“Billboard” (2015) by Clinton Snider. Artist Clinton Snider is best known for his moody landscapes and portraits—blue/green toned images that overlap the whimsy of children’s book-style illustrations, a cadre of offbeat characters, and the poignancy of vacant landscapes. A few small examples of Snider’s painted work (2012). In “Sleeping Potential,” a new collection of work […]

Art flowing freely at the “Creative Expressions” group show opening. It is easy, in the context of the art world, to take art very seriously. To be sure, art is a mechanism for social critique and personal catharsis, and that can lead to dark and solemn places. But there is a refreshing feeling to art, […]

New work by Megan Heeres opened at Re:View Contemporary. When it comes to artist Megan Heeres, collaboration is the name of the game. Whether she’s rigging a local bell tower to light up in reaction to the movements of the DLECTRICITY 2014 festival attendees milling beneath it, or driving into the community with her self-made […]

Tickets available now for shows running through Sunday, March 29. The Abreact Performance Space is hosting a performance of Tennessee Williams’ play, “The Glass Menagerie,” presented by Puzzle Piece Theatre. The play, which first premiered onstage in 1944, eventually launching Williams to great success, is a “memory play” dealing with characters drawn from Williams’ real-life […]

Takashi Horisaki, “Social Dress: Buffalo,” cast latex sheets on PVC structure. Detroit artist, teacher and curatorial champion Andrew “Andy T” Thompson continues his streak of outstanding feats of curating with “Place Names the Place,” a group show that “confronts locational identity vis-a-vis personal experience and memory of place.” The show opened at Eastern Michigan University’s […]

Actress Joanna Caplan as Etty Hillsum. Photo courtesy of Gina Reichert of Powerhouse Productions Over the weekend of March 7-8, Power House Productions and The Hinterlands (both Knight Arts grantees) co-hosted the first weekend of performances at Play House, a newly completed performance space on the Detroit/Hamtramck border. The inaugural production was “Total Verrückt,” a one-woman […]

Tim Hailey snags a photo-op at the opening of his show for Public Pool’s 5th anniversary! Culture mavens, revelers, music lovers and intellectuals needed look no further than Hamtramck this weekend, where an astounding confluence of culture left the city awash in action, even as the first stirring of spring started to break down the […]

The latest from theater company A Host of People. The performance is being staged in a residential property on W. Grand Blvd. “The Modern Woman,” the latest piece of cutting-edge theater by the Detroit troupe A Host of People, is enjoying an all-too-short run this week, with shows continuing through the weekend that are not […]

Writer’s Block organizers introduce the afternoon’s readers. During the Writer’s Block reading on the afternoon of Saturday, February 28th, the Diego Rivera courtyard was filled with “lost voices to be resurrected in the DIA.” The event featured the poetry of inmates from the Macomb Correctional Facility, as read by their family members or Writer’s Block […]

The first of many special events to spring out of the Essay’d series. This past Thursday, February 26th, artists Corrie Baldauf and Rose DeSloover participated in an artist talk and open discussion that I moderated for Essay’d, Detroit’s premiere location for short, in-depth articles on key members of the Detroit art scene. Baldauf, Sharp and […]

What lies beneath the surface: Lockwood’s creations take on abandoned forms. There are few things that make the average person more squeamish than contemplation of our bodies as physical vessels. What goes on inside us is a mystery that most prefer to keep out of mind and under the skin. Perhaps that is why “Thinking […]