In Mexico, and other Latin American countries, the Day of the Dead is the time of the year to celebrate the lives of close relatives, friends or community members who have passed away. Objects important to lost loved ones, such as favorite foods, drinks, mementos and pictures, are collected and incorporated into elaborate displays that include pan de muerto (bread of the dead), sugar skulls, candles, flowers, papel picado (paper cutouts) and other decorations.

The Detroit Institute of Arts, in collaboration with the Consulate of Mexico in Detroit, the Southwest Detroit Business Association and Mexicantown CDC, is looking for local artists and community members to participate in the museum’s 11th Annual Ofrendas: Celebrating el Día de Muertos exhibition at the museum.

Interested participants are encouraged to submit a proposal of an ofrenda altar or offering honoring the life and memory of lost loved ones as part of a celebration of the traditions of Día de Muertos (Day of the Dead).

Proposals will be reviewed by a selection committee composed of DIA staff and local community members and considered using the following criteria: clarity of intent (who or what is being honored), level of displayed artistry and/or creativity and alignment with the values and characteristics of the Día de Muertos tradition.

How to participate

To submit a proposal, fill out the submission form here by May 14, 2023. Additional information and a materials list are included on the linked form. A Spanish version is also available here.

Selected artists will be notified by Monday, May 29 2023.

The selected ofrendas will be displayed to the public from September 23 – November 5, 2023, in the Special Exhibitions Galleries south of Rivera Court. The artist or group of artists of each selected ofrenda will receive a $500 stipend.

Winslow Homer is one of the best-known and best-loved American artists, but he was an intensely private individual who left no diaries and few letters. Scholars have struggled to discover the man behind the paintings, watercolors, and prints.

Building on new facts he discovered and new interpretations he developed in his acclaimed recent biography of the artist, independent scholar William R. Cross will discuss some of the ways in which Homer’s seemingly transparent works both expressed and contributed to changing attitudes toward race, class conflict, gender roles, nature, and human nature. 

Please join us before the lecture at 5:30 for a Cocktail Reception and book signing with Cross. 

AAW Members can click here to get tickets for a private dinner following the event.

Sponsored by the Ida and Conrad H. Smith Fund.

Vân-Ánh Võ’s Blood Moon Orchestra (BMO) is a genre-bending musical collective that defies the bounds of Vietnamese traditional music. All master musicians, members of BMO have an innate ability to blend very different sounds together, creating surprisingly new and fresh musical dialogues.  

Emmy Award-winning composer and multi-instrumentalist Vân-Ánh Võ has collaborated with Kronos Quartet, Yo-Yo Ma and presented her music frequently at The Kennedy Center, Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center. 

This program is made possible by a grant from the Freeman Foundation

Scholars have long known the importance of the DIA to the study of Islamic Art in North America. The DIA employed one of the first dedicated curators of Islamic art in the country, Mehmet Aga-Oglu, and mounted its first exhibition of Islamic art in 1930 with loans from all the major dealers of the time. The formation of the DIA collections in Islamic art is a more complicated story, taking place through many stages.

In this lecture, Dr. Margaret S. Graves, Associate Professor of Islamic Art at Indiana University, will explore the important collections of ceramics from the Islamic world held in the Institute today.

It will also examine the skilled craftsmanship that saw some pieces of ceramic art remade and reinvented for the market as they traveled to the new world of the twentieth-century United States.

Margaret S. Graves is Associate Professor of Islamic Art in the Department of Art History at Indiana University, Bloomington. She is currently in residence at the Clark Art Institute as a 2022-23 research fellow, writing a book called Invisible Hands: Islamic Ceramics on the Colonial Art Market.

Ukraine/ 2022-Directed By Pavlo Peleshok

The Detroit Film Theatre in partnership with the Ukrainian National Women’s League of America (UNWLA) Detroit Regional Council and the Ukrainian-American Civic Committee of Metropolitan Detroit (UACC) will host a screening of the new documentary Life to the Limit, which tells the story of Ukrainian resistance against Russia's attempts to colonize and eradicate their country and society.

