Published: 10/6/2010
Types: Arts, Visual arts
This Friday, the release the latest film from David Fincher (Fight Club), The Social Network — "the Facebook movie" — an adaptation of Ben Mezrich's 2009 nonfiction novel The Accidental Billionaires, marks a cinematic phenomenon of sorts. Face it, Facebook's history is as fasci...[MORE]
Published: 9/15/2010
Types: Arts, Visual arts
Spend 40 minutes driving north on Woodward Avenue from Detroit's city center at Campus Martius Park and you'll find yourself in the vicinity of the Cranbrook Academy of Art, a revered graduate school surrounded by plush wooded plots and mansions in Bloomfield Hills. With flat land in every direction...[MORE]
Published: 9/15/2010
Types: Arts, Visual arts
Kristine Diven's Rivertown warehouse would quickly drop the jaws of most Detroiters. Sitting dignified and still in the shadow of the old Stroh's water tower, and a stone's throw away from Atwater Brewery, the newly christened studio and gallery District 7 is all exposed brick and raw energy. Twenty...[MORE]
Published: 9/8/2010
Types: Arts, Visual arts
The Detroit Institute of Art celebrates its 125th birthday this season with projects and exhibitions, including DIA: Inside/Out, outdoor installations of reproductions from their permanent collection. But will metro Detroiters be taken aback by the 40 clones placed — quite conspicuously in som...[MORE]
Published: 8/25/2010
Types: Arts, Visual arts
You need only look at the magnitude of work they've done for Jack White's Dead Weather — which includes set design, posters and a deck of cards, to get a sense of their regard. Their commissions for the Alamo Draft House don't hurt either. We're talking about Silent Giants, which is Chris Ever...[MORE]
By Jim McFarlin
Published: 8/4/2010
Types: Arts, Visual arts
When Nii Quarcoopome arrived in the United States in 1979 from Ghana to begin graduate studies at UCLA, the first thing he perceived — the minute he stepped off the plane — was racial tension. It hung in the air thicker than L.A. smog. "You could tell from the demeanor of the white...[MORE]
Published: 8/18/2010
Types: Arts, Visual arts
The gallery's windows were blacked out with garbage bags. It was the last Saturday night in July and the place might've appeared closed. But, promptly at 8 p.m., its doors opened to the sounds of crying and howling. Then came the drums, followed by layers of humming, singing and muddled spoken words...[MORE]
Published: 7/28/2010
Types: Arts, Visual arts
The Imagination Station is exploding from the ashes of a firebombed flophouse standing — barely — in the shadow of Detroit's abandoned, antique train station. Painted colors splash from a second story window, and people congregate on the lawn to plan the future. It's the work of a racial...[MORE]
Published: 6/16/2010
Types: Arts, Visual arts
It's hard to miss the bleeding rainbow cascading down the western wall of a nine-story building at East Grand Boulevard and Beaubien in Detroit. A few blocks east of the New Center area, and just west of the Russell Industrial Center, artist Katie Craig's "Illuminated Mural" conducts a viv...[MORE]
Published: 6/16/2010
Types: Arts, Visual arts
If you look, you'll notice that Detroit has lots of art that exists outside its own landscape. Detroit is a city where you can still catch guys hand-painting billboards on sides of urban businesses; it's a city whose abandoned factories, schools and stores now stand as three-dimensional canvases for...[MORE]
Published: 6/16/2010
Types: Arts, Visual arts
After those cherished higher-learning years wane (no matter how high you were during them), the winds of workplace ennui begin to blow. You first felt its slight breeze during your first summer job, but not until you were clocking in regularly did you actually feel it. Recent College for Creative ...[MORE]
Published: 5/19/2010
Types: Arts, Visual arts
Last week, underground superstar street artist Banksy paid a visit to Detroit. He was on what could be considered one of the most proactively viral and resourceful publicity tours in history. Hitting Los Angeles, Park City (for Sundance), Chicago and Toronto, the famed spray-can kid left a series of...[MORE]
Published: 4/21/2010
Types: Arts, Visual arts
You can catch longhair Phillip Lauri filming indie docs about Detroit's urban farmers, community activists, artists and transplanted brains. You'll see him painting cartoonish murals adorned with his "Detroit Lives" logo on derelict Detroit structures, the same logo he silk-screens onto co...[MORE]
Published: 3/17/2010
Types: Arts, Visual arts
For any cognizant creative whose finger is on the pulse of this ailing city, the news of one relocating to New York is a cliché. And other places too. Want to move to Los Angeles? Best of luck, see you in the valley, babe. You'll be back broke with smog-filled lungs, a runny nose and an uneve...[MORE]
Published: 3/3/2010
Types: Arts, Visual arts
Computer Perfection We Wish You Well on Your Way to Hell Le Grand Magistery Computer Perfectionists and Pas/Cal-inites Gene Corduroy and Bem were living in Brooklyn when they met commercial illustrator Andy Taray (ohioboy.com), the man responsible for the art found on the cover and throughout th...[MORE]
Published: 2/24/2010
Types: Arts, Visual arts
