Artist Bio
Composer/guitarist A. Spencer Barefield has toured and recorded extensively in the US, Canada and Europe as bandleader and soloist. He has worked with numerous jazz greats, including Lester Bowie, Roscoe Mitchell, Oliver Lake, Richard Davis, Andrew Cyrille, James Carter, Regina Carter and others. His compositions have been commissioned by Meet the Composer: Commissioning Music/USA, Michigan Council for Arts and Cultural Affairs, Arts Foundation of Michigan, Arts International and the National Endowment for the Arts. He has numerous recordings on international labels that have received rave reviews and international honors, awards and recognition. As director of Creative Arts Collective/Creative Music at the Detroit Institute of Arts, his concert series received the Governor’s Arts Award.
www.spencerbarefield.com
ArtX Project Description
Medium: Lecture Demonstration & Music Performance
Year Created: 2011
Description: A. Spencer Barefield – Super String Symphonica: Quantum, Quasar, Music and the Cosmos is a series of compositions inspired by the wonders of our universe from the infinitesimal to the infinite and our ability to explore and define them in order to understand our existence ourselves. As a composer and improvising musician, Barefield has studied and allowed himself to be influenced by the musical linguistics of blues, jazz, classical, folk, pop, rock, African, Eastern and world music. His range of compositional and performance styles span from soulful blues to abstract, angular, odd and mixed meter avant garde, and everything in between. He uses musicians with a variety of skills and backgrounds, including jazz, classical and many more. It is through science, music, art, culture and history that Barefield makes sense of his individual and collective existence and communicates with the world and universe around him. Through the purest form of communication: music, Barefield aspires to be original, honest, and individual in his compositions and improvisations.
Barefield’s performance scheduled for Thursday, April 7th, 8:30pm at First Congregational Church will feature top jazz and classical musicians including:
• Violins: Emmanuelle Boisvert (DSO concertmaster) and Jannina (Barefield) Norpoth
• Violas: John Madison and James Greer (both play with DSO and MOT)
• Cellos: Sarah Cleveland and Martin Torch-Ishii
• Bass: Dave Young
• Guitars: A. Spencer Barefield
• Percussion: Djallo Djakate Keita.
The concert will feature a 30-year retrospective of Barefield's avant garde string music.
Barefield’s performance scheduled for Friday, April 8th, 7:00pm at The Detroit Science Center Planetarium will be a multi- media visual and audio journey through the universe with photos, videos, light, sound, music, jazz and discussion exploring the relationships between music and the cosmos. • Guitars and narrator, A. Spencer Barefield; bass, Dave Young; percussion, Djallo Djakate Keita.
www.spencerbarefield.com
Artist Bio
Part collector, part craftsman, part designer, Abigail Anne Newbold utilizes a domestic vocabulary to create objects and installations that examine issues of comfort, survival and portability. Born in Boston, she received her Bachelor of Fine Arts from Massachusetts College of Arts, Boston and her Master of Fine Arts in Fiber from Cranbrook Academy of Art, Bloomfield Hills, MI. Newbold, whose work has been published in both Dwell and American Craft, exhibits internationally and continues to collaborate on local design-build projects, as well as fostering commissions for both quilts and furniture. She has taught at the College for Creative Studies, Detroit and the Haystack Mountain School of Craft, Deer Isle, ME; while working as the Exhibitions Preparator at Cranbrook Art Museum. She currently resides in Pleasant Ridge, MI.
www.abigailanne.com
ArtX Project Description
Medium:
Year Created: 2011
Description: Abigail Anne Newbold is interested in cognitive and kinesthetic understandings of home, and the tempting notion of learning to provide shelter for herself in an increasingly more complicated superstructure of society. Her installation, Home Maker series, showcases an on-going series of kits that build on one-another to culminate in the ability to build a home from the ground up.
Straddling the vestiges of traditional craft, DIY design sensibilities, and the beginnings of an anthropological survey of domesticity, Newbold’s work illustrates in physical dimensions a conflict in how we live. We are at once torn between an increased availability and reliance on the product market, and a desire for more personalized living. As function and utility are spoon-fed to us, what happens when we look critically at the building blocks of our homes and our home tools—those essential instruments that ultimately help to define the character of our spaces? What happens if we leave the fold of the big-box-store and we begin to craft our own tools and build our own homes? How would our relationship with our homes change?
Created from financial necessity and paired with our inescapable human need for shelter to survive, Newbold finds irony in this era of exponential new technologies that there are also opportunities for individuals to be self-sufficient. We could at once be entering an era of folk architecture- changing the monotony of the store-bought landscape, and in the process be reviving basic skills of hand-making integral to survival and creativity and this excites her.
www.abigailanne.com
Artist Bio
Cedric Tai, artist and educator, was born in Detroit in 1985. He grew up in Northville, MI and received his Bachelor of Fine Arts in Studio Art and teaching certification from Michigan State University, East Lansing. He has a studio practice in the Russell Industrial Center, Detroit and volunteers as an educator at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit. He works actively to promote the Detroit arts community. While his work varies from painting on Plexiglas to ceramics and installation, his pieces are always engaging and material specific, often producing numerous works in order to understand what it is exactly that fascinates him about the material itself.
www.cedrictai.com
ArtX Project Description
Medium: Painting
Year Created: 2011
Description: Cedric Tai uses preexisting structures to build upon in order to find connections or balance between chaos and order. Tai’s Brixel project is designed as a generative piece of art, a tool for public interaction, and a vehicle for potential urban beautification. Occupying the space between ideas and action, the project plants a seed of open dialogue regarding the function of public art and the definition of a ‘blank canvas’. Working with systems of pattern and design they evoke textiles and Razzle Dazzle Battleships from WWI by drawing parallels between the camouflaged ships that eluded their enemies and a city that avoids being reduced to an essentialized narrative.
Visitors are asked to join the process through creating their own tessellations at www.makebrixels.com.
