Katie Yamasaki’s newest picture book, Shapes, Lines, and Light: My Grandfather’s American Journey, celebrates the life of her grandfather, the acclaimed Japanese American architect Minoru Yamasaki.

Please join Katie for a joyful and reflective afternoon of storytelling and art-making for friends and families of all ages with a collage-based project in our Art-Making Studio. 

Create a pencil drawing to take home while taking a closer look at the collection. No experience is necessary. All supplies provided.

For ages 6 - Adult (children ages 12 and younger should be accompanied by an adult). Capacity is limited.

Senegal/1968—directed by Ousmane Sembène | 91 minutes

This second feature by Ousmane Sembène was the first movie ever made in the Wolof language—a major step toward the realization of the trailblazing Senegalese filmmaker’s dream of creating a cinema by, about, and for Africans. After jobless Ibrahima Dieng receives a money order for 25,000 francs from a nephew who works in Paris, news of his windfall quickly spreads among his neighbors, who flock to him for loans even as he finds his attempts to cash the order stymied in a maze of bureaucracy, and new troubles rain down on his head.

One of Sembène’s most coruscatingly funny and indignant films, Mandabi—an adaptation of a novella by the director himself—is a bitterly ironic depiction of a society scarred by colonialism and plagued by corruption, greed, and poverty. In Wolof and French with English subtitles. 

“Sembène’s classic 1968 feature about colonialism resonates today.” –  Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian

The Detroit Film Theatre presents this series of films by African directors, working in Africa and Europe during the 1960s and 1970s, in conjunction with the DIA special exhibition James Barnor: Accra/London. 

Senegal/1973—directed by Djibril Diop Mambéty | 89 minutes

With a stunning mix of the surreal and the naturalistic, Djibril Diop Mambéty paints a vivid, fractured portrait of Senegal in the early 1970s. In this New Wave–influenced fantasy drama, two young lovers long to leave Dakar for the glamour and comforts of France, but their escape plan is beset by complications both concrete and mystical.

Characterized by dazzling imagery and music, the alternately manic and meditative Touki Bouki is widely considered one of the key works of Senegalese cinema and was named in the recent Sight & Sound poll as one of the 100 greatest films of all time. In Wolof, Arabic and French with English subtitles. 

“In Touki Bouki, rejection of one’s homeland is inextricably bound to a glamorization of the colonizer’s homeland.” – Derek Smith, Slant 

The Detroit Film Theatre presents this series of films by African directors, working in Africa and Europe during the 1960s and 1970s, in conjunction with the DIA special exhibition James Barnor: Accra/London. 
 

Senegal/1966—directed by Ousmane Sembène | 59 minutes

Ousmane Sembène, one of the greatest and most groundbreaking filmmakers who ever lived and the most internationally renowned African director of the twentieth century, made his feature debut in 1966 with the brilliant and stirring Black Girl (La noire de . . .). Sembène, who was also an acclaimed novelist in his native Senegal, transforms a deceptively simple plot—about a young Senegalese woman who moves to France to work for a wealthy white couple and finds that life in their small apartment becomes a figurative and literal prison—into a complex, layered critique on the lingering colonialist mindset of a supposedly postcolonial world.

Featuring a moving central performance by Mbissine Thérèse Diop, Black Girl is a harrowing human drama as well as a radical political statement—and one of the essential films of the 1960s. Winner, 1966 Prix Jean Vigo. In French with English subtitles.

The Detroit Film Theatre presents this series of films by African directors, working in Africa and Europe during the 1960s and 1970s, in conjunction with the DIA special exhibition James Barnor: Accra/London. 
 

France/1970—directed by Med Hondo | 102 minutes

A furious howl of resistance against racist oppression, the debut from Mauritanian director Med Hondo – one of the founding fathers of African cinema – is a bitterly funny, stylistically explosive attack on Western capitalism and the legacy of colonialism. Laced with deadly irony and righteous anger, Soleil Ô (Oh, Sun) follows a starry-eyed immigrant (Robert Liensol) as he leaves West Africa and journeys to Paris in search of a job and cultural enrichment—but soon discovers a hostile society in which his very presence elicits fear and resentment.

Drawing on the freewheeling style of experimental cinema of the 1960s, Hondo deploys a dizzying array of narrative and stylistic techniques—animation, docudrama, dream sequences, musical numbers, folklore, slapstick comedy, agitprop—to create a revolutionary landmark of political cinema and a shattering vision of awakening black consciousness.

The Detroit Film Theatre presents this series of films by African directors working in Africa and Europe during the 1960s and 1970s in conjunction with the DIA special exhibition James Barnor: Accra/London. 

Winner, Golden Leopard, 1970 Locarno International Film Festival. In French and Arabic with English subtitles.

Phyllis Chen presents a new program for piano, toy pianos, and projections. Opening the program is Tone Grove, a piece for manipulated music boxes. The main piece is based on an original scroll painting by Newbery- and Caldecott-award winning artist and author Grace Lin. The piece explores the four major Chinese constellations. 

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.

Introspective, multi-layered and quietly majestic, composer Jane Antonia Cornish’s Sierra is a vivid meditation on how our deep connection to nature can move us to an inner stillness and awaken the creative impulse. Sierra consists of five separate pieces composed for multiple pianos, ranging from the poignant solo excursion Last Light to the cascading, undulating ‘Ocean’ and the epic 15-minute title piece.

Pianist Vicky Chow, whose ability to flex in different interpretive directions, depending on the composer’s intention, is renowned in the modern classical community. Sierra captures a palette of subtle but insistent emotions — wonder, wistfulness, joy and awe — that can elevate and transport with astonishing power.

A monoprint is a single impression of an image made from a block that is able to be reprinted. Try your hand at this unusual form of printing using sandpaper and crayons.