Before getting into the charred thickets of east Detroit, you'll pass the old train yard. In certain areas you'll see stray dogs, vagabonds, curious shutterbugs, countless pounds of broken glass and gnarly graffiti art. It's been that way for decades. For taggers, burners and bombers with a blunt an...[MORE]
By Brian Smith
Published: 2/10/2010
Types: Arts, Visual arts
He's been called a sexist pig and a trash merchant. He's also been called a visionary armed with a heightened sense of irony. Either way he's Jerry Vile (aka Jerry Peterson), storied organizer and mouthpiece of The Dirty Show, now one of the biggest erotic art shows in the world. He's also the forme...[MORE]
Published: 12/9/2009
Types: Arts, Visual arts
This guy Frank Warren knows a thing or two about secrets. He probably even has a few secrets on the topic of secrets. He definitely has some of his own — he publishes one in each PostSecret book. Before becoming a New York Times bestseller, his book, PostSecret, was but a Blogspot blog. It's...[MORE]
Published: 11/11/2009
Types: Arts, Visual arts
Imitation can be unabashed or slickly hid, either way it's flattery. That's tired. What's more gripping than a solid rip-off (of idea or design) is some conceptual take on duplication, an approach concocted to bastardize the source to the point that it can't be (easily) recognized. Make art. And m...[MORE]
Published: 10/21/2009
Types: Arts, Visual arts
Some history: From the 1920s through the late '50s, Paradise Valley was Detroit's African-American arts and entertainment hub. It was also the home of African-American heroes, including boxer Joe Louis, bluesman John Lee Hooker, poet Robert Hayden (Elegies for Paradise Valley) and civil rights icon ...[MORE]
Published: 10/21/2009
Types: Arts, Visual arts
His stained-glass work gives grace to the Tabernacle Missionary Baptist Church in Detroit. You can find his massive oil paintings on Federal Reserve Bank walls, and an impressive 37-square-foot piece he named "Genealogy" is the circular terrazzo floor at the Charles H. Wright Museum of Afr...[MORE]
Published: 9/30/2009
Types: Arts, Visual arts
Just open a daily newspaper in any major American city today and you'll find it's not just the quality, length and subject matter of the stories inside that's changed. Where did the creativity go? What about the screwball columnists and cartoonists? And what would become of an artist like Nolan Ros...[MORE]
Published: 9/16/2009
Types: Arts, Visual arts
"If there hadn't been women we'd still be squatting in caves eating raw meat, because we made civilization in order to impress our girlfriends." —Orson Welles Can we not reside in caves and impress our girlfriends? It's not so rare when what's often considered primordial collides w...[MORE]
Published: 9/16/2009
Types: Arts, Visual arts
It's been 17 years since Steve Panton, owner of Hamtramck's secret headquarters for contemporary art, the 2739 Edwin, made the move to Detroit from his native Nottingham, England. He's used his time here wisely, taking this unique (as in moving to the Motor City) opportunity — as are other Eur...[MORE]
Published: 9/16/2009
Types: Arts, Visual arts
It began last winter as a scribbled idea on a long sheet of paper, one of many thoughts that burst out with others, adding to the list of possibilities. This list was the result of one of many of Broken City Lab's regular brainstorming sessions for the group's next big project. These "projects,...[MORE]
Published: 9/16/2009
Types: Arts, Visual arts
The battered abandonment, the veritable concrete jungles and the wrecked streets give Detroit its ghostly and troubled tone. It also makes the once glorious metropolis one of the world's most enigmatic modern cities. It's true. Blunt and simple: People dig Detroit, but nobody's rushing to move h...[MORE]
Published: 9/16/2009
Types: Arts, Visual arts
The building's exterior is beset by a gaggle of tattooed twentysomethings in cutoffs, holding beers and sticky rollers. They're helping Andrew Beer paint the outside of his place a phosphoric shade called "green energy." All concerned have a shared vision for Detroit's Woodbridge community...[MORE]
Published: 9/16/2009
Types: Arts, Visual arts
Their paintings get seen by more people than do the works of most artists in the city. The exhibitions of their art are shown in every part of town, and often last for years. Yet they're virtually unknown. "You'll sometimes see my work in the middle of, say, Puritan and Livernois, where you sa...[MORE]
By Lee DeVito
Published: 9/9/2009
Types: Arts, Visual arts
Get yer old-skool 3-D glasses out ... now! Most astute observers have no doubt seen local artist Chris Dean's work somewhere around the city, whether it's on those 1800 Tequila billboards or on the walls of the now-defunct CPOP Gallery. And if you're a regular clubgoer, you've probably seen Dean him...[MORE]
Published: 9/2/2009
Types: Arts, Visual arts
She's a working-class Polish punk chick. She runs with a bunch of buxom burlesque types. But, as part of her voyeuristic side — one that puts her behind the video camera and in front of an easel — she prefers to paint her pinups rather than play dress-up. Either way, though, Beth Amber g...[MORE]
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