From the producers of Winter on Fire, an Academy Award-nominated film for Best Documentary, Life to the Limit is the first Ukrainian documentary to address the complete history of Russia's war on Ukraine from 2013 to 2022. Director Pavlo Peleshok and producer Yurko Ivanyshyn trace the formation and evolution of Ukrainian resistance to Russian aggression, beginning during the Revolution of Dignity in 2014 and leading to the full-scale war on Ukraine in 2022.

Now, both war veterans, Peleshok and Ivanyshyn joined the Ukrainian resistance at the time of Russia’s illegal and unrecognized annexation of Crimea and the Russian invasion of eastern Ukraine in 2014. They defended Ukrainian soil and freedom, while simultaneously documenting the causes and consequences of the war by assembling a mosaic from more than 640 hours of archival materials.

Director Pavlo Peleshok will be present to introduce the screening.
 

French double bass player and composer Florent Ghys performs his new double album "Ritournelles & Mosaïques" in a solo for double bass, electronics, and video.

Florent’s album has been described by French journalist Melanie Bauer (France Inter) as “a massage for the brain” and Alex Ross (The New Yorker) said that his videos “have rightfully attained viral fame.” 

Contrasts of Expression - Dramatic Minimalism to Classically Elegant Floral Design

World Cup Champion, Bart Hassam, demonstrates his mastery of the architectural botanical form and his love for the classically elegant decorative forms of floristry. 

Michael Menchaca (they/them) is an interdisciplinary Xicanx artist using print and new media to generate anti-colonial, anti-racist, and anti-capitalist visions of the world. In the talk, “The Artist is Human: A.I. Won’t Break My Soul,” Menchaca will discuss the A.I. industry, text-to-image generators like Image GPT and large language models like ChatGPT and the cultural implications. 

This talk is organized in conjunction with the exhibition Printmaking in the Twenty-First Century. Support for the talk comes from the DIA’s Friends of Prints, Drawings and Photographs. 

The talk is free and open to the public. 

Image: Michael Menchaca, Castizo no. 2, 2019, from the suite, La Raza Cósmica 20XX, 2019, screen print. Detroit Institute of Arts, Museum Purchase, Friends of PDP Photographic Fund in honor of Lindsey Buhl, 2021.249.2. 

The Friends of African and African American Art present the 30th Annual Alain Locke Awards on Saturday, February 25th at 5:30 p.m. in Kresge Reception. The award ceremony will honor artists Ming Smith and Henry Heading.   

The Alain Locke International Award will be presented this year to Detroit-born photographer Ming Smith, known for her black and white street photography depicting various aspects of humanity.  Smith was the first woman to become a member of the Kamoinge Workshop, founded in 1963, a collective of Black photographers documenting Black life in New York, which is still active today. By the late 1970s, she had become the first African American female photographer whose work was acquired by the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York City.  In 2023, Smith was selected as one of the recipients of The International Center of Photography’s Infinity Awards honoring outstanding achievements in photography. Currently, her art is being exhibited at MOMA. Valerie Mercer, curator and department head of African American Art at the DIA, will lead Smith in a conversation about her photography and career.    

The local Alain Locke Recognition Award will be presented to Detroit artist Henry Heading. A longtime member of the Detroit Fine Arts Breakfast Club, Heading’s realistic paintings feature African American celebrities and everyday people of interest to him.  

Italy/1971—directed by Bernardo Bertolucci | 110 minutes

In Mussolini’s Italy of the 1930s, Marcello (the great Jean-Louis Trintignant of My Night at Maud’s and Amour) is so desperate to fit in with those around him that he’s willing not only to become a fascist and a murderer but also to deny his own desires in order to blend into the regime’s version of “normal.”

Bertolucci’s masterpiece is a visual and aural feast – it’s almost as if all the sensuality and passion the protagonist is repressing explodes onto the screen via richly the richly colorful and fluid cinematography of Vittorio Storaro (Apocalypse Now) and the evocative, memorable musical score by the great Georges Delerue (Jules and Jim, The Last Métro).

Classically elegant while thematically subversive, The Conformist is a seminal filmgoing experience, more stunning than ever in this brand-new 4K restoration. With Dominique Sanda and Stefania Sandrelli. In Italian with English subtitles.

“A rejuvenating jolt of youthful creative energy… a time when movies were the most important art and their creative possibilities seemed endless.”   –Dave Kehr, The New York Times