The number one thing we miss about pre-COVID life is art and culture. Thankfully, most of Detroit's galleries have reopened with precautions so that you can make an appointment to visit to see their current exhibit(s). Here is what some of our favorite spots currently have on display.
DUAL VISION - Dual Vision is an expansive, forty-person group exhibition featuring artists living in or otherwise engaged with Detroit. Framed as a series of visual conversations that explore various methodologies for collaboration between practitioners, Dual Vision includes twenty individual projects produced by forty artists working in pairs—each work representing dual creativity as one. This exhibition underscores the nature in which contemporary artists communicate visually as a means of crafting a collective message. Dual Vision exhibits a robust intersection of disciplines and practices—from painting and sculpture to sound, fiber, and lens-based media—with contributions by artists at varying stages of their careers.
February 5th - August 8th, 2021
LENI SINCLAIR: MOTOR CITY UNDERGROUND - Motor City Underground presents the photographs of Leni Sinclair, best known for her work chronicling radical movements of Detroit since the 1960s. A founding member of the White Panthers, Sinclair is both an activist and longtime witness to social justice organizing in Detroit. Her images are among the most iconic and thorough records of the city’s countercultural history.
February 5 – May 2, 2021
BLACK ART LIBRARY - Created in February 2020 by independent curator Asmaa Walton, the Black Art Library was born from Walton’s desire to create a tactile means for communities to engage with Black artists and Black art history. A living archive of global Black creativity, the collection includes artist monographs, exhibition catalogs, children’s books, artist memoirs, artist biographies, art history texts, and other art-related ephemera. As a mobile collection and interactive installation, Black Art Library provides a platform for community accessibility and engagement with the rich legacy of Black art, aesthetics, and history.
February 5 – May 2, 2021
DETROIT NARRATIVE AGENCY: RADICAL REMEDIES - As our communities face the dual pandemics of COVID-19 and severe anti-Black racism, what do resilience, resistance, joy, grief, and collective care look like? Detroit Narrative Agency (DNA) invited Detroiters and Michigan residents to creatively respond to this question through short videos. Radical Remedies, organized in collaboration with Detroit Narrative Agency, amplifies community stories to build collective healing
February 5 – May 2, 2021
RASHAUN RUCKER: UP FROM THE RED CLAY
Solo Exhibition
March 26 - May 1, 2021
Upcoming:
KENNY KARPOV
A SMALL CORNER OF HELL
POP-UP BOOK SIGNING
MAY 15, 12 - 6 PM
ANATOMY: NATALIE WADLINGTON - Anatomy: Natalie Wadlington features new paintings by the Texas-based artist, who creates vibrant oil paintings that are based in story-telling and figuration. Her characters are wide-eyed with wonderment and fear as they navigate various environments and encounters with both wild and domesticated animals. Within her paintings, humans and animals come together in symbolic scenes that mirror our own complex interpersonal struggles for understanding.
March 16 - April 27, 2021
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— NATALIE WADLINGTON
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FADE TO FADE: JULIA WACHTEL, PAUL PFEIFFER, AND WENDY WHITE-Through the lens of the American stage, Fade to Fade challenges the passivity of our contemporary self-image at a time when manipulation through social and news media has reached dizzying heights. Through the deconstruction of pervasive imagery within media and popular culture, artists Julia Wachtel, Paul Pfeiffer, and Wendy White present a dismantling of the pageantry of commerce, performance, and policy to reveal the axioms and essential flaws that lie beneath.
April 10 - May 8, 2021
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Paul Pfeiffer — Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (06), 2001-2018
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ROBERT BLACKBURN & MODERN AMERICAN PRINTMAKING-Robert Blackburn & Modern American Printmaking celebrates both the artist and the democratic and diverse creative community he developed. Born of Jamaican immigrants and raised in Harlem, Blackburn was an innovative printmaker and influential teacher. Blackburn explored avant-garde ideas while promoting a new collaborative approach to printmaking. The exhibition contains more than 75 works, including lithographs, woodcuts, intaglio prints, and watercolors by Blackburn and the artists with whom he collaborated, including Elizabeth Catlett, Grace Hartigan, Robert Rauschenberg, and Charles White.
Sat, Mar 20, 2021 — Sun, Sep 5, 2021
DETROIT STYLE: CARE DESIGN IN THE MOTOR CITY 1950–2020-Detroit designers have always led the way in car design. The futuristic concept cars, roaring muscle cars, and sleek racers designed in and around the city shape our ideas of what a car can be. Working on paper, in clay, and in metal, their ideas drive American car culture and inform the way we get around every day.
Sun, Nov 15, 2020 — Sun, Jun 27, 2021
RUSS MARSHALL: DETROIT PHOTOGRAPHS, 1958-2008-The Detroit Institute of Arts presents a survey of over 90 photographs by Russ Marshall whose black-and-white imagery was inspired by the Motor City’s streets, architecture, music and factory workers for over 50 years. Marshall was born in 1940 in the thriving coal-mining town of South Fork, Pennsylvania to a family of coal miners, farmers and industrial factory workers. His family relocated to Detroit in 1943. By the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s, Marshall had begun to photograph the city’s streets, its passersby, Thanksgiving Day parades, its Michigan Central Station (MCS) and even a rare “Love-In” staged on Belle Isle in the late 1960s.
Sun, Nov 15, 2020 — Sun, Jun 27, 2021
EXPERIENCE AND EXPRESSION-To create the art of our time, artists often draw on their own experiences of the world—from the personal to the political, from the aesthetic to the commercial, from the individual to the collective, from the spiritual to the material.
Sat, Jan 30, 2021 — Sun, Oct 3, 2021
2021 GRADUATE DEGREE EXHIBITION OF CRANBROOK ACADEMY OF ART-The most innovative work from the next generation of architects, artists, and designers will be on display at the 2021 Graduate Degree Exhibition of Cranbrook Academy of Art. The Degree Exhibition showcases pieces that are the culmination of two years of studio work from a diverse group of graduates as they launch their careers.
MISE EN ABYME: RACHEL PONTIOUS SOLO EXHIBITION-Rachel Pontious is a fine artist based in Detroit, Michigan. She uses paint to explore nonlinear narratives that speak to the ways we relate to one another, to the objects around us, and to the spaces we inhabit. Pontious does this by weaving abstracted and unnavigable spaces with figures and objects of different planes and perspectives. Her work investigates the Venn diagram of what objects we keep close and the personal mythologies that they create, subtle and exaggerated modes of communication (e.g. body language and theatricality), as well as threshold/transitional architectural spaces and portals.
On view through May 15th
AKEEM SMITH: NO GYAL CAN TES-Drawing upon his experience growing up between New York and Jamaica, Smith harmonizes disparate elements from this extensive archival documentation, which chronicles this seminal era from the early 80s through y2k, conjuring a collective memory that otherwise would have only existed on the threshold of the artist’s own. Part poem, part anthropological homage, No Gyal Can Test forms a layered exploration of spectral coloniality, diaspora, and the voyeurism that results from transposing these artefacts across cultural, economic, and temporal divides.
April 16–July 30, 2021
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