Community Calendar

This retrospective exhibition features works spanning six decades of Detroit artist David Rubello’s remarkable career. Displayed works highlight his fascinating evolution of art discovery and transitions: from drawing to painting, photography to printmaking, reliefs to sculpture, representational to abstract, and continuing…a continuum.

Gallery Hours
Monday-Thursday: 9:00am-10:00pm
Friday: 9:00am-6:00pm
Saturday: Closed
Sunday: 12:00pm-10:00pm

Please visit www.umdearborn.edu/stamelos for more information.

Image is: #15 Color Moves, David Rubello, acrylic on canvas, 2015

Organized as a response to the Museum’s recent acquisition of Titus Kaphar’s "Flay (James Madison)," this upcoming reinstallation of one of our most prominent gallery spaces forces us to grapple with our collection of European and American art, 1650-1850. In recent times, growing public awareness of the continued reverberations of the legacy of slavery and colonization has challenged museums to examine the uncomfortable histories contained in our collections, and challenged the public to probe the choices we make about those stories. Choices about which artists you see in our galleries, choices about what relevant facts we share about the works, and choices about what - out of an infinite number of options - we don’t say about them.

This exhibition proactively engages with debates about restitution and the ethics of museums’ owning African heirlooms collected during the era of colonization. The investigation and research into 11 works of African art will be conducted publicly — visitors will have access to documents, photographs, and correspondence that will help UMMA develop a better understanding of each object’s history, grappling in real time with questions surrounding legal and ethical ownership of these artworks. Though complex, this project presents exciting opportunities for museum transparency and creating new pathways for relationship-building with partners in Africa and its diaspora.

Following years of research into the Museum’s and University of Michigan’s relationships with Africa and African art collections, "We Write To You About Africa" is a complete reinstallation and doubling of the Museum’s space dedicated to African art. Featuring a wide range of artworks—from historic Yoruba and Kongo figures to contemporary works by African and African American artists, such as Sam Nhlengenthwa, Masimba Hwati, Jon Onye Lockard and Shani Peters—the exhibition directly addresses the complex and difficult histories inherent to African art collections in the Global North, including their entanglements with colonization and global efforts to repatriate African artworks to the continent.

On March 16, 2020, we closed our doors, just six days after the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a global pandemic. We didn’t know for how long. At that point there were twelve confirmed COVID-19 cases in Washtenaw County. We weren’t wearing masks because we didn’t fully understand how the virus is transmitted. We reopened to the public 488 days later, on June 17, 2021. While it is exciting to be together again and to see the world slowly reopen, we are also deeply impacted by what we’ve been through. This exhibition holds both of those feelings.

Trace the fascinating and sometimes troubling stories behind the world's most desired ceramics. The technology and taste for blue and white porcelain originated in China in the fourteenth century, and quickly set off a worldwide craze that lasted five hundred years. Installed across four different galleries at UMMA, this exhibition explores that history and tracks the influence of blue and white ceramics across the globe.

In "Pan-African Pulp," Botswana-born artist Meleko Mokgosi explores the history of Pan-Africanism, the global movement to unite ethnic groups of sub-Saharan African descent. His Vertical Gallery installation, which inaugurates a new biennial commission program at UMMA, features large-scale panels inspired by African photo novels of the 1960s and ’70s, a mural examining the complexity of blackness, posters from Pan-African movements from around the world, including those founded in Detroit and Africa in the 1960s, and stories from Setswana literature. "Pan-African Pulp" vividly connects to Detroit’s deep history of activism, where organizations such as Black Nation of Islam, The Republic of New Afrika, Shrine of the Black Madonna (Black Christian Nationalism), Pan-African Congress, and United Negro Improvement Association were founded. The renewed urgency for diversity and civil rights in Detroit, and the country as a whole, heightens the relevance of Mokgosi’s project and reveals the deep connections between these historical movements and those developing today.

In "Andrea Carlson Future Cache," a 40-foot-tall memorial wall towers over visitors, commemorating the Cheboiganing (Burt Lake) Band of Ottawa and Chippewa Indians who were violently burned from their land in Northern Michigan on October 15, 1900. Written across the walls above and around the memorial, a statement proclaims Anishinaabe rights to the land we stand on: “You are on Anishinaabe Land.”

Presented alongside are paintings of imagined decolonized landscapes and a symbolic cache of provisions. Future Cache implicitly asks those who have benefited from the legacies of colonization to consider where they stand and where to go from here and seeks to foster a sense of belonging for displaced Indigenous peoples fighting for restitution.

"Watershed" brings recent work from fifteen contemporary artists to UMMA for an exhibition that immerses visitors in the interconnected histories, present lives, and imagined futures of the Great Lakes region.

Some of these artists give voice to the experiences of communities that have been marginalized, making personal and visceral the social, economic, and political relationships among people, water, and land. Others use water as part of their process—whether photography, painting, sculpture—to provoke reflection on its ineffable effects on our bodies, language, and lives. All demonstrate how art can contribute to and shape current dialogues on the critical problems confronting our region.

This exhibition features new commissions from those listed below as well as works by Dawoud Bey, Pope.L, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Cai Guo-Qiang, Shanna Merola, Doug Fogelson, Matthew Brandt, and Senghor Reid.

This retrospective exhibition features works spanning six decades of Detroit artist David Rubello’s remarkable career. Displayed works highlight his fascinating evolution of art discovery and transitions: from drawing to painting, photography to printmaking, reliefs to sculpture, representational to abstract, and continuing…a continuum.

Gallery Hours
Monday-Thursday: 9:00am-10:00pm
Friday: 9:00am-6:00pm
Saturday: Closed
Sunday: 12:00pm-10:00pm

Please visit www.umdearborn.edu/stamelos for more information.

Image is: #15 Color Moves, David Rubello, acrylic on canvas, 2015