When it opened in the old Burton International School building in Fall 2009, the Burton Theatre was an exciting and welcome addition to Detroit’s film culture. Founded by four twenty-something cinephiles, the scrappy independent theater promised to show films that weren’t being shown anywhere else in the area, and since the riveting first screening
Two friends separately cautioned me against seeing Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, which is playing at the Abreact Performance Space in Corktown until May 7. “You know nothing happens,” one said. “For more than two hours.” Truth be told, when we got to the theater, located in the Lafayette Lofts,
Since 2007, the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit has invited children and their caregivers to create together during Family Days. This Sunday, kids will have the extraordinary opportunity to paint with noted local artist Gilda Snowden. Snowden is a Kresge Arts Fellow whose Flora Urbana series is currently on display as part of MOCAD’s Art X [...]
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
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:
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
“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
