Art Is Life

“All the arts we practice are apprenticeship. The big art is our life.” 

—Potter and painter M.C. Richard, from the book Chop Wood, Carry Water

When Betsy Best was in art school in Seattle in the 1980s, she recalls, “I had an unexpected set of twins.” While they were small, she tried to keep painting at night, but it “got to be too much. I was sleep deprived.

“So I started doing linocuts on my kitchen counter, which I could do out of their reach while they were playing.” She cut images into linoleum-covered blocks, then inked them to make prints.

“I thought I would do it just for a little while, but I just really loved it and kept doing it. That’s what I’ve done ever since.” 

Best’s art has reflected her life ever since. After her marriage ended, she says, she spent many years on her own, and that was reflected in the “mostly solitary women in my compositions from that time.” Then, after thirty years in the Pacific Northwest, she moved back to her hometown, the Flint suburb of Flushing, to care for her aging parents. “I did a whole series after my mom passed away” in 2016.

Up to that point, her work had focused almost exclusively on women—but then “men started showing up” in her images. By that point, “I was living with my dad and my partner,” Kevin McLearn, she says. While “none of the men in my work look anything like my dad or Kevin,” sometimes when she looks at the female faces in her work, “I say to myself, ‘Oh my God, that looks like my mom.’ 

“Art has been a way to just sort of process things,” she says, “even if it’s not consciously. It’s been a way for me to sort things out, put some perspective on things, and just kind of move through those changes in my life.” 

After her father died in 2021, Best bought his condo and turned the walk-out basement into a studio. She sells her bold, evocative linocut and woodcut prints online and at art fairs—including, starting in 2019, at the Ann Arbor Street Art Fair, the Original. She’ll be in booth 803, near Hill Auditorium.

Paloma Núñez-Regueiro sought her out there in 2021. She’d discovered Best on Instagram, and when she “realized that the poster for the Ann Arbor Street Art Fair [that year] was Betsy’s work,” she was determined to meet her in person. Her husband bought her a print of a woman doing yoga that she keeps in a nook where she meditates.

“The work she makes somehow relates to who I am and where I have been,” says Núñez-Regueiro. “That is one reason why people buy art, and how people give power to the art that is made.” 

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“I form metal to express something about human relationships,” emails Boris Kramer. One of 233 artists at the State Street District Art Fair, he will be showing his metal sculptures in booth 638–40, on Liberty near State.

Kramer started coming to the Ann Arbor fair as a kid with his father, also a sculptor. While Kramer still produces some of his dad’s designs, he has found his own voice and language in metals.

His father, Richard Kramer, trained as a blacksmith in Germany and moved to Canada in the mid-1950s. When he arrived in Hamilton, Ontario, he had “only a few dollars in his pocket and could barely speak English,” Kramer says by phone from his home in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. “His first job was shoveling manure at a farm.” 

But his father “loved the Canadian culture with their kindness and openness.” After going back to school, he “became a high school teacher by day and artist in the evenings and weekends,” making “Giacometti-like tall, skinny figures” combined with Henry Moore–like “rounded, figurative forms.” 

As a boy, Kramer spent a lot of time in his father’s studio and traveled with him to art shows and on church-sponsored service trips all over the world. He started down an academic track with degrees in religion and philosophy and was going to get a PhD—but then “decided I’d rather express myself through artwork.” He started working with his father in 1995 and took over the business in 2000.

While his father “was predominantly an ironsmith and worked mostly with steel,” Kramer says. “I really started looking deeper and deeper into these other materials like bronze,” because of “their longevity outdoors, and [because] the patinas you can get on nonferrous metals like brass, bronze, and copper are so beautiful.” 

The downside is that those materials are “crazy expensive.” He’ll bring some pieces to Ann Arbor that can fit on a tabletop, but the biggest is eight feet tall, and prices range “from around $250 up to $25,000.”

His dad remains “the real inspiration.” Kramer recalls a church trip to South Africa where they helped build a schoolhouse. The people “had nothing,” he says—but when it was done, “the parents came out with the kids and they presented us with this beautiful song and dance … it brought tears to my eyes. My thought at that moment was, ‘It doesn’t matter where we come from in the world, we can help each other. We’re connected in some way.’ 

“That’s why so many of the forms I use are individuals, but they’re always somehow connected to each other—through their legs, through their arms—as kids dancing.” 

Kramer met his wife, Angela, at a fair in Philadelphia when she bought a piece from a friend. An art school grad, she “works in insurance by day,” he says, but “in the evening she comes into the studio and does a lot of the color work, and I’ll do the metal sculpting. It’s a real family affair.” 

His father passed away last November. “Just a couple nights ago I had a dream about him,” Kramer says. “Like he was right there with me.

“Every day I’m working I say it out loud, ‘Thanks, Dad. Thanks for the gift.’” 

