiting artists like Gerome Kamrowski in their studios and having long conversations with them about their art.
Ultimately, Allen-Meares says she wishes "more funding for the art acquisition program" had been available during her time as dean.
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Doug CoombeU-M School of Social Work Assistant Director of Operations Jerome Rork.
She says she worked hard to place art in "high-visibility, high-traffic" areas of the building — areas where it was most likely to be seen most often. But when she left her position as dean in 2008, there were still gaps in the collection — and on the walls.
Rork estimates that the bulk of the collection was acquired between roughly 1998 and 2003, after which the art "has been coming piecemeal," he says. In recent years, he says, the collection has expanded to include "student projects that were so impactful that we decided to present them with the collection."
In fact, he adds, a conversation has recently arisen among the school's administrators, marked by the following questions: "What defines our collection? Is it value? Is it what Paula did in '03?" Ultimately, what defines the collection is just one thing, and it's simple.
"It's whatever we decide," Rork says.
The ducking problem
Rork takes a personal approach to his work. Over the years, he's developed the unintentional habit of referring to the art that hangs in the School of Social Work as "my" art. It's the kind of intimacy you might expect from someone who shares each working day with these objects and has thought deeply about how to display each piece at its best while protecting the integrity of the materials.
"It's not just 'my artwork,' but the building itself," Rork says.
He says Allen-Meares' "passion" for the building and its artwork was "very contagious." Still, he insists that he's no expert when it comes to purely aesthetic issues.
"The [artworks] that I know the most about are the ones that cause me the most trouble or need the most maintenance," Rork says. In one case, he had to have an entire wall physically reinforced to keep it from buckling beneath the weight of two cement panels, each of which weighs several hundred pounds.
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Doug CoombeJanet Taylor Picket's "Fly Away" at U-M's School of Social Work.
Pinto says Rork "has done the best one can" to display the collection. But, as Rork points out, the Social Work building "was not intended to be a museum."
Rork has certainly had his work cut out for him. And while some of his tasks — like framing and mounting paintings — might at first glance appear to mirror the work of any more conventional gallery or museum, it quickly becomes clear that the Social Work building adds unique challenges all its own.
For one thing, the hallways are narrower, which means that students, faculty, staff, and visitors are far more likely to wind up crowded against the walls. Even when the halls aren't crowded, students and their bulky backpacks tend to lean against the walls while they wait for their classes to start.
"I have students leaning against my artwork between classes … and they don't know they're leaning against a Keith Haring, right?" Rork says. "... They don't even think twice. … All they know is they're tired because they were up studying late last night."
Rork contrasts this behavior with that seen in museums, "where people expect to interact with such art." He doesn't think students intend "to be disrespectful," but adds, "I think we have an additional challenge [in] maintaining our artwork."
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Doug CoombeU-M School of Social Work Assistant Director of Operations Jerome Rork in his office.
And as Rork tallies up the challenges, such as unwieldy custodial carts bustling down the narrow hallways, the building begins to take on the distinct aura of an obstacle course.
"We have had [artworks] fall," Rork says, adding that frames have even broken in the process.
As a result, Rork has often had to limit his framing and mounting decisions to all but the sturdiest and most durable options.
"We sometimes had to choose form over fashion," he says.
Rork himself has not been trained in art conservation and restoration. He's learned the basics on the job and, for more complicated issues, has sought advice from the University of Michigan Museum of Art or consulting companies. But there are still other, weirder, issues with which Rork contends.
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Doug CoombeSam Gilliam's "The Real Blue" at U-M's School of Social Work.
During the most recent student elections, for instance, Rork discovered that one of the candidates had been placing dozens of tiny plastic ducks all over the School of Social Work building. Rork calls the stunt a ploy "to garner attention."
All of a sudden, "I'm finding little ducks all over my artwork, and my drinking fountains, and on the fire extinguisher cabinets," Rork says.
Rork says he doesn't want to "be a curmudgeon all the time," but that he also can't tolerate anyone touching the actual artwork. Eventually, he found the responsible student and told them so. For now, the matter rests.
"I don't think many museums have people go around putting ducks on [their art]," Rork says.
"Social justice in everything"
The art collection at the School of Social Work is not organized by theme, artist, or subject matter.
"That was semi-deliberate," Rork says. With artwork interspersed across the building's four floors, he says, "you would have to see the whole building to see any one theme."
Still, as Pinto points out, certain threads do run through the collection as a whole. He draws particular attention to "a sense of social justice in everything — in every piece that we look [at]."
The school's Haring "Silence Equals Death" piece fits that definition perfectly. The pink triangle in the piece echoes those which were appropriated by the LGBTQ+ community after being used to identify gay and transgender people in Nazi Germany. The piece also references both the Japanese maxim "See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil," and the Reagan administration, whose inaction on the AIDS epidemic has been widely criticized as allowing the disease to flourish.
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Doug CoombeUniversity of Michigan social work and art professor Rogério Pinto.
Pinto, himself
a practicing artist, says he felt an immediate "emotional connection" with the Haring print.
"[For] any gay person of my age, and even younger, the moment you see … a pink triangle, there's a whole
thing that comes through your mind," he says, describing that "
thing" as "a whole era of people dying and nothing being done about [it]."
During Concentrate's tour of the Social Work collection, Pinto and Rork lingered beside a particular artwork: Josh Greene's "Mom & Kids Need Help I
." At first glance, Pinto says, the piece looks like "nothing, right?"
"But," he adds, "this became extremely famous because Greene depicted something that had never been depicted as art."
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Doug CoombeU-M School of Social Work Assistant Director of Operations Jerome Rork.
Greene's piece is nothing more than a bit of cardboard on which has been written, in black marker, "MOM & KIDS NEED HELP THANK-YOU." Just in being framed and mounted on the wall, the piece challenges "what it is that we consider to be important and … [to have] an artistic impact," Pinto says.
It also challenges what we consider to be art in the first place. But for students of social work, the piece might have a more elemental use, reminding them of their role, their practice, and their humility.
Later, Allen-Meares says, "The art collection tells stories about who we are as a people," and in doing so, "it demonstrates the vibrancy of the arts."
"I don't even know how to express all of the consequences of having such a rich array of art in the building," she says. "It creates a milieu for conversation, for learning, and for reflection, as well as for reminding us who we are, where we've been."
Natalia Holtzman is a freelance writer based in Ann Arbor. Her work has appeared in publications such as the Minneapolis Star Tribune, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Literary Hub, The Millions, and others.
Photos by Doug Coombe.