Tai’s painting, Durer Bomb appropriates elements of Albrect Durer’s etching, Abduction of Proserphine on a Unicorn, mingling the visual language of classical representation with contemporary abstraction and graffiti; asking us to examine the role of current visual iconography, in the gallery and the street, through an art historical lens.
Collaborators include: Dan Marchwinski, Ian Swanson, and building owners, Ray Debates, the folks at Michigan Paper Die and Dan Tartanian. Thanks also go to the Detroit Mural Factory, Matt Eaton, Mike Han and Chazz Miller.
www.makebrixels.com
Artist Bio
Detroit artist, Charles McGee, was named the inaugural 2008 Kresge Eminent Artist by the Kresge Arts in Detroit Initiative. Over the past six decades, McGee, 84, has had a distinguished career that includes hundreds of exhibitions in the United States and abroad as well as many important contributions to Detroit’s cultural and educational community. His paintings, assemblages and sculptures are in prestigious national and international collections, and are permanently installed at local institutions including the Detroit Institute of Arts and the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History. McGee is a mentor, teacher, and community arts advocate, founding the Charles McGee School of Art, Gallery 7, and the Contemporary Art Institute of Detroit (CAID
Charles McGee’s past involvement with public art committees, since the mid-1960’s placing art in the public sector through New Detroit Inc., The Gannett Sign Company’s Billboard Show, and serving on committees for the Michigan Council for the Arts and the State of Michigan’s Commission on Art in Public Places, shifted the focus of his artwork drastically toward a public spaces orientation. Discovering solutions that transform mundane public spaces into lively, aesthetic, people-friendly environments is the focus which motivates McGee’s work. Site-specific solutions to environmental spaces offer intriguing challenges which McGee has recently satisfied with large scale commission pieces all over the state.
ArtX Project Description
Medium: Sculpture
Year Created: 2011
Description: Measuring 8’ x 22’, this newly commissioned work will be located in front of the Horace H. Rackham Memorial Building across from the Detroit Institute of Arts (DIA). The work consists of two 4’ x 20’ dark gray coated aluminum panels positioned 6” apart, serving as the support system for this 56-piece sculptural configuration. Each layer extends ½ inch above the other. The variety of materials required to build this sculpture are a relatively new aluminum alupanel which is a decorative aluminum composite that is available in several thicknesses, colors, etc. It is comprised of 0.3 mm black and white aluminum sheet metal on either side with a solid polyethylene core, coated stainless steel, flat hexhead screws, ½ “ aluminum tubing, and welded framework. All structure units are attached with hexhead screws that fit into drilled holes that are tapped and countersunk into each succeeding layer. McGee’s Spirit Renewal promises to be a highlight of the future Midtown Loop Greenway Public Art Plan.
The dedication for Charles McGee's sculpture, Spririt Renewal, will be held on Wednesday, April 6th, at 4:00pm, on the grounds of the Horace H. Rackham Educational Memorial Building located at 100 E. Farnsworth (at the corner of John R and Farnsworth Streets). A program will include remarks by the University Cultural Center Association, the Kresge Foundation, the Engineering Society of Detroit, and the Rackham Foundation of Engineering.
Artist Bio
Chido Johnson was born in Nyadiri, Zimbabwe. He received Bachelor of Fine Arts degrees in Sculpture in 1996 and in Painting, with a minor in Drawing, in 1997 from the University of Georgia, Athens. He obtained his Master of Fine Arts degree in Sculpture from the University of Notre Dame, IN in 2000. Currently, he is the Section Chair of Sculpture at the College for Creative Studies in Detroit. He has exhibited his work both nationally and internationally.
www.chidox.com
ArtX Project Description
Medium: Video/Mixed Media
Year Created: 2011
Description: Chido Johnson will be exhibiting two pieces at MOCAD, and will also have an installation at Techtown, along with a performance outside of the DIA for Art X Detroit. The two pieces at MOCAD are a video titled a dance for Diego and a small ebony carved tourist object titled me me me. The video is a documentation of a wire-car cruise on the historical Woodward Avenue performed to the formation of Detroit’s version of soul train, The Scene. The participants were requested to make their dream car and choose their favorite cruising song for the performance. The cruising music and wire-cars made by diverse communities within Detroit, its vicinity and others as far as Zimbabwe, will be exhibited to a scaled parking structure in the lobby of the old Dalgleish Cadillac Dealership, now Techtown. As a dance for Diego celebrates our community as individuals, me me me, originally a tourist object from Kenya which was then carved upon transforming it into a self portrait of the artist, questions the public’s assumptions of the individual. Having lived between two cultures, the United States and Zimbabwe, has led Chido’s work to persistently locate cultural spaces identified as other and different in an attempt to find physical or narrative performances to transform and negotiate a new sense of self, place and belonging.
www.wirecarcruise.com, www.chidox.com
Artist Bio
Poet, playwright and translator, Chris Tysh has been on the faculty of the English department at Wayne State University, Detroit since 1989, where she teaches creative writing and women’s studies. She has authored several poetry collections and completed a full screenplay based on a novel of Georges Bataille. Recently, her play, Night Scales, A Fable for Klara K, was produced at the Wayne State University Studio Theatre under the direction of Aku Kadogo. She has given numerous readings, both here and abroad. She is a recipient of a 2003 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. www.christyshpoet.com
ArtX Project Description
Medium: Poetry Reading
Year Created: 2011
Description: Chris Tysh will be reading an excerpt from her current project, entitled Molloy, the Flip Side, a book-length poem which is based on Samuel Beckett’s Molloy, the first novel in his celebration trilogy, published in Paris in 1951.
