Pop-Up Gallery Brings Brutalist Concrete Art to Downtown Saline

A new pop-up art gallery in downtown Saline features the concrete and mixed-media work of artist Brian Caiazza. Open at 101 S. Ann Arbor Street through August.

By John Anderson

Photo by John Anderson

Saline has an art gallery. At least, through August it does.

The storefront window, found prominently on the corner of Murphy’s Crossing at 101. S. Ann Arbor Street indicates the space is still for lease. But, “FOR NOW ART,” with art in big letters.   

Inside the Pop-Up Gallery

Inside, there are lamps and bowls. Assemblages of carpentry flotsam, rebar, string, and concrete. Lots of concrete. The bowls are concrete. Some of it is fine art, the rest is functional fine art, both pulling influence from the movements of Brutalism, Minimalism, and mid-20^th Century Modernism. Just as the window’s display text suggests.

The Artist Behind the Work

The work in this pop-up is by Brian Caiazza, who, over the last four decades, had been working professionally in the digital spaces of motion graphics, UX, and experience design. “It’s anti-digital is what it is,” said Caiazza of the work in the gallery. “My free time away from digital, I don’t want to push a pixel.”

Educated in illustration at Parsons in New York City in the early 1990s, he discovered computer-aided design while on an internship at Viacom. Understanding that’s where the future was, he convinced his mom to get him a Power Macintosh 8100. From there, a career in motion graphics with clients that included Microsoft, Nordstrom, and The Motley Fool.

But, away from the office, he tinkered with his hands, working with found materials of metal, wood, and stone. “I’m not a craftsman. I’m not a guy who can dovetail and that level of fine woodworking,” says Caiazza. “I’m spontaneous. I like to work fast.” Many of his bricolage sculptures reflect that spontaneity, as if trying to complete a thought before refining it. They’re more like sketches: maquettes for something larger that might one day live in a park.

Caiazza and his family moved to Saline in 2017, where he started working as an experience designer for Ford and Lincoln, designing the lighting, sonic, and display UX in the cabins of models like Mustang, Lightening, and Nautilus. But, at home, he worked with concrete: pouring into whatever he could find and working quickly. Eventually, he made frames, poured concrete into them, and liked what he saw. “There is a speed, tempo, and rhythm when working with concrete. The inherent challenges,” Caiazza says. “And, the end result: there’s a permanence to it. A weight to it. Literally.”

From Ford to Downtown Saline

The summer pop-up came at the right time for Caiazza. In April he left Ford. By May he was asking his barber, Rod Marsh, about the vacant storefront two down from his shop, on the north side of Carrigan Café. That’s when Rod encouraged Caiazza to call Tyler Kinley.

Kinley is the president of Praxis Properties, a Washtenaw County-based property management that owns Murphy’s Crossing.

“That space is a jewel,” says Kinley, who has been looking for the right tenant for the corner store. Investment brokers and insurance companies had expressed interest. “They want to be there for the visibility. It’s a billboard,” says Kinley. “But, kids walking by aren’t going to pop in to check on financial planning,” he jokes. He’s more interested in adding vibrancy to the downtown through his spaces: something that excites the whole family, like a toy store or chocolate shop. “That’s where the home run is.”

For a couple years, Kinley has had big plans for the whole building, hoping to add a wrap-around ADA-compliant balcony to the back of the Italianate structure through an MEDC Revitalization and Placemaking Grant, with a grassy pocket park below. In the meantime, he wanted to activate the space with short-term leases. “It gives me flexibility. It gives the tenant low rent.”

A Rough-Edged Space with Purpose

The gallery space has a roughness to it: a suggestion that it will only be temporary. Tables are formed from heavy boards on sawhorses. Some of the lighter sculptures sit on homespun pedestals. The awnings outside still faintly read “Flowers for all occasions,” a reminder of the space’s recent past. But the only flowers inside are those delicately stenciled into the interiors of a few of his heavy concrete bowls.

From the street, the pop-up looks less like an art gallery and more like a funky lamp store. Back in New York, Caiazza had success with his lamps. One buyer said they would place it next to their table designed by Isamu Noguchi. “The addition of a lightbulb: That’s function.” For him it was a simple gesture. “Some people are okay with being abstract forever. I can’t do that,” he says, reflecting both on his various abstract pieces competing with the lamps and bowls in the space.  “As a person I also need purpose.”

Instead, he poured concrete into forms. Or took scraps of wood, or metal, and assembled them, sometimes tying bits of string at various intervals to define planes. There’s a quickness to the wooden structures, as if a race to complete a thought. For Caiazza it’s part of the process. “You develop the language and discipline, instead of just a craft.” It’s work he could see on a larger scale, living in a park or plaza, like the cube on Astor Place in Manhattan where he’d meet up with friends during college. A similar cube, also by artist and U of M graduate, Tony Rosenthal, can be found on the Michigan campus.

But, before the concrete, there were the lamps. While living in New York he would assemble found wood and stones and assemble them into sculptures.

Visit the Gallery

Brian Caiazza’s art pop-up is on view at 101 S. Ann Arbor Street, Saline, through August.