This past Saturday, the local literary press known as [sic] held its second quarterly event, which took place in the stunning OmniCorpDetroit hackerspace at Eastern Market, and featured poetry readings by New Yorkers Allyson Paty, Mike Lala and Amy Lawless, along with local poets Ivan Grass and Phreddy Wischusen. There were also musical performances, as well […]

This coming Sunday at 6:30 p.m., Detroit Soup will celebrate its two-year anniversary with a dinner at 2900 E. Grand Blvd., featuring a performance by The Detroit Flyhouse Circus School. There is quite a lot to celebrate. Begun by a handful of participants, the micro-granting dinner has undergone steady expansion, having now outgrown its previous […]

Local jazz ensemble Mike Monford & Detroit Effervescence performed last Friday in the Diego Rivera mural room at the Detroit Institute of Arts — a Knight Arts grantee — as part of the museum’s “Friday Night Live!” series, which offers free admission to Detroit residents, extended late hours, free drawing workshops and a truly impressive calendar of […]

Detroit native Andrew Krieger was, until recently, a fulltime carpenter, but he returned to making art after a two-decade absence following a revelation of sorts — that his avoidance of art making was actually the symptom of something deeper, an evasion from some fearful element he’d been unwilling to confront. That sounds rather serious considering […]

With considerable shame, I must confess my experience with “Middle Eastern music,” if such an enormous and diverse cultural heritage can be reduced to that designation, comes almost entirely from brief fragments heard through tinny radios in the back of specialty grocery stores or as ambience in the background of restaurants. This is why I […]

The Packard plant, at one point the most advanced automobile plant in the world, was shuttered and abandoned in 1958, and since then has become one of the more notorious ruins in the country. A vast and sprawling structure, it remains a definitive symbol of Detroit’s economic decline. It has been thoroughly explored and photographed, […]

The Contemporary Art Institute of Detroit (CAID) sits as the sole remaining building on its block at Warren and Rosa Parks, in a seemingly abandoned neighborhood in a city that, until very recently, had been all but forgotten beyond its borders. A fitting venue for “The Apocalypse Show,” a wild assortment of media and performance-based […]

Ben Bunk is a local working artist. Having grown up in New York, he left home at the age of 18, bouncing around the country before landing in Detroit a few years back. I caught up with Bunk at his home, which is also his studio. Over an afternoon of beer and coffee, our conversation […]

On one of the first legitimately cold and snowy nights this Detroit winter, I had the pleasure of attending the opening reception of Carrie Dickason’s “Second Nature” at A Public Pool, the Hamtramck-area gallery. The work on display was a colorful and lively grouping, comprised mainly of discarded materials, such as plastic containers that once […]