In Molloy, the Flip Side, she uses the French language in which Samuel Beckett wrote to guide her into finding a contemporary American vernacular through which the hapless narrator speaks. Tysh’s three-line stanza formation compresses Beckett’s diegetic universe, sparse as it is, and allows her to link the two texts through the projection of a new speaking subject – a funny, witty, old and disabled bum, going slowly nowhere. Tysh extends the concept of translation toward what one might call a transcreation, or transcultural dialougue. The result is a communication between continents, languages, and temporalities, which, in ghostly fashion, prolongs the life of the original like a standard translation does, but at the same time ushers in a gap and a new migatory lyric.
www.christyshpoet.com
Artist Bio
Dutch photographer Corine Vermeulen's work revolves around the phenomena of post-urban culture. She settled in Detroit in 2006 and has been documenting the city's shifting social and geographic ecologies. She holds a Master of Fine Arts in Photography from the Cranbrook Academy of Art, Bloomfield Hills, MI and completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts, Cum Laude, in graphic design from the Design Academy Eindhoven, The Netherlands. She has twice been the recipient of project grants from the Netherlands Foundation for Visual Arts, Design and Architecture (Fonds BKVB). Her work has been published and exhibited internationally, most recently in Beijing, China.
www.corinevermeulen.com
ArtX Project Description
Medium: Photo Series
Year Created: 2011
Description: Corine Vermeulen states that life in Detroit feels strangely futuristic. It is a prescient model of our failing post-industrial, post-urban culture and loss of civic life. But what does it mean to live in the aftermath of widespread cultural and economic collapse? How do people cope with it? What is the potential of all that vacant land? What would its use look like?
Her ongoing series of photographs, Your Town Tomorrow, explore new topographies and ways of urban life. Detroit is capable of offering these scenarios because of its place in our current socio-economic system, rather than despite of it. These images function as a glimpse into an alternate future – as a series of memories of the future – in which things could be different.
www.corinevermeulen.com
Artist Bio
Dr. Craig L. Wilkins is an architect, educator and director of the Detroit Community Design Center. A graduate of University of Detroit Mercy, whose practice specializes in engaging communities in collaborative and participatory design processes, Dr. Wilkins is the author of The Aesthetics of Equity: Notes on Race, Space, Architecture and Music (2007), which was awarded the 2008 Montaigne Medal for Best New Writing, the 2009 National Indie Excellence Award in the Social Change category and was a finalist in the Education/Academic category. He is also co-editor of Activist Architecture: A Field Guide to Community-Based Practice forthcoming from Princeton Architectural Press (2011).
http://sitemaker.umich.edu/clwilks/home
ArtX Project Description
Medium: Reading & Panel Discussion
Year Created: 2011
Description: Dr. Craig L. Wilkins will read excerpts from his current work concerning the 100-year effort to create the National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC), set to open in 2015 on the National Mall. The outline for the event is as follows: 30 minute reading by Wilkins, a 30 minute panel discussion regarding the reading, the proposed NMAAHC and its significance in African America, American and architectural history and culture and finally, a 30 minute Q&A with the audience. The panel will discuss how the ethereal becomes manifest; the dream, a thing; in this case, architecture. It will explore not only what it means to create an architecture that might legibly and positively represent that complex experience in a country still deeply conflicted about its racial past yet optimistic enough about its future to elect it first African-American president. The panelists are John Gallagher, architecture critic for the Detroit Free Press; Lee Bey, executive director of the Chicago Central Area Committee and former critic for the Chicago Sun-Times and; Robert Fishman, professor of architecture and planning, University of Michigan.
http://sitemaker.umich.edu/clwilks/home
Artist Bio
Ed Fraga, born in Imlay City, MI, received a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Wayne State University, Detroit, in 1980 and, in 2008, was recognized with a Distinguished Alumni award. His paintings and drawings are in the public collections of The Detroit Institute of Arts, Cranbrook Art Museum, Bloomfield Hills, MI; Flint Institute of Arts, MI; and the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. Fraga's first solo show was in 1984 at the Feigenson Gallery, Detroit. Fraga showed his work in solo exhibitions in New York City in 2002 and 2007. He is a recipient of the Awards in the Visual Arts 8, Midwest National Endowment for the Arts award and a Rockefeller Foundation residency in Bellagio, Italy.
ArtX Project Description
Medium: Unknown
Year Created: 2011
Description: The tradition of animal sacrifice as it relates to religious symbolism has long since informed Ed Fraga’s work. He is interested in the reading and interpretation of artifacts and archaeological discoveries linked to the sacred and notions of ownership.
His installation, Agnus Dei –Stage One: Extispicy, addresses the practice of using anomalies in animal entrails to predict or divine future events (common in Mesopotamia and then later in ancient Rome). In the center of a 9 x 17 foot room, a display case made of wood and glass houses the bones of a sheep. The bones are laid on sewn patches of wool. At the far end of the case, a funnel-like shape made of clay and covered in gold leaf emerges from below. On the floor next to the vessel, a white porcelain bowl rests. Extruding from the same vessel is a thin red string forming a pile of wool. Acts of ritual, alchemy, and the natural world are woven together in this work to pose questions.
Ed wishes to thank the following for their assistance with Agnus Dei: John Rowland, John Murphy, Tim Thayer, Sandra Cardew, and Sybil Williams.
Artist Bio
Frank Pahl received a bachelor of arts degree in English from Wayne State University, Detroit and a master of fine arts degree in art and design with an emphasis in sound art from University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He has received over 80 commissions to write music for theater, film and dance and has performed throughout North America, Europe and Japan. His music has appeared on over 70 releases. Since 2000, he's actively created kinetic sound installations, which are frequently designed to accompany his music. Pahl has taught sound design at College for Creative Studies, Detroit and sound-related courses at University of Michigan. His current music projects are Scavenger Quartet and Little Bang Theory.
www.frankpahl.net
ArtX Project Description
Medium: Music Performance with Kinetic Sound Installation
Year Created: 2011
Description: "The Rube Goldberg Variations" represents the world between low and hi-tech/low and high culture, that Frank Pahl lives in. There are several computers scattered about, performing rudimentary functions. They are hidden in well-travelled vintage suitcases. The low tech is represented by rotisserie motors, erector set parts and tinker toys. These are not the toys of his youth; they are the toys of his adulthood. There are three vague keys played by the air organs that can be accompanied by the various automatic percussion ensembles. The result tends to sound a bit like Rube Goldberg collaborating with a drunken Brian Eno. Pahl doubts the two would choose to collaborate but the best bedfellows are strange and never look the same in the morning.
