Kresge Arts in Detroit profile video

This past weekend, the new cohort of 2011 Kresge Arts in Detroit Fellows had their inaugural weekend retreat, thus officially concluding my fellowship year. At the same time, I received the long version of my KAID profile video.  Stephen McGee and his crew Cory and Chris did a great job. Also thanks to the Kresge Foundation for footing the bill on this and other things, and for what has been a very memorable experience.

Above video: Vince Carducci, 2010 Kresge Artist Fellow produced and directed by Stephen McGee LLC.

© Kresge Arts in Detroit, College for Creative Studies

Detroit Art, Time & Space @ the DIA

Tonight I've curated a group a readings to follow the Detroit Institute of Arts Friends of Modern and Contemporary Art meeting. The event starts a 7 pm and is free. (Click here for information and here for a reservation ticket.) It kicks off the FMCA's year of programing based on the theme "Making Space: Imagining Architecture, Art and Intimacy."

We take "making space" in two senses, the processes of creating space, objective and subjective, and the location, i.e., the studio, the museum, the writer's desk, in which those processes take place. I will talk about that a little bit plus introduce the other speakers. Each writer will then speak from a location in the modern and contemporary galleries that provides a context for their presentation. People will move from speaker to speaker to take it all in, a kind of intellectual moving feast. There will be two groups, each presenting their work again to allow everyone to cycle through. I think it's going to be a great event. Here's the line up and what they will be doing. In parentheses is the artist whose work each reader will be giving their presentations by.

Group A:

• Louis Aguilar is an award-winning journalist and nonfiction writer. His writing gigs include the Washington Post and Denver Post, and since 2004, he has helped to report the epic nature of his native city for The Detroit News. While in Washington, D.C., he ran a Latino film festival and consulted to the Smithsonian Institution on Latino programming. His 2009 book Long Live the Dead: The Accidental Mummies of Guanajuato, is about a Mexican city’s complex relationship with 112 of its mummified citizens. Tonight he’s going to talk about his complex feeling for Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo. (Diego Rivera)  
• Lynn Crawford is an art critic and a fiction writer. She is also a founding board member of the Museum of Contemporary Detroit. Besides her art criticism, which has been published internationally, Crawford is the author of two novels, Blow and Simply Separate People as well as a collection of sestinas inspired by art titled Fortification Resort. Her newest novel, Simply Separate People, Two, comes out this fall from Black Square Editions—Brooklyn Rail. She reads tonight from a passage of Shankus, a novel in progress, inspired by Dashell Hammett. (Giorgio De Chirico)
• Chris Tysh is a poet and playwright who teaches creative writing and women’s studies at Wayne State University. She is the author of several collections of poems and plays. Her latest publication is the play Night Scales: A Fable for Klara K due out later this month from United Artists. It was also performed at the Hilberry Theater under the director of Aky Kadogo. Tonight she will from Molly, the Flip Side, a “transcreation” of Samuel Beckett’s novel, translating it from French to English and also from prose to poetry. (Alberto Giacometti)
• Matthew Olzmann is poet who has worked as a writer-in-residence at the InsideOut Literary Project since 2002. He also teaches composition at Oakland Community College and is the poetry editor of the online journal, The Collagist. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in numerous publications, including American Poetry Journal, Kenyon Review, New England Review, Salt Hill, Atlanta Review, and elsewhere. He is the recipient of many awards and fellowships, including the Oboh Prize from Boxcar Poetry Review. Tonight he will read a selection of poems organized around a fictional museum. (Willem De Kooning)

Group B:

• Craig Wilkins is an award-winning architect, urbanist, educator, and author, and director of the Detroit Community Design Center at the University of Michigan. He is the author of the 2007 book The Aesthetics of Equity: Notes on Race, Space, Architecture, and Music, which won the 2008 Montaigne Medal for Best New Writing and the 2009 National Indie Excellence Award in the Social Change category. He is also co-editor of Activist Architecture: A Field Guide to Community-Based Practice to be published next year by Princeton Architectural Press. His design and narrative work mines the nexus between identity, the city, and the spoken, and he will read from that work tonight. (Hughie Lee Smith)
• Rachel Harkai writes poetry and essays about memory, survival, collapse, and sometimes about the post-urban landscapes of Detroit. Her work also often deals with other art forms, including visual art, which became an inspiration after she began making regular weekend visits to the Detroit Institute of Art as an undergraduate at the University of Michigan. After graduation in 2007, she was writer-in-residence with Hub City Writers Project of Spartanburg, South Carolina, before relocating to Detroit in 2008. She has written poems about a number of pieces in the DIA's collection, a few of which she will share tonight, along with thoughts on the inspiration and process behind their creation. (Donald Sultan)
• Steve Hughes is a beer drinker with a eager ear for listening. He collects stories from people he meets at local bars. He writes them then publishes them in the format of a small magazine titled Stupor. Hughes has collaborated on the layout and design with many of Detroit's artists. The art for his newest issue titled "A Hole for Brains and Candy," was accomplished by Faina Lerman. An event celebrating the release of this issue will occur at Hamtramck's Public Pool art space on Devil's Night. Tonight Hughes will be reading stories from past, current and future issues of Stupor. (Mike Kelly)
• Vievee Francis is the author of two poetry collections, the 2006 Blue-Tail Fly and Dark, which is forthcoming from Northwestern University Press. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Callaloo, Crab Orchard Review, Best American Poetry 2010, and Angles of Ascent: An Anthology of Contemporary African American Poetry. In 2009-2010, she poet-in-residence for the Alice Lloyd Hall Scholar’s Program at University of Michigan and in 2009 received the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers Award. She is a Callaloo and Cave Canem Fellow and currently visiting artist/scholar at College for Creative Studies. She will read several selections from her impressive body of work tonight. (Kehinde Wiley)
  

10 Years of Contemporary Art @ OUAG

"Ten Years of Contemporary Art" at Oakland University Art Gallery, installation view, featuring work by from left to right: Harmut Austen, Sharon Que, Dennis Michael Jones, Peter Williams, Eric Mesko, and Kristin Beaver. (All photos courtesy OUAG.)

