David Hinton is an American poet, and translator who specializes in Chinese literature and poetry. The arts were considered forms of Zen Buddhist practice in ancient China, and mountain landscapes were integral to that practice.  

Hinton’s new book, Wild Mind, Wild Earth: Our Place in the Sixth Extinction explores how Zen is a path to reveal the kinship of mind and nature, one that must be re-animated to counter our modern ways of devaluing and exploiting our planet.  

Detroit Zen Center monks will offer a guided meditation as part of this program and facilitate a conversation with Hinton and audience members after his presentation. (75 min.) 

Internationally acclaimed artist Sean Scully will lecture on the legacy of painter Vincent Van Gogh, placing key paintings from the DIA’s exhibition Van Gogh in America into dialogue with his own artistic practice. As Scully will discuss, Van Gogh’s paintings were made in a time of great change not unlike our own, as artists were reeling from the onset of the twentieth century.

As Van Gogh faced the end of ruralism and the steady rise of industry, he worked to preserve the very idea of landscape. Revealing Van Gogh’s continued resonance for artists working today, Scully will ask what Van Gogh’s paintings might help us see about our own time. 

Sponsored by the Friends of Modern and Contemporary Art 

The Detroit Institute of Arts’ (DIA) auxiliary Friends of Art & Flowers welcomes Paul D. Orpello, CPH Director of Gardens and Horticulture at Hagley Museum and Library, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, for it's annual Betsy Campbell Lecture on November 5, 2022. 

To celebrate our return to the DIA, Kenneth Myers, the DIA’s Byron and Dorothy Gerson Curator of American Art, will give us an update on Covid-era acquisitions by artists such as Marsden Hartley and Arthur Dove.

Ken’s talk will start at 6:30 p.m. in the Lecture Hall. The lecture is free and open to the public. 

This event, from the Associates of the American Wing auxiliary, is sponsored by the Ida and Conrad H. Smith Fund.

To celebrate our return to the DIA, Kenneth Myers, the DIA’s Byron and Dorothy Gerson Curator of American Art, will give us an update on Covid-era acquisitions, including the major work pictured above. Ken’s talk will start at 6:30 p.m. in the Lecture Hall. The lecture is free and open to the public.

For participating AAW members, cocktails will begin at 5:30 p.m. in the Great Hall, with dinner in Rivera Court following the lecture at 7:30 p.m.

Please RSVP for the dinner by Thursday, September 15, 2022.

This event, from the Associates of the American Wing auxiliary, is sponsored by the Ida and Conrad H. Smith Fund.

The Friends of African and African American Art will present its 2022 Margaret Herz Demant Award for African Art to Professor Benedict O. Oramah, President and Chairman of the Board of Directors of African Export-Import Bank (Afreximbank). 

Please join us on Sunday, September 25th, for an award ceremony honoring Professor Oramah for his contributions to promoting and collecting African art, both in Africa and internationally. Professor Oramah oversees Afreximbank's Art Program, which acts as a patron for the preservation, collection, and showcasing of African art in the Bank's corporate offices and promotes the visibility and commercial viability of Africa's contemporary artists through planned art-related activities. To date, Afreximbank has built a pipeline of finance focused on creative and cultural industry projects—classical and contemporary art, fashion, music, and art training--to the tune of $500 million.  

Professor Oramah's talk will focus on how Afreximbank's programs are bolstering the creative industries in Africa through strategic investment. He believes that with suitable investments, the arts have the potential to contribute to the structural transformation of the continent, thereby creating jobs and increasing exports and other development outcomes. He will also explore how the current programs can benefit the promotion and exhibition of works by African artists in the Diaspora. 

This event is open to the public; however, seating is limited, and advance registration is required. 

Proof of vaccination or a negative COVID test as well as masks are required to attend events in the Lecture Hall. 

Katherine Kasdorf, Associate Curator of Arts of Asia and the Islamic World, will give a tour of contemporary works and new acquisitions in the Asian and Islamic Galleries after the FAAC Annual Meeting takes place.   
 

"Dead on arrival. Or not? The present state of crypto and the future prospects for NFTs"

Not only has the weather this summer been scorching, to a record extent; but also, the crypto and NFT markets have experienced a commensurate meltdown. The naysayers are wagging their collective fingers and gleefully retorting in response to the recent barrage of NFT hype in a chorus of “We told you so!” But, to paraphrase Mark Twain: the death of NFTs is greatly exaggerated. Why the nascent market for digital art will outlive the current decline and rebound in rude health, sooner than you think.  

Kenny Schachter has been curating contemporary art shows in museums and galleries while teaching art history and economics for more than thirty years between Switzerland and the United States. Schachter has a column on Artnet.com and contributes to various international publications, including the New York Magazine and The Times Magazine (UK).

After making digital art for decades, Schachter has spearheaded the traditional art world’s adaptation of Non Fungible Tokens in 2020-1 by lecturing at Harvard Law School, Art Institute of Chicago, Yale and the Hirschhorn Museum and writing a series of feature articles on the subject. In 2021, he curated wide-ranging NFTism exhibitions (a term he trademarked) at Nagel Draxler in Cologne, Institut in London. An interview with Arturo Galinsino, director of Florence’s Palazzo Strozzi Museum and Schachter was published in a book on the occasion of the exhibit Let’s Get Digital in 2022.

Schachter had a retrospective of his art at Joel Mesler’s Rental Gallery in New York in the summer of 2018, curated a show at Simon Lee Gallery in London (Fall 2018) and a solo show at Kantor Gallery in LA (Feb. 2019). He recently had a show with Eva Beresin at Galerie Charim in Vienna (May 2021) and participated in Art Basel 2021/22  on multiple occasions with Nagel Draxler Gallery. In addition, Schachter inaugurated the first one-person exhibit in Nagel Draxler’s Crypto Kiosk Gallery in Berlin between January - March 2022. He is the subject of a documentary under the production and direction of Chris Smith (Tiger King/Fyre Festival) and a Hulu/ABC NFT film. Schachter lives in New York.