Pahl would like to save the reader any pronouncements about “his work” because “his work” is play. It’s play in the sense that he enjoys creating it, exhibiting it and performing with it. If you have to think about it, he’s failed...or maybe you’re thinking too hard.
Apologies to J.S. Bach and thanks to Frank Pahl’s collaborators.
Artist Bio
Detroiter Gilda Snowden is a graduate of Cass Technical High School, Detroit and Wayne State University, Detroit, where she received a Bachelor of Fine Arts, Master of Art and Master of Fine Arts in Painting. She is Professor of Fine Arts at the College for Creative Studies, Detroit, and is also Gallery Director of the Detroit Repertory Theatre. Snowden's works have also been exhibited throughout the United States, as well as in Mexico, Canada and West Africa. Her works are featured in a number of publications, as well as private and corporate collections, including Post/Newsweek, the Neiman-Marcus Corporation, Ameritech, Blue Cross/Blue Shield, and The Detroit Institute of Arts. Recently, Snowden exhibited two paintings in the invitational exhibit, Michigan Masters, at the Kresge Art Museum of Michigan State University, East Lansing.
ArtX Project Description
Medium: Unknown
Year Created: 2011
Description: In the series of related nature-works, FLORA URBANA, Snowden is drawn to the lush color of selected plants and flowers as obvious renditions of beauty. She believes that, currently in Detroit there is a new view of the ‘urban prairie’, vast areas of land denuded of structures that the citizens in the area are now utilizing as gardens. Snowden uses the ancient medium of encaustic for these works because the brilliant color is a wonderful match for those vivid objects as well as the bright optimism of the people who are farming these lots. The idea of searching out and depicting richly hued flowers intrigued her. In a way, the study of these very singular flowers paralleled the study of her family tree, specifically her female ancestors as well as the current populace. The wax is the perfect medium for preserving, protecting, and augmenting the various materials that she incorporates. It is natural and fragrant and unassertive, so it doesn’t hide identities or histories but allows the chronicle to develop naturally as documentation of her immediate urban environment, heritage, history, and nature as stand-in for the self. The private metaphors that are some of Snowden’s underlying reasons for working on this series of paintings exist in tandem with a desire to create a new view of her Detroit. She is attempting to create in this series of abstract paintings a different, more abundant, and absolutely possible urban portrait.
Artist Bio
Born in Detroit in 1948, Gordon Newton began taking art classes at Port Huron Community College. In 1969, he moved to Detroit to attend the Society of Arts and Crafts (now College for Creative Studies) and Wayne State University, both located in Detroit. In 1971, Newton's work was included in the inaugural exhibition at the Willis Gallery, a cooperative space run by artists working in the Cass Corridor, Detroit. His work has also been included in exhibitions at the Guggenheim Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, The Detroit Institute of Arts and most recently the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit.
www.susannehilberrygallery.com
ArtX Project Description
Medium: Unknown
Year Created: 2011
Description: Newton’s installation will be revealed on the opening night of Art X Detroit, as well as information connected to this outdoor project.
Artist Bio
Haleem Ar-Rasheed discovered his passion to dance at an early age. Growing up in Detroit came with its own unique challenges that served as motivators and helped to manifest his creative and business ventures. His motto is “hardcore,” which represents success after struggle and overcoming hardships to achieve victory. Haleem established Hardcore Detroit® in 2001. Since then, he has instructed dance workshops internationally, judged and participated in dance tournaments throughout the nation, organized dance-related events in his hometown and produced relevant merchandising materials. Hardcore Detroit was voted “Best Dance Company” in the 2010 Real Detroit reader’s poll.
www.HardcoreDetroit.com
ArtX Project Description
Medium: DVD Premiere & Performance
Year Created: 2011
Description: Special performance by Stringz of Hardcore Detroit and collaborators. Premiering the long awaited and exclusive documentary of the Jitterbugs, the group who innovated the beginning steps of Detroit’s own renowned dance form, the Jit. A Q&A will follow after the viewing. The audience will be able to interact with Stringz, Jitterbugs and other collaborators. There will be a special performance with Stringz and collaborators in a celebration of urban dance movements: Breakin', Jittin', Poppin', Housin', Lockin' and more
Dance Workshop “The Jit”
Prepare to sweat in this workshop, as Stringz will be instructing classic and modern Jit fundamentals.
For Stringz, the stage is his canvas and his body moves like a brush within a balanced composition of technique and artistry. From the foundation of b-boying, the original hip-hop dance, he uses design elements of line, contrast, shape, pattern, juxtaposition, and repetition to create a smooth display that interprets the rhythms he encounters. Stringz discovered his creative instincts as a dancer almost sixteen years ago. As he matured, he learned discipline through the trials of everyday life and the intense ridicule of b-boying’s only teacher: "the cypher". Unlike modern jazz or ballet institutions, b-boying had no formal methods of instruction. Therefore, originality and perseverance became paramount and laid the groundwork for his personal brand: Hardcore Detroit®, honoring success after the struggle and overcoming hardships to achieve victory.
B-boying is a boundless expression, a melting pot of dance. Stringz draws inspiration from nature, using the elements of fire, water, wind and earth to focus his mood and approach in execution. For example, during a performance, the embodiment of wind maintains his fluidity of movement, while in competition, fire generates his tenacity. Having reached a certain confidence in b-boying and exploring dance in other communities, he gained more appreciation for Detroit’s own innovations. Jit, a Detroit style of footwork dating back to the early 1970s, fuses rapid shuffles, floor work, and arm motions, creating complex patterns. After immersing himself in the culture and training with Jit’s pioneers and innovators, it was inevitable that he blur his b-boy identity with this new knowledge, coining the term “break-jitter”. Dance is a process of cracking codes. Through his research, observation, experimentation and vision, he uncovers new variations. His practice includes not only physical expressions in the studio but also the cataloging of ideas in his mental notebook. Moreover, he continues to explore how simple steps can be modified in new ways, allowing the development of intricate sequences.
