Joy Hakanson Colby Signs the Beam at the Scarab Club.

September 2008


Gilda Snowden, David Barr,  Dennis Nawrocki, Gary Eilenko, Charles McGee


Lester Johnson, Joy Colby


Sarah Colby, Bob Wilbert, Joy,  Treena Erickson










Sarah Colby, Joy, David Barr, Woman, Dennis Nawrocki



Joy, Jim Pallas



Joy, Jim and Janet Pallas






Lester Johnson, Joy and man.



woman, Joy, Sarah Colby

Scarab Club pays tribute to art writer Joy Hakanson Colby

Michael H. Hodges / The Detroit News

Those lucky enough to squeeze into Detroit's venerable old Scarab Club tonight will be treated to a dazzling new show, "Voices," that comprises a virtual who's who of Michigan's top artists, including many, like Charles McGee, who rarely submit work for juried exhibitions."Voices," up through Oct. 12, was curated by Joy Hakanson Colby, the longtime Detroit News art critic who retired in 2006. In many ways, the show represents the collective gratitude of the local art community to a woman who for 50-plus years championed the work coming out of Detroit.Indeed, in recognition of her influence, the club -- founded in 1907 by Detroit's artistic elite -- has asked Colby to sign one of the ceiling beams in their upstairs hall, an honor reserved for artistic superstars the likes of Diego Rivera and John Sloan, Cranbrook architect Eliel Saarinen and, more recently, novelist Elmore Leonard.The signing will take place at 7:30 tonight -- less than 24 hours before Colby, who lost her husband Ray last January, gets on a plane to move to St. Louis to be closer to two of her three daughters.

"One of the things I'm so happy about with the beam-signing is that Joy is moving to St. Louis," says club gallery director Treena Flannery Ericson. "This is the last opportunity for people to celebrate her and let her know how much she's meant to Detroit."
For her part, Colby -- a diminutive woman with an unfailingly hip fashion sense -- says she was astonished at being asked.
"I was amazed," she said on Wednesday morning, sitting in the club's airy gallery space while artist McGee worked on hanging the show.
"I mean, people like Diego Rivera and Saarinen are up there." Colby shakes her head. "It's just a great honor."
No less an honor, she says, was getting the opportunity to choose among hundreds of works that poured in once artists knew that Colby would be curating. Ericson isn't sure of the exact number of entries, but says it was more than 300 -- astonishing for a show that was only announced a couple months ago, and pulled together in record time.
The big names include not just McGee, but Gilda Snowden, Jon Strand, Jocelyn Rainey and Lester Johnson -- as well as some complete newcomers like Lisa Marie Rodriguez, a student at Wayne State University.
The show's delights are considerable. Worth a special trip are photographer Bruce Giffin's powerful "Joe Jones," a study of an old man's face in black and white; Russell Dunbar's realist painting of an abandoned Brush Park mansion, "Demolished by Neglect"; and Gerald C. Moore's beautiful, nearly vertigo-inducing oil, "Bryce Snow Storm."
Much of what Colby picked is somber and profound, like Brandon Burke's paired portraits of a man and woman, "Gerry/Shanna," which -- hung side-by-side -- evoke something of the grim majesty of the pitchfork-toting farmer and wife in Grant Wood's "American Gothic."
Happily, not all is serious.
Taking a reporter around the hall, Colby points to Jud Coveyou's "Gizmo," a tongue-in-cheek painting in which a man and cat appear to tumble multiple times across the same canvas, a bit like film frames from some madcap movie comedy.
"That," Colby says with satisfaction, "is a scream."
And she can't say enough about McGee's aluminum sculpture, "United We Stand," comprises seven people-like shapes.
Her verdict? "Charles is simply amazing."
It's a characterization many apply to Colby herself.
Artist Gilda Snowden says that at the dawn of her career, nothing meant more to her than her very first Joy Colby review.
"It was more important than getting my master's degree," says Snowden, now the chair of fine arts at the College for Creative Studies, "because I could take it home and show my parents and say, 'See? I was in the paper!'"
Colby started her career at The Detroit News in 1946. Typical of that era, she was immediately shunted into the Society section, and in short order became beauty editor.
Yet, it was under the rubric of "beauty" that the Wayne State art grad was able to start sneaking art stories into the paper.
Colby calls her stint as beauty editor "such fun -- I once dyed a girl's hair green for a photo shoot. And I did a silent interview with Harpo Marx. He was just a scream, except for being such a letch."
He invited Colby to dinner, but sensibly, perhaps, she declined.
Of greater moment were the articles Colby wrote with Detroit News staff writer Susan R. Pollack in 1983 exposing the freewheeling spending habits of former Detroit Institute of Arts director Frederick J. Cummings -- articles which triggered an audit by the city of Detroit and were widely seen as prompting Cummings' abrupt resignation later that year.
Colby was no pushover, artists say.
"She was tough," says Jef Bourgeau, artist and director of Pontiac's Museum of New Art.
"Even if you were a friend," he says, "she'd write a bad review if she felt it deserved it. But you appreciated the honesty. And Joy was never mean-spirited."
DIA curator of European modern art MaryAnn Wilkinson says Colby fought very hard to keep art front and center in the paper, an uphill battle even in the best of times.
"There's really been nobody like her since," Wilkinson says. "Plus, she really understands artists."
Ericson agrees.
"She wasn't just a critic, but a tireless proponent of the arts in Detroit," Ericson says. "Her career made such a difference for so many artists that she simply had to be up there on a beam."