The Knight Arts program is now seeking grant opportunities in Detroit that can create transformational and sustainable change through artistic excellence and collective cultural experiences. If you’re interested in learning more about working with Knight in the arts, please contact Interim Program Director Meredith Hector.
The 19th Media City Film Festival kicked off at MOCAD (a Knight Arts grantee) on Tuesday, May 21st with a live musical performance featuring Michael Snow/Canadian Creative Music Collective and Wolf Eyes. The international film festival, which has run the last two nights, will continue through Saturday, May 25th, with all film screenings taking place at [...]
Robert Sestok contains an awful lot of Detroit’s history for such an unassuming presence. The unraveling of his understated personality reveals an astounding cultural and historical index of Detroit, painstakingly accumulated since his move to the city in ’67, against the tidal wave of outward migration. In his time, Sestok has seen the rise and [...]
Today, ArtPlace America, a nationwide initiative that puts the arts at the heart of community revitalization, announced $15.2 million in funding for new projects in 44 communities across the United States. We’re excited to see that arts leaders in seven of the communities where Knight invests – Miami, Philadelphia, St. Paul, San Jose, Macon, Detroit and [...]
Taste in art is such a personal matter, often the best one can do as an art and culture blogger is to attempt to provide some kind of context for art through the frame of one’s own perspective. The subject of fan art can be a bit sticky; it is singled out as derivative, as [...]
The highly anticipated “Mobile Homestead” by artist Mike Kelley opened on Saturday, becoming the first permanent exhibit at the MOCAD (a Knight Arts grantee). The project was conceived in 2010, and executed as a scale replica of Kelley’s childhood home in the suburbs of the Detroit Metro area. The homestead includes a detachable façade room, [...]
The old joke goes like this: A tourist stops a New Yorker on the street and asks “How do you get to Carnegie Hall?” The local pauses for a minute and then replies “practice, practice, practice…” Well, the world class Detroit Symphony Orchestra must have been practicing. They were in Carnegie Hall last night with [...]
This Saturday, May 11, promises to be an extravaganza of household objects made art, as Public Pool hosts the closing of “Able Objects,” sculpture by Real OK Design (a.k.a. artist Aaron Blendowski), with an interactive appearance by Blendowski to demonstrate his candle-making skills, accompanied by live music performed by Behind the Times featuring Benjamin Teague. Attendees [...]
There is a pervasive feeling when encountering the work of Metro Detroit artist Mary Fortuna, currently on display in the Robinson Gallery at the Birmingham-Bloomfield Art Center, of intense personal mythology at work. Fortuna’s exhibition, “She Towers Above,” which opened Friday, May 3rd and remains on display free of charge at the BBAC through June [...]
Upon entering the scene at 2739 Edwin Gallery, I was immediately gripped by a kind of nervous energy, invoked by “Let’s Don’t Take No Chance,” a collection of sculptural pieces by Detroit artist Ben Hall. Put simply, I felt a little worried that they might collapse on me at any moment. When I spoke with [...]
Without question, hair is a major issue. Mainstream hair culture still suffers along under the terribly retrograde, double-bind of a beauty standard that dictates a woman must spend a lot of time on her hair to make it look as good as possible, while also pretending to have achieved this look effortlessly. This is just [...]