Stringz believes his interests in other creative fields, such as poetry and visual art, supplement his repertoire as a dancer. However, he finds dance to be a true path to the inner-self, not always possible in other disciplines. With his inner-self now revealed, he can confidently share his talents on a prominent platform.
www.HardcoreDetroit.com
Artist Bio
Hartmut Austen was born and raised in Germany. During the 1990s, he studied painting and drawing at Hochschule der Künste (University of the Arts) in Berlin. His paintings and drawings have most recently been shown at Galerie Eva Bracke in Berlin, Galerie Lisi Hämmerle in Bregenz, Paul Kotula Projects in Ferndale, MI and at the Kresge Art Museum in East Lansing, MI. He is a member of the artist collective, Telegraph. Together with Lynn Crawford, he edited Detroit: Telegraph, a literary and visual arts journal published by the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit. He currently lives with his wife and son in Rochester Hills, MI.
www.hartmutausten.com
ArtX Project Description
Medium: Installation
Year Created: 2011
Description: Hartmut Austen’s installation, Wedge, consists of two walls that form a V-shape and several oil paintings; as well as drawings that are attached to the inside and outside and the gallery wall. The structure is made of wood studs that remain visible. Unlike regular patterns used when framing partitions in architectural projects, the irregular placement of studs varies in one side from another. A platform is installed on top of the junction of both walls. The structure is somewhat reminiscent of the bow of a ship that imaginatively could also be climbed and used as a pulpit, for change of vantage point or play. Wedge is a synthesis of architectures, objects and forms found in Europe and America – for example billboards, playgrounds and German wood-frame houses - expressing linearity, fragmentation and the dynamic relationship of inside and outside. On a symbolic level, it expresses memory, play and change - things that Austen feels strongly relate to Detroit but also to his own studio practice.
Situated in a corner of the gallery at MOCAD, the structure however imparts a somewhat tragic expression, like a ship that lost its ability to move. The pictures, results of imagination and formal investigation, add another layer of expression and possibility. They are based on photographic source images culled from newspapers, Austen’s own snapshots and the Internet. Despite or because of its bulky appearance, Wedge also invites immersion and contemplation. When working on this project, Austen repeatedly thought of Caspar David Friedrich’s Wander above the Mist (1817-18) in the Hamburger Kunsthalle. This is Austen’s reference to him.
Many thanks to Graem Whyte for consultation and help with the installation of Wedge.
www.hartmutausten.com
Artist Bio
Detroit based hip-hop artist and activist Invincible began penning lyrics at the age of nine, after moving to the Midwest from the Middle East and learning English by memorizing songs. She founded EMERGENCE Media and released her debut album ShapeShifters in 2008. Her songs, shows and videos amplify social justice issues and project visions for transformation, while her work with the Live Arts Media Project, a program of the community organization Detroit Summer, goes beyond music towards actualizing the change she wishes to see. Invincible is also a fellow of the Ellen Stone Belic Institute for the Study of Women and Gender in the Arts and Media.
www.EMERGENCEmedia.org
ArtX Project Description
Medium: Music Performance
Year Created: 2011
Description: Invincible + Waajeed will premier music from their upcoming album at the Detroit Science Center's 4-D theater, along with live musicians Diana Nucera, Rick Robinson, and Gayelynn Mckinney, with special guests Monica Blaire and Finale. The performance will include a multimedia art installation by That's That, and video projections by el iqaa.
Location: Detroit Science Center - Toyota Engineering Theater
Time: 9:00-11:00pm
This live production will be preceded by an interactive performance and projection-based workshop in the Planetarium. Some of today's most groundbreaking artists and activists, including Grace Lee Boggs, Kathy Wan Povi Sanchez, Theory, and D. Blair will explore the connections between science and social justice movements.
Location: Detroit Science Center - Planetarium
Time: 7:00-8:30pm
www.EMERGENCEmedia.org
Artist Bio
Composer/musician Joel Peterson has 22 years of experience performing and teaching music. He has programmed music and art in Detroit for 16 years, including over 200 events a year at Bohemian National Home from 2005-2008. Peterson studied double-bass with Detroit Symphony Orchestra Principal Robert Gladstone and Dan Pliskow, as well as guitar with John Denome. He is a founding member of Immigrant Suns, Scavenger Quartet, Lac La Belle, Odu Afrobeat, Xenharmonic Gamelan and BoxDeserter. He has collaborated with Rhys Chatham, Eugene Chadbourne, Damo Suzuki, Faruq Z. Bey, Frank Pahl, Thollem McDonas, Tatsuya Nakatani, Steve Cohn, Amy Denio, Gino Robair, The Violent Femmes and many others. www.myspace.com/bohemiannationalhome
ArtX Project Description
Medium: Music Performance
Year Created: 2011
Description: Collective improvisation ensemble featuring noted pianist Thollem McDonas and locals Joel Peterson, Kurt Prisbe, Skeeter Shelton, and Abby Alwin. McDonas is a Bay area native who is the only person to have recorded on DeBussy’s piano. He frequently visits Detroit and collaborates with Joel Peterson and others under the BoxDeserter moniker which has one CD to its credit.
Zeena Parkins and Chamber Works by Joel Peterson
A solo performance by the world’s leading experimental harpist. Zeena Parkins is a Detroit native who attended Cass Tech, but came to prominence in the 1980’s New York “downtown” scene. She has worked with Fred Frith, Pauline Oliveros, Nels Cline, Bjork, Elliot Sharp, Thurston Moore, etc. A noted composer, Parkins is frequently commissioned for works in theater, film, and dance. The performance will begin with Chamber Works by Joel Peterson.
