It was an amazing weekend for art and community in Detroit. This was thanks in large part to the first ever Art X Detroit, a remarkably successful, five-day festival in Midtown showcasing the work of 38 local Kresge Arts grantees and several guests. But the festival coincided with much else:  gallery openings at 71 Garfield […]

The two installations on display this month in Hamtramck couldn’t be more different from one another:  Scott Hocking‘s chaotic Tartarus is a crowded and dirty underworld, while Marcelyn Bennett-Carpenter‘s elegant Turn is an ordered, minimalist paradise.  But both invite you to explore and revel in the total environments they create, and as it turns out, Heaven and […]

It’s no secret that it’s a troubling time for classical music in Detroit. The nearly six-month old Detroit Symphony Orchestra musicians’ strike continues, leaving the Max M. Fisher Music Center largely silent. But as the avant-garde composer and philosopher John Cage spent much of his life and career insisting, there’s no such thing as silence, […]

Pop Up Detroit is back. The temporary art gallery that periodically pops up around town started building a reputation last year as a showcase for Detroit’s young artists and overlooked spaces. It premiered last fall in the Kresge Building downtown, followed by a Midtown Noel Night appearance in a vacant Art Deco auto showroom. This time, […]

If you haven’t visited the N’Namdi Center for Contemporary Art since it opened in the Sugar Hill Arts District last October, now’s an excellent time.  The splendid, 16,000 square foot facility is currently hosting its first curated show, New Departures and Transitions: Medium, Materiality and Immateriality.  (Additionally, there are three other shows by individual artists on […]

You can’t talk about the last 25 years of art in Detroit without talking about Tyree Guyton.  His ever-expanding, internationally-acclaimed east side neighborhood Heidelberg Project (the subject of an upcoming Knight-funded retrospective exhibition at the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History) has delighted, haunted, and inspired visitors since 1986.  His colorful dots and boldly-drawn faces continue to enliven […]

“There is nothing about the Vietnam War that hasn’t been said,” director Frannie Shepherd-Bates declares in the program notes to Last of the Boys, the current Magenta Giraffe Theater production playing downtown at 1515 Broadway.  “But that doesn’t mean that it’s over.  Or that we’re done with it.” Last of the Boys, by noted American […]

After a long and snowy Detroit Winter, the arts community is welcoming Spring with an important pair of events that will celebrate local talent and inspire dialogue about the region’s future: The inaugural Art X Detroit is a sprawling visual, performing, and literary arts festival taking place April 6-10 at more than 12 locations throughout […]

This Saturday night, the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit will exhibit two experimental films that investigate (among much else) the connection between black history and science fiction. This connection is the central theme of John Akomfrah’s documentary The Last Angel of History (1996), which explores moments when blackness and science fiction intersect. It conceptualizes these […]

If you haven’t been to the Detroit Institute of Arts’ photography gallery lately, stop by and check out the current show, An Intuitive Eye: André Kertész Photographs 1914-1969. This generous exhibition of elegant black and white images traces the influential modernist’s career from Hungary, where it began, to Paris in 1925 and New York in […]

The annual Detroit Artists Market (DAM) Scholarship and Exhibition Program opened Friday at DAM’s midtown gallery. It features work by nine Cranbrook Academy of Art graduate students, all finalists for DAM’s John F. Korachis Scholarship Award, as well as a handful of alumni.  The exhibition commemorates more than 75 years of support provided by Cranbrook […]