Maureen Elizabeth Devine

Maureen grew up on Harvard St. in Grosse Pointe and walked to nearby St. Clare Montefalco School with her friends and family. She graduated from Grosse Pointe South High School, with good grades and some cheerleader experience, then next entered Western Michigan University’s studio art program where she studied with Curtis Rhodes and Terry Allen and received a BFA in printmaking.

After college, Maureen thought it would be fun to see more of the world and applied for an internship at the 20c. prints and decorative arts dept. at Sotheby’s Auctions London. The Sotheby staff enjoyed having the kid from Michigan around (they found her mid-Western accent pretty amusing) and Maureen immersed herself in the rich history and finest examples of 20th European prints, decorative arts, architecture and early 80’s London dance clubs.

She returned to Grosse Pointe at the end of the scholarship and worked for the Joy Emery Gallery on Kercheval Ave, preparing exhibits of local and international 20c. artists. She met fellow art student Lawrence Baranski at the gallery, and began exchanging post cards written in substitution cipher codes with him as a challenge for each other to solve. They were married February 10,1990 at St Claire Montefalco Church, and moved nearby to a house they bought on Hereford Street, in Detroit’s old Belgian neighborhood along Cadieux Avenue.

That same year Maureen accepted a position as curator at the Edsel and Eleanor Ford House on Lakeshore Avenue. In addition to organizing exhibits from the family archive and Detroit-centric shows such as the Lawrence Scripps Wilkinson antique toy collection, she became project manager for the restoration of the Cotswold-style slate roofs on the gate house and main buildings, designed in the 1920s by Albert Kahn. Maureen researched and sourced slate tiles from the same quarry in England that Kahn used, and hired teams of English roofers who restored the roofs by hand with traditional tools and ladders.

The Edsel and Eleanor tile project drew the attention of a collector who owned historic 19c. buildings in the Chicago Loop area, including the Nickerson Mansion and the American College of Surgeons Amphitheater on East Erie Street. Maureen was offered a position as curator of their 19c. art glass ceramic and jewelry collection, accepted, and in the course of her tenure organized a long-running exhibit of Tiffany stained glass windows on display at Chicago’s Navy Pier.

In 2010 when Chicago fortunes fell, Maureen moved back to Detroit and Hereford Street to complete a master degree at WSU and begin an unlikely letter writing campaign to Detroit city officials, pitching the idea of developing a regional art collection at the Detroit Regional Convention Center (nee Cobo Hall). In 2015, she was asked by the three-county authority to do exactly that. Among the projects she managed were commissions for the giant fresco Detroit Innovation by Hubert Massey, and in 2022 the monumental bronze sculpture Floating Citadel by Scott Hocking, now standing at the foot of Jefferson Avenue next to the bronze statue of Joe Louis.

Maureen pursued her joy through travel, at home and around town by volunteering for the Detroit Artist Market, gardening, cooking, thrill rides on bikes and kayaks, and tending to the needs of a long dynasty of feral cats that adopted her, eventually moving into the house on Hereford Street.

She is survived by husband, Lawrence; sisters, Kathleen and Eileen; nephews, Robert and Joshua; niece, Michelea; grandnephews, Grant and William; grandnieces, Kalie and Emma; and her giant Norwegian forest cat, Eames.

Funeral Mass will be held, 10:30 am, with an Instate Visitation starting at 10:00 am, Thursday, June 27th at St. Clare of Montefalco Catholic Church, 1401 Whittier Rd, Grosse Pointe Park, MI 48230.

Memorial donation may be made in Maureen's honor to the Forgotten Harvest Food Bank or the Oudolf Garden Detroit, located on Belle Isle.

Maureen’s family and friends are invited to a reception with guided tours of the Oudolf Gardens, Detroit from noon until 2pm. The gardens are located on Belle Isle in front of the Nancy Brown Peace Carillon Tower. Parking, lunch, and refreshments will be at the Flynn Ice Skating Pavilion, just West of the gardens along Loiter Way.

Please rsvp for lunch to [email protected]