Eugene Chadbourne and Tatsuya Nakatani
This duo features two of the finest improvisers in America. Eugene Chadbourne is considered one of the country’s first free-improvisers, but is also the largest living repository of music from the 20th century. He has appeared on hundreds of recordings with a staggering range of collaborators: John Zorn, The Violent Femmes, Hank Williams Senior’s pedal steel players Don Helms, Charles Tyler, Derek Bailey etc. Percussionist Tatsuya Nakatani has pushed his instrument as a solo performance further than anyone in the country. He has had many collaborations since coming to the U.S. from Osaka, Japan. His solo performance was documented by the Smithsonian. Preceded by 10 minutes of Chamber Works by Joel Peterson.
Artist Bio
Detroit based artist Kristin Beaver paints larger-than-life portraits of friends in cinematic poses inspired by fashion photography (and its cyclical tendencies), album cover art and the history of painting. Dramatic lighting and punchy color illuminate subjects in photo-shoot environments, exposing different attitudes and personalities. Kristin Beaver received her Master of Fine Arts in painting from Wayne State University, Detroit, in 2004.
www.kristinbeaver.com
ArtX Project Description
Medium: Unknown
Year Created: 2011
Description: Kristin Beaver’s paintings in Hamtramck Circus are in loving memory of Jim Shaw, who passed away on December 5, 2010. They are a tribute to her friendship with him and his wife, Sandy Kramer, and are based on photographs Beaver took last August—windows into their Hamtramck summer. Jim often rode his motorcycle to chemotherapy, despite offers to take him to the hospital. He always said, Nope – I feel like I’m kicking the cancer’s ass a little more each time I ride the bike….
Beaver’s work could be considered a documentation of her life, using friends, acquaintances, and herself as subjects. In preparation for painting she takes hundreds of photographs, either from staged performances or candid situations. Beaver focuses on unique beauty—one moment someone looks stunning, and in the next vulnerable and awkward. An expression can be loaded, seeming euphoric, complacent, orgasmic, hysterical, and agonized all at once. While viewers might not know the subject personally, they can empathize or fantasize with the presented human image. Beaver has been interested in the investigation of pairs within one painting—people she considers “sidekicks”— but singular gazes and interactions between paintings are also a focus. Blurring lines between the present and the past through allusions to fashion photography and album cover art remains a source of exploration, while the history of painting coincides with her focus on sensuality, sincerity vs. parody, formalism, and color. Beaver continues to paint at a monumental scale in order to manipulate space and create an intense emotional atmosphere.
www.kristinbeaver.com
Artist Bio
At age 16, Louis Aguilar was officially declared "incorrigible" by Catholic administrators of St. Hedwig High. Mr. Aguilar has eagerly tried to live up to the title. He is an award-winning reporter, which includes staff writing gigs at the Washington Post and Denver Post. He briefly ran Cruzando Fronteras Film Festival in Washington, D.C. and consulted the Smithsonian Institution on Latino programming. Since 2004, he has helped to report the epic nature of his native city for The Detroit News. In 2009, he wrote Long Live the Dead: The Accidental Mummies of Guanajuato, a book about a Mexican city’s complex relationship with 112 of its mummified citizens.
ArtX Project Description
Medium: Multi-Media Presentations
Year Created: 2011
Description: The Troublemakers: The True, Epic Story of Diego and Frieda in Depression-era Detroit is a multi-media telling of the battle over Diego Rivera’s Detroit Industry mural - a fierce controversy that nearly resulted in the whitewashing of Rivera’s masterpiece at the Detroit Institute of Arts.
The words said by Rivera and his wife Frida Kahlo—now one of the most famous artists in the world—have been preserved in archives and newspapers articles of the time.
Presented in Rivera Court and told in the form of a three-act play, community leaders and artists recreate Rivera’s and Kahlo’s impressions of Detroit. Other voices include architect Albert Kahn, an ardent supporter of the DIA, as well as some of the artwork’s fiercest critics.
Rivera loved Detroit and called Henry Ford “America’s greatest poet.” Kahlo considered Detroit a “shabby old village” plagued by poverty and racism. But Detroit is where Kahlo produced her first great art.
The Troublemakers also features more than 100 archival images, including unpublished images of Kahlo and Rivera at the DIA. An original musical score has been composed by Jessica Hernandez.
The archives have been provided by the DIA, The Detroit News, the Collections of The Henry Ford, Wayne State University’s Walter P. Reuther Library of Labor and Urban Affairs and the estate of Lucienne Bloch.
Please note the following change for the performance time of "The Troublemakers":
8:00 – 9:00 pm – Detroit institute of Art – Rivera Court
Artist Bio
Lynn Crawford is an art critic and fiction writer. Her criticism has appeared in Art in America, Tema Celeste, Metro Times, Zing, Parkett, Modern Painters, American Ceramics and The Brooklyn Rail. Her books include Solow, Blow, Simply Separate People and Fortification Resort, a collection of sestinas responding to the work of visual artists. A new novel, Simply Separate People, Two has just been published by Brooklyn Rail/Black Square Editions as part of her Art X Detroit project. She is a founding board member of Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit.
www.lynncrawford.net
ArtX Project Description
Medium: Book Launch & Reading
Year Created: 2011
Description: Lynn Crawford published Simply Separate People (a novel Harry Mathews described as "bewitching and original") in 2002. Her next collection, Fortification Resort, was an oulipean inspired series of sestinas responding to visual art seen in the Detroit area. Now, with Simply Separate People, Two, she returns to the novel form. This book is full blown, character driven and includes her reworking/re-imagining of texts by Ernest Hemingway, Henry James and Virginia Woolf. According to the writer Peter Markus, Crawford "is a dead-on inventor of human dislocation. Her people, separated as they are from both themselves and the rest of the world, are skinlessly rendered by a writer who reminds us of who we are inside our own skins."