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“People come into my booth and say, ‘Hmmm. I’m not sure I understand it,’” says abstract expressionist Lisa Burge. “And I say, ‘I don’t mean to be flippant about this at all, but there’s nothin’ to understand. Don’t be intimidated by it. It either moves you, or it doesn’t.’ 

“I don’t know what makes people respond to art. Because my art is nonrepresentational, they have to be responding to something emotional, because it’s not like I’ve done this perfect rendering of a still life. It isn’t that. It’s about color and composition and mark-making.” 

She works “very spontaneously,” and “the paintings sort of evolve as I go along … I love to work with color, so I’m constantly developing the palette as I’m working into the painting.”

Working in oil and acrylic on canvas or wood panel, Burge paints pieces that range in size from 2’ x 2’ to 4’ x 5’, and in price from $850 to $5,000. She’s in the Original fair on North University, booth 833 “in front of the clock tower.”

“I’ve always been a lover of art,” she says. “I’m influenced by Richard Diebenkorn, Picasso, Willem de Kooning.” The Abstract Expressionist movement speaks to me. … They wanted to make something that the viewer would respond to emotionally.”

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Painter Anusree Sattaluri is one of ninety-eight new exhibitors at the Original fair this year. She’ll be just a few spaces from Burge on North University, in booth 829.

Born and raised in Hyderabad, India, Sattaluri moved to Ann Arbor to join her boyfriend, now husband, six years ago. She’s self-taught as an artist, and this is her first big show. “I love it so much,” she says. “It feels amazing to be doing it finally!” 

On her website, Sattaluri writes that her paintings “depict overly romanticized everyday scenes designed to visually bring warmth and calm to the viewer and through the process to the creator, me! They portray home as a sanctuary filled with everything that brings me peace—light, quiet, order, books, tea, and an abundance of plants.” Her larger framed pieces are priced between $600 and $2,000, while smaller 5” x 7” canvases with the same calm scenes are $150 to $300.

Her tranquil scenes are intended as much for herself as for her customers. “I started painting as a way to deal with my anxiety and depression,” she says. “The process of creating is something that gives me a lot of joy and calm, and I think the best part about selling in shows has been just how much people respond to that … 

“People see themselves in those paintings, and it just makes me so happy that there’s so many ways that people can connect to what you make.” 

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Jewelry maker Scott Berry followed his father, John Berry, into the Guild’s Ann Arbor Summer Art Fair. At art fairs, his cast gold rings, necklaces, bracelets, earrings, and pendants sell for $800 to $9,000. He says he makes about half his income at fairs and the rest from commissioned pieces—“the vast majority of them” for people who’ve seen his work at a fair.

When I call, he’s waiting for commission clients to arrive at his Ann Arbor studio—a long-married couple he met at the fair last year. The husband wanted a new wedding ring for his wife.

At their first meeting, she brought “her mom’s ring, which was barely a wisp of a piece,” Berry says. “It had several diamonds, and a couple of them were chipped.” She told him it had sentimental value and she would really love him to use it—but she didn’t relate to the design, and didn’t really like diamonds.

“We went back and forth design-wise,” he says. “They asked questions, and through those discussions, I’m left with a direction.” He made technical drawings and sketches, looking to see what they liked, and even more for what they didn’t like.

“I’m searching for no’s,” he says. “You know when something’s no—more so than you do yes.”

The couple settled on “a two-tone ring,” Berry says. “The outer ring is white gold, and then there are little inlaid gold components. Those yellow gold components came from her mom’s ring, as did the diamonds—barring two stones that I had to replace with two new stones because the ones she had were not quite up to par to use in the piece.” 

Berry sees their car outside and hangs up. About five minutes later, he calls back.

That was quick. Her reaction? “She took it, put it on, held out her hand, looked at it, smiled, and embraced herself,” he says. “She had a quiet moment.” 

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Deb Gumucio has been participating in the art fair since 2005, but she’s not an artist by profession—she’s a retired professor in the U-M medical school’s Department of Cell and Developmental Biology. Her connection is through the university’s BioArtography program, which shows this year—likely for the last time—at booth 1103 in the South U branch of the Guild of Artists and Artisans Ann Arbor Summer Art Fair.

The program started, Gumucio says, as a way to turn “the beautiful images we see every day under the microscope into art—or pseudo-art. I’m not sure how you classify it.” 

It’s “absolutely” art, says Jim Cogswell, one of three art profs who juried this year’s exhibit. “Does it count [against them] that they are byproducts of scientific research projects? Have you seen Galileo’s sketches of the surface of the moon?”

Gumucio gathers medical images from the U-M and beyond, and then “I fiddle with them all in Photoshop and mess with their colors, cropping, sometimes applying photograph filters to make them as striking as possible.” And because it’s an academic project, “we try to explain, as well as we can, what’s there and what the medical significance of it is,” Gumucio says.

