January 13, 2018: Your Arts & Culture Adventure Picks
This post is a part of a series of posts curating adventurous arts and culture experiences in Southeast Michigan. Sign up for email updates (choose “Arts & Culture Adventures” list).
UMS Wallace Blogging Fellow Amanda Krugliak is an artist, curator, and arts administrator best known for performance and conceptual experiential installations, most notably as curator at the University of Michigan Institute for the Humanities since 2007. Amanda is most recently recognized nationally as co-creator artist/collaborator with Richard Barnes and anthropologist Jason De Leon for “State of Exception,” an exhibition about De Leon’s “Undocumented Migration” project. Her essay about the work of Richard Barnes will be included in the upcoming book “Object Lessons,” about the University of Michigan Collections and Museums, and a collection of her essays will be included in a catalog commemorating the U-M Institute gallery, which will be published in December 2017.
Here we are, the New Year! and the town is covered in a sheet of ice, cold snap. I wear sunglasses in the house, listening to Leonard Cohen. But then, just like the forgotten can of La Croix that explodes in the back of my friend Jen’s car, sometimes all you need is a wake-up call, a bottle rocket, a Sign….to remind you how lucky we are just to be Here.
The State Theatre Marquee by Mark Chalou
State Street, Ann Arbor
Neon Artist/Lighting Designer Mark Chalou’s new renovation of the State Theatre Marquee is nothing short of spectacular, Oscar-worthy. Just stand under the glow and bask. Chalou is an artist who understands the notion of Place, cities and towns, haunts and watering holes …his signs inhabit them. Raised in Detroit, with more than thirty years in his practice, his work is authentic, innovative, and requires no museum frame job, street becomes gallery. He carefully researches historic motifs for context, and sketches out his many revisions over time, ultimately re-inventing the way we see things in the process, from once familiar to new again. Remember to look up, and check out other stand out Chalou monikers here and in Detroit: Cafe Zola, Zingerman’s Roadhouse, Adventura, Eastern Market Brewery.
Learn more about the renovation here.
Making Home
Through June 6
Detroit Institute of the Arts
DIA assistant curators of Contemporary Art Taylor Renee Aldridge and Lucy Mensah make their museum
Abelardo Morrell’s photograph Laura and Brady in the Shadow of Our House/ from Making Home.
curatorial debut with this incredibly smart and insightful exhibition. Culled from the DIA’s permanent collection, the exhibition includes works on paper, photographs, as well as installation works, all offering concepts and perceptions of home, both reassuring and still searching, resonant in complexity and the universal longing for a place we belong. The exhibition’s reach offers the opportunity to see the work of a wide range of artists such as Tyree Guyton, Clinton Snyder, Charles McGee, Jane Hammond, Carlos Diaz, Lorna Simpson and Joanne Leonard among others. The exhibition bodes well for exciting and provocative future endeavors from these dynamic new curators with sensitivity to where they stand, and a futuristic gaze.
Through June 6, entry included with regular admission/Detroit Institute of Arts/5200 Woodward Ave.
Also, in conjunction with the exhibition, the Detroit Film Theatre offers a series about Home.
Homegoing: A Conversation with Yaa Gyasi
February 6
7-8:30 PM
Rackham Auditorium, Ann Arbor
A few days into the future, but put it on your calendar…not to be missed.
The work of Yaa Gyasi has proven deeply relevant for many of us questioning our identities, journeys, and exact locations at this tumultuous pivot in history. Gyasi’s novel also served as inspiration for curators Aldridge and Mensah when crafting their recent exhibition Making Home (noted above)
Gyasi was born in Ghana in 1989, raised in Huntsville, Alabama, and is a graduate of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. Gyasi’s extraordinary novel Homegoing follows the parallel paths of two half-sisters and their descendants through eight generations: from the Gold Coast to the plantations of Mississippi, from the American Civil War to Jazz Age Harlem. Though the sisters never meet, their journeys dovetail through a series of narratives that emerge like short stories, interconnected.
Alexis Rockman/ The Great Lakes Cycle
January 27-April 29
Grand Rapids Art Museum, Grand Rapids
Off of our usual squirrel track, but this is a show worth the trip, and not to be missed.
Rockman is an art star, an icon, a fixture in NYC, a presence internationally. His work is both out of this world, yet a real life imperative, conjuring up sublime painted and drawn images that also serve as beacons and omens, bringing attention to the impact climate change, globalization, invasive species, mass agriculture and urban sprawl on our environment and ecosystems.