Artist Bio
Lynne Avadenka has received individual artist grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Michigan Council for Arts and Cultural Affairs. Awards include Factory/Artist Exchange, Bullseye Glass, Portland, Oregon,The Dorothy Saxe Prize, residencies at The Oberpfälzer Küntslerhaus, Schwandorf, Germany and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts in Amherst, Virginia. Recent solo exhibitions include Impromptu, Gallerie Eva Bracke, Berlin and The Project Room, Lemberg Gallery, Ferndale, Michigan. Avadenka's work is included in the following selected institutions: The Detroit Institute of Arts, The New York Public Library, The British Library, London; The Israel Museum, Jerusalem; The Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. and The Meermano Museum, The Hague, The Netherlands.
www.lynneavadenka.com
ArtX Project Description
Medium: Workshop
Year Created: 2011
Description: Lynne Avadenka’s art is inspired by the philosophical and physical presence of the book: as a repository of memory and loss, as a vehicle for transmitting transcendent information, as a singular object binding together a multiplicity of ideas. Her work is driven by the combined power of word and image, the notion that both word and images are formed from abstractions and that both are codes to be deciphered.
For Art X Detroit, Avadenka has created two separate, yet conceptually connected art works that expand upon the ideas mentioned above as part of her installation, Goes and Comes. The wall drawing and the accordion screen pieces are made from a combination of traditional (relief printing, letterpress printing), obsolete (typewriter) and contemporary (scanning and laser printing) print techniques. Included are collage elements from books that range from a French manual for machine made paper and a history book celebrating The Detroit News. The wall drawing expands the idea of the page, the accordion screens are book structure expanded into sculpture.
Lynne will also lead a Book Arts Workshop to 15 teens on Saturday, April 9th, on Wayne State's campus in the Art Building, Room #354. Participants will fold, sew and glue together several different books to later fill with their own writing, drawings, or paintings. For more information on this workshop, please contact 313.420.6000.
www.lynneavadenka.com
Artist Bio
Detroit’s legendary master jazz trumpeter was born in Chester, PA. He is best known for his longtime association in playing with Ray Charles. More recently, at the request of Wynton Marsalis, and The Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra, he represented Detroit as part of the Lincoln Center Motor City Jazz Masters tribute which Included Yusef Lateef, Curtis Fuller, Charles McPherson, and Ron Carter.
A true musical Renaissance man, there isn’t much trumpeter, composer, arranger, educator, recording artist and producer, Marcus Belgrave can’t boast is on his curriculum vitae. He is a professor of music at Oberlin University, in Oberlin Ohio, is the co-founder of the Jazz Studies Program at The Detroit Metro Arts Complex and the Jazz Development Workshop in Detroit.
His career as a player has intersected with an unparalleled variety of musicians across several musical generations including Ray Charles, with whom he collaborate extensively, Ella Fitzgerald, Charles Mingus, McCoy Tyner, Dizzy Gillespie, Eric Dolphy, Aretha Franklin, Wynton Marsalis and Joe Henderson. He has mentored and recorded with pianist Geri Allen, bassist Bob Hurst alto saxophonist Kenny Garrett, and percussionist/composer Lawrence Williams. This list of musicians only scratches the surface of his many musical collaborations.
The collective impact of Belgrave’s mind, music and vision is felt across the spectrum of identities for which he has become rightfully recognized both within and outside of the jazz community. His tribute to Louis Armstrong is unparalleled and is enthusiastically received by audiences all over the globe.
www.marcusbelgrave.net
ArtX Project Description
Medium: Music Performance
Year Created: 2011
Description: PERFORMANCE 1: Jazz Development Workshop Youth Ensemble & Performance
Film Clip, Community One
A youth performance with Jazz Master Marcus Belgrave – An ensemble composed of
current students being trained and mentored, continuing the program he started in
the early 70’s. At that time, his students were Geri Allen (piano), Robert Hurst (bass),
Kenny Garrett (sax), and Karriem Riggins (drums), to name a few. Today’s ensemble
consists of: Endea Owens (bass), Kavon Gordon (drums), Ian Finkelstein (piano) and
Marcus Miller (sax), and Kasan Belgrave (clarinet). There will also be a short duet with
Marcus and pianist Bill Meyer under a film on “One Hamtramck,” a project supported by
Marcus & Joan Belgrave’s Jazz Development Workshop.
PERFORMANCE 2: Marcus Belgrave performs with legendary trumpet master and
master percussionist from Ghana, Isaac Okyerema Asante
Marcus revisits his early 1970’s awakening to the effects of the African drums
in American jazz with master Ghanaian drummer Isaac Okyerema Asante in a
performance between American trumpet and African drums, bringing his sound to
deep rooted African rythyms.
PERFORMANCE 3: Marcus performs with members of his 1970’s Collaborative Ensemble
“Tribe.”
Original members include: Marcus Belgrave (trumpet), Phil Ranelin
(trombone), and Wendell Harrison (sax).
Joining the veterans will be Marcus’s protégé, Geri Allen (piano), Robert Hurst (bass),
Ralph Armstrong (bass),and Karriem Riggins (drums). Opening pieces by composer
Lawrence Williams, with dance choreographed by the Lisa McCall Dancers.
www.marcusbelgrave.net
Artist Bio
Matthew Olzmann’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Kenyon Review, New England Review, Salt Hill, Margie, Atlanta Review and elsewhere. He has been awarded fellowships from The Kenyon Review Writers Workshop and Kundiman, a work-study scholarship from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and the Oboh Prize from Boxcar Poetry Review. Currently, he is a writer-in-residence for InsideOut Literary Arts Project and the poetry editor of The Collagist. www.nereview.com/30-4/Olzmann-Sir%20Isaac%20Newton.htm
ArtX Project Description
Medium: Poetry Reading
Year Created: 2011
Description: Bigfoot gets shot, a man writes a series of letters to a shipwreck, a dead body rides the subway, & NASA video transmission is picked up by a baby monitor.