Ten Years of Contemporary Art," installation view, featuring from left to right, work by Denise Whitebread Fanning, Hasan Elahi, Michael E. Smith (floor), and Ed Fraga.

"Ten Years of Contemporary Art" participants, from left to right: Robert Schefman, Rob Kangas, Harmut Austen, Dennis Michael Jones, Senghor Reid, OUAG Director Dick Goody, Renata Palubinskas, Kristin Beaver, Ed Fraga, Chido Johnson, and Sharon Que. (Not all participants in attendance.) Background painting: Renata Palubinskas.

For a full decade, artist/curator Dick Goody has maintained one of Detroit's most significant venues for contemporary art, all the more remarkable for its location well off the beaten path in the wilds of North Oakland County. In relative isolation (its nearest neighbor Paint Creek Center for the Arts is four-and-a-half miles to the east) and with scant resources, Goody has carried on a dialog with contemporary art that is truly singular, even when compared to institutions in the tricounty area with far greater means at their disposal. In recognition of this achievement, Oakland University Art Gallery has mounted a celebratory exhibition "Ten Years of Contemporary Art," which runs until October 17.

Besides the consistent high quality of the work he has shown, one of the things that makes Goody's approach noteworthy is the documentation he has provided for most if not all of the exhibitions. In a series of typically handsome catalogs, he has not only helped viewers, both casual and the more informed, gain entry into the work of each artist but created an archive that extends the conversation in space and time. (Catalogs can travel where an exhibition many times can't and they continue to exist long after the work has been taken down and the gallery walls spackled and painted over.) What's more, rather than be satisfied with simply illustrating the art photographically as so many catalogs do, the ones Goody has produced have taken the time to get inside the work as well as inside the mind of its creator, providing an extended critical essay he has either written or commissioned in the first case and an interview with the artist in the second.

This documentation isn't valuable just as an educational and a research tool (though it certainly is that); it's important for the artists involved from a career perspective. For most of them, an OUAG show and its accompanying catalog has constituted a kind of "summing up" of their development to that point. It's been a moment to reflect on one's practice and more importantly consider the next move. Indeed, many of the artists in the current show have gone on to significant recognition since showing at OUAG. These include taking part in a Whitney Museum of American Art Biennial (Peter Williams), the Venice Biennale (Hasan Elahi), and several Kresge Artists Fellowships (seven are represented in this show alone: Harmut Austen, Kristin Beaver, Susan Goethel Campbell, Ed Fraga, Chido Johnson, Senghor Reid, and Michael E. Smith).

The final thing worth mentioning is the nature of Goody's eye. The gamut of contemporary art practice, from traditional painting to mixed-media installation to digital imaging, has been surveyed over the years, a testament not only to the catholic quality of Goody's taste but his ability to separate his curatorial discrimination from his own artistic aesthetic. To be sure, not a single artist in this show does work that looks like Goody's ironic postmodern text-image mashup paintings.

As for the show itself, its conceit is to juxtapose an older work with a newer one by each artist. For the most part, the artists have extended their earlier concerns, in the case of painters like Peter Williams, Ed Fraga, Kristin Beaver, and James Stephens, for example, taking their painterly chops to new heights of accomplishment. Artists working with technology have similarly increased command of their tools, notably Rob Kangas's 2009 photomontage incorporating color-intensified digital imagery and high-tech substrate, and Chido Johnson, taking a cue from Christian Marclay, turning his sculpture Push Stick (2010) into a record of its performative use, mounting on its tip a CD with a video file burned into it. 

A radical exception to this tendency is Susan Campbell's new video documenting her project Weather2250, surveying Detroit's atmospheric conditions from a webcam mounted atop the Fisher Building, that although continuing her environmental investigations adopts the latest information technology instead of the traditional drawing and printmaking mediums for which she is so justifiably well regarded. Less obvious perhaps is Robert Schefman who in his newer painting directs his trompe l'oeil hand to more seemingly prosaic allegory.

Everything in this show is worth the trek out to Rochester to see and the installation showcases it all to great effect. Another Goody convention that works well here is the solicitation of artist's statements, in this case posted along with the work and providing useful information on the artists, especially those I haven't discussed. And in the same way that the Goody treatment often provides a summation and as such a platform for the artists being shown to move on to bigger and better things, "Ten Years of Contemporary Art" is an opportunity to take stock of the curator himself. My take on it is definitely thumbs up.  It'll be interesting to see where he goes from here.

"Ten Years of Contemporary Art" continues at Oakland University Art Gallery, on the campus of Oakland University in Rochester, until October 17. Call 248 370 3005 for information.