Energizing Paris After Cubism

Jennifer M. Friess, Associate Curator of Photography, University of Michigan Museum of Art, will discuss how electric light energized a new and experimental era of photographic image-making in Paris after the First World War. Although painters and printmakers had been representing scenes illuminated by electric light as early as the 1870s, photographers only started to do so in earnest after the First World War. Featuring photographs, prints, and drawings from the exhibition After Cubism: Modern Art in Paris, 1918–1948.

Sponsored by the Detroit Institute of Arts Friends of Prints, Drawings and Photographs
 

Due to unforeseen circumstances, the Betsy Campbell Lecture on Saturday, October 14 has been canceled.

The Detroit Institute of Arts’ (DIA) Friends of Art & Flowers auxiliary welcomes its 2023 speaker, Claudia West, a leading voice in the emerging field of ecological planting design and co-author of Planting in a Post-Wild World.  

Our cities and suburbs desperately need more inspiring, ecologically rich planting. Yet, budgets are tight and crews and gardeners are often unfamiliar with diverse planting technologies. In her lecture entitled, "Rebuilding Abundance with Ecologically Rich and Evocative Planting," West will share the techniques that her landscape architecture firm, Phyto Studio, applies to tackle the maintenance challenge and create ecologically rich and inspiring planting.
 

Portraitist and photojournalist James Barnor will discuss his career in conversation with DIA curator Nii Quarcoopome, Curator of African Art, as well as Lizzie Carey-Thomas, organizing curator, Serpentine Gallery.  

Image: James Barnor (Ghana, b. 1929). Sister holding brother outside Studio X23, Accra, 1979 (printed 2010–20). Gelatin silver print. Galerie Clémentine de la Féronnière, Paris.

© James Barnor, courtesy Galerie Clémentine de la Féronnière, Paris.

For this year's annual Mopper Lecture Dr. Tristram Hunt, Director of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, will present “The Civic and the Global: the Cultural Mission of the Victoria & Albert Museum.” His lecture will focus on the V&A’s founding commitment to design, education and beauty. Tracing the museum’s genesis from its Victorian roots, Dr. Tristram Hunt will consider how the V&A’s civic foundations engendered a world-class collection; a growing family of nationwide museums; and a mission to inspire creative endeavor in each new generation. 

At a time of growing cultural divides, increased awareness of colonial legacies, and public demands for 
transparency and accountability in arts organizations, Dr. Hunt makes a powerful case for the continued civic 
mission of museums.

Sponsored by the Dr. Coleman Mopper Memorial Lecture Fund in collaboration with the Visiting Committee for European Sculpture and Decorative Arts and the European Paintings Council.

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.

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.

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.  

Driven from Europe first by the Nazi conquest of France and then the Blitz in London, the Dutch artist Piet Mondrian (1872–1944) settled in New York City where his “mind was blown” by a form of jazz whose popularity was sweeping the city—Boogie Woogie.

Mondrian expressed the revelations of this sonic encounter in some of the best-known and best-loved mid-century abstract paintings.

Leah Dickerman, Director of Research Programs at the Museum of Modern Art, will explore some of the contexts and meanings expressed by one of the artist’s most iconic and beloved works, Broadway Boogie Woogie, which MoMA acquired in 1943, only a few months after Mondrian completed it. 

Presented by the Associates of the American Wing with help from the Ida and Conrad H. Smith Fund.