This multifaceted project was initiated in 2013 when artist Alexis Rockman embarked on a research tour of the Great Lakes region. The centerpiece of the exhibition is a suite of five mural-sized paintings which explore separate themes that emerged during Rockman’s travels.
Make a day of it.
New York Times article about the project.
Helado Negro, Cuco + Lido Pimenta
February 19
8 PM
Museum Of Contemporary Art Detroit, Detroit
MOCAD is magic when it comes to avant-garde musical performances. The space lends itself to taking chances, out on a limb, yet you always feel a strong sense of community, the energy that comes from a gathering in the best sense.
Cuco is a Los Angeles based artist making synth experimental music. Helado Negro is a music and performance artist, alter ego/alias for artist Roberto Carlos Lange, whose song lyrics are consistently bilingual in English and Spanish. His work is daring, yet soulful, expressive and introspective. His fourth LP Double Youth released in 2014 garnered acclaim with Pitchfork naming it “the boldest and most intricate Helado Negro work to date.” His practice includes work in Computer Art and Animation, worked video, sculpture, sound and performance. Lange has worked on projects with numerous artists including Sufjan Stevens, Julianna Barwick (as Ombre), Mikael Jorgensen (of Wilco), Guillermo Scott Herren (of Prefuse 73), Mouse on Mars, and sculptor David Ellis.
Lido Pimienta is a Colombian-Canadian musician and human rights advocate whose music incorporates a variety of styles and influences, including traditional indigenous and Afro-Colombian musical styles and contemporary synthpop and electronic music.
Art Detroit/ Second Saturday
January 13
12-6 PM
Detroit
How fantastic, to spend the afternoon in Detroit, moseying from one gallery to another, talking about art, asking 
the difficult questions, offering up disparate opinions, drinking too much coffee, who knows… it just might change your mind about a few things, or you just might fall in love. Stand -outs destinations include David Klein Gallery/Downtown, who represents such “who’s who” terrific artists like Liz Cohen, Mith Cope, Gina Reichert, Scott Hocking, Mario Moore, Corine Vermeulen, Alison Saar etc etc. Currently on view is the work of Lauren Semivan: Door Into the Dark, hauntingly beautiful prints suggestive of psychological landscapes between sleeping and waking; Playground Detroit/Eastern Market, with the last day of the group exhibition COMM[UNITY] , which represents a small cross-section of Detroit’s creative landscape, “bound not by geography or practice, but by an enduring set of shared values and virtues;” Salt and Cedar Letterpress and Signal Return Press, two gems in Detroit that make extraordinary prints both run by two amazing women… Megan O’Connell(Salt and Cedar) and Lynne Avadenka (Signal Return); and Mark Newport at Simone deSousa Gallery /Midtown, whose surprisingly intimate works on fabric explore the vulnerabilities of loose threads, wear andtear, holes that need mending, seams exposed, the doing and undoing of things.
Jim Cherewick Exhibition
Through February 4, Closing Reception February 2
Ferndale District Library, Ferndale
Artist Jim Cherewick is a legend in these parts, reclusive Ypsi artist whose quirky watercolor paintings take you down the rabbit hole, baby. It takes me back to my days in SF, staying up all night, dreaming big, ceiling fan whirring, painting in my kitchen,where music and art were so deeply connected, and individuality fiercely embraced, and (before texting existed) you wrote late night boozy poems about crushes. The work is fresh, authentic, weird, wonderful, and wandering. Raised in Brighton, he’s lived in Ypsi for several years, where he has been featured in art exhibitions, and he spends a good deal of his time writing, recording and touring with the Detroit-based quartet Best Exes.
UMS Wallace Blogging Fellow Amanda Krugliak is an artist, curator, and arts administrator best known for performance and conceptual experiential installations, most notably as curator at the University of Michigan Institute for the Humanities since 2007. Amanda is most recently recognized nationally as co-creator artist/collaborator with Richard Barnes and anthropologist Jason De Leon for “State of Exception,” an exhibition about De Leon’s “Undocumented Migration” project. Her essay about the work of Richard Barnes will be included in the upcoming book “Object Lessons,” about the University of Michigan Collections and Museums, and a collection of her essays will be included in a catalog commemorating the U-M Institute gallery, which will be published in December 2017.
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