Community Calendar

Who: A great place to beat the heat! Lighthouse ArtSpace Detroit presents Immersive Van Gogh Detroit now through Sept. 5, 2022

What: The perfect place to take the kids and stay cool before the Detroit Fireworks, before a ball game and all summer long - the Immersive Van Gogh projection series that has been sweeping the nation, with more than 5 million tickets sold!

Immersive Van Gogh invites audiences to “step inside” the iconic works of post-Impressionist artist Vincent van Gogh, evoking his highly emotional and chaotic inner consciousness through art, light, music, movement and imagination. The gallery space offers patrons more than 500,000 cubic feet of animated projections with mood setting electronic music with pure, ethereal and simple-seeming piano.

Where: Lighthouse ArtSpace Detroit (inside the historic Harmonie Building) 311 E Grand River Ave, Detroit, MI 48226

Unlike any art museum exhibition you’ve seen, FUN will transform before your very eyes as it becomes what you — our community, our students, and our visitors — make of it.

Over the course of this exhibition, UMMA’s glass-walled Stenn gallery will become a creation space. Piles of materials and supplies will form the backdrop of a collaborative, summer-long free artists’ workshop. A place to create, experiment, glue, paint, and get messy.

This exhibition features approximately forty remarkable mid to large-scale glass works spanning three decades of John Wood's artistic career. Inspiration for his work is drawn from a combination of influences from modern art: Fauvist in color sensibility, Cubist in multiplicity of viewpoint, and Abstract Expressionist in spirit. Please check the gallery website for hours: www.umdearborn.edu/stamelos.

In "Curriculum / Collection," an incredible variety of University of Michigan courses take material form. Collected for each course are objects that address the nature of materiality, time, and human interaction in relation to our environments, our wars, our relationships, and our eccentricities.

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.

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.

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.