“We have a scarf that is printed with a mouse model of pancreatic cancer. It’s quite pretty, in kind of blues and aquas.” At a show at the Matthaei Botanical Gardens, “this lady picked it up and said, ‘I love these colors—this is so pretty.’ And she put it on and asked, ‘What is it?’ 

“I said, ‘Well, it’s a mouse model of pancreatic cancer. And she began to tear up. And she said, ‘This is so beautiful. My husband died of this cancer.’ 

“I then told her a little about the research that was going on behind it, and she said, ‘This scarf gives me hope.’” 

This year’s images include one of Gumucio’s own lung cancer—“I had my left upper lobe removed last December,” she says. When she looks at the image, “I feel like I conquered it.”

Revenue from the sales is supposed to help pay the way for young researchers to “get out to national meetings where they can present their work and meet the big people in the field,” Gumucio says. But “as a fundraiser it’s kind of pathetic, to be honest.” Prints sell from $50 to $260, depending on size and whether they’re just matted, matted and framed, or printed on canvas or glass. Even with her volunteering her own time, between the cost of supplies and paying a part-time administrator, “we always run a deficit.” 

In June, she was notified that the program would no longer be funded by the university “due to budget constraints and competing priorities.” “Happily,” she emails, “we have already found a new home, at the University of Notre Dame, in the College of Science.” The school’s dean, Santiago Schnell, “was the codirector of BioArtography here for many years. He is extremely dedicated to the program and believes that it will thrive at Notre Dame. This likely means that BioArt will not be shown at future Ann Arbor Art Fairs, but instead at many art fairs in and around South Bend, Indiana.”

She’s glad BioArtography will continue, but will miss being part of it. “We had so much fun at the art fair, and were able to talk to the public and have them ooh and aah over a picture of a pancreas!” 

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When painter Susan Hamady started exhibiting at the Guild fair in 1976, she says, her subject matter was “pretty much still life, and sweet animals and that kind of work. Then I got into a lot of design with hearts.

“I did that for quite a long time—hearts and angels—because I figured we needed that on this planet … They were really colorful designs that people loved.” 

But “I’m not airy-fairy,” she says. In 2001, after 9/11, she began “doing a lot of Polaroid print transfers … of the Eiffel Tower and barns around Ann Arbor. I just got into that kind of architectural stuff, and I thought, ‘Why am I doing this? Why do people like it?’ 

“I loved it. I loved doing it. Then I thought, ‘Wait. We have lost a certain stability.’ It is interesting how you do relate to what’s happening and try to overcome it a little bit.” 

Hamady recently graduated from WCC with an associate degree in applied science photographic technology, and “that elicited a whole other evolution—of going back to my old slides and working through those and making these really beautiful travel images that are kind of nostalgic … 

“You need to create a place where people can exist happily, and I think art serves that kind of purpose.” She believes people connect to her work because “I see something beautiful or something that I want to share and I just put life into it—my life.” 

Though she says she’s tapering back on her “art fair business,” she still expects to do fifteen to eighteen shows this year. She’s traveled as far as Texas and Florida in her minivan—“I’m a very good packer,” she says—but “Michigan has some of the best art fairs in the country.

“It’s so much fun interacting with the people,” she says. “I had one painting about hearts. A lady came to my booth and said she wanted to give it to her daughter for her wedding.” Another young woman saw one of her paintings and told her, “‘If I get pregnant, I’m going to buy that painting and put it over my baby’s crib.’ I saw her the next year at a show and she said, ‘I got pregnant, I had the baby, and I want that painting.’ It was pretty uplifting.”

She’ll have watercolor and acrylic landscapes, calligraphy, and even some poetry in booth, ST576, on State in front of the Michigan Union. Prices start at $20 for a box of notecards “to, I hope, up to $900 for a matted and framed nice piece of a landscape.

“Looking back, it’s trying to be helpful and give people hope,” she says. “That’s what art is—it’s uplifting. I don’t have a lot of spiritual angst in it. It’s not like I’m trying to find myself and [say], ‘Look at me—look at all of my problems and my neuroses.’ 

“That’s not me. I’m more trying to reach out and help people.”

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The 2023 Ann Arbor Art Fair runs July 20–22, 2023, Thurs. & Fri. 10 a.m.–9 p.m., Sat. 10 a.m.–8 p.m.

Parking in city structures is $18 per day, $9 after 5 p.m., and Park & Ride shuttles are available from Huron High School and Briarwood mall. See theannarborartfair.com/parking-shuttle for information.

For performances on the Stage on Main, the William Street Stage, and the Fountain Stage on Ingalls Mall, see “Art Fair Entertainment” in the Observer’s Events listings.

Website for all three fairs: theannarborartfair.com.

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This article has been edited since it was published in the August 2023 Ann Arbor Observer. Susan Hamady’s name has been corrected.