Olzmann is interested in the figurative potential of the “absurd”, and how it can reveal new relationships between us and the world around us. He will be participating in two readings, including one with Vievee Francis and Rachel Harkai, and one with Chris Tysh. Olzmann will be reading poems from two different manuscripts-in-progress.
Artist Bio
Smith was born in Detroit in 1977. He received his BFA from The College for Creative Studies and MFA from Yale University School of Art. Smith's work includes painting, sculpture, video, performance and mixed media installation. He has shown at Mary Boone Gallery and Clifton Benevento Gallery (New York), Marc Jancou Contemporary (Paris), KOW (Berlin) and just held his first solo museum exhibition at Monchehaus Museum in Goslar Germany in January 2011. He is currently adjunct faculty at both the College for Creative Studies and University of Detroit Mercy, and lives in Ferndale, MI, with his wife and son.
www.kow-berlin.info/exhibitions/solo_exhibition_1
ArtX Project Description
Medium: Unknown
Year Created: 2011
Description: Smith’s project for Art X will be unveiled on Opening Night, along with any information pertaining to the work.
Artist Bio
From Mozart to mainstream, eclectic is the way to describe Monica Blaire. Classical, rock, soul, gospel, funk, hip hop, techno and pop playfully coexist. For Blaire, the audience is the performance, and her voice is the vehicle. As an artist, Monica has the ability to create a transformative musical environment one show at a time. She seizes the chance to be a truth seeker and create music that is honest. Monica Blaire is more than an artist. She is an experience.
www.monicablaire.com
ArtX Project Description
Medium: Music Performance
Year Created: 2011
Description: Monica Blaire believes that we are all connected in such a basic human way. Her
performance, Alive: Detroit — Exploring Our Connection from the Inside Out, will
explore those connections in an unconventional concert format with voice as the main
vehicle. The goal is to create a show that concert goers are familiar with and gradually
soften the barrier between audience and performer. Alive will be the debut of several
performance pieces including (all tentatively titled): "everyone is talking, no one is
listening" a work about dialogue and how misused it often is, an analog "musical suit,”
"Blur the Line" and several other interactive musical explorations. We will explore our
human connections through song and grow together as one.
www.Facebook.com/AliveDetroit
Artist Bio
Rachel Harkai received a bachelor of art degree in creative writing and comparative literature from University of Michigan, Ann Arbor in 2007, where she was the winner of four Hopwood awards for both poetry and nonfiction. After graduating, she served as the writer-in-residence with Hub City Writers Project of Spartanburg, South Carolina and moved to Detroit in 2008. Harkai is currently a writer-in-residence with InsideOut Literary Arts Project. Her work is deeply influenced by non-literary art forms, and she is currently working on a body of poems loosely based on the themes of memory, survival, collapse and the post-urban landscapes of Detroit. www.rachelharkai.com
ArtX Project Description
Medium: Poetry Reading
Year Created: 2011
Description: Rachel Harkai’s literary work is rooted in the concept of survival. It examines the result of managing to have lived through something and the realization of a continuing existence that remains after similar things have been lost or forgotten.
Her work is influenced by a broad range of interests and imagination: desire, landscape, botany, ethology, entomology, archaeology, seasons and nature. Non-literary art forms are also deeply influential to Harkai’s work, much of which is ekphrastic, or about other forms of art. More than simple homage to the original object, Harkai’s attempts at ekphrasis examine what kinds of art are able to ultimately remain after the passing of time.
Just as prevalent as the visual arts - though perhaps more subtly apparent in Harkai’s work - is music. Her poetry seeks to find an ear for the rhythms of language, leaning into a space where sound creates texture and even meaning. This focus on the sound of language strives toward a cumulative effect that is not unlike a song itself. It searches for a space where melody itself can have significance that stands apart from the meaning of words.
Through a range of interests and influences that is diverse and idiosyncratic, these inspirations synthesize where invisible and internal truths can find expression externally. Their significance surfaces in the ways that limitations can both complicate and cultivate survival, and how these complications may manifest themselves in our human attachments to others, to spaces, to objects or even times, and to the places that we decide to call 'home.
www.rachelharkai.com
Artist Bio
Bassist and Detroiter Rick Robinson is a 21 year member of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra (DSO). In 1995, he began arranging a hundred symphonic, classical and jazz masterworks for two unique outreach groups of DSO musicians called CutTime. Robinson's composing abilities flourished, and in 2006, his original work Essay After Sibelius was premiered by the DSO. Robinson has since composed a dozen works that blend classical with urban dance and folk idioms including Latin and gospel. He intends to use the fellowship to produce a debut recording and upgrade his promotional materials, while he pursues performance opportunities that make classical music fun for new audiences. www.cuttime.com
ArtX Project Description
Medium: Music Performance
Year Created: 2011
Description: This concert shows classical music as a vibrant mode of expression even without a drummer. It features several works by Rick Robinson that are virtuosic, powerful, playful and funky as played by 6 string players from the (striking) Detroit Symphony Orchestra. With titles such as Pork ‘N Beans and Gitcha Groove On, Robinson builds bridges for the curious to wander deeply into classical music’s vast neighborhood. His big hit City of Trees is a poignant essay for his depressed hometown of Highland Park, MI and will by danced by Haleem “Stringz” Ar-Rasheed. His Elegy captures the devastation and loving memories of a colleague who lost his wife to cancer. His Gigue Rondo is a high energy festival of Bach-meets-rock for the solo oboe which will be played by DSO Principal Oboist Donald Baker. Valeria Montes will dance flamenco to transcriptions of Spanish music. A selection from Robinson’s Mighty Love collection shows his full understanding and appreciation of the traditional rules of classical music with new ways to bend those rules.
Rick Robinson has played bass in the Detroit Symphony Orchestra (DSO) for 21 years. His work outside of the DSO is driven by the fact that most people who love music in this country avoid classical music for many reasons. As a black musician, he can draw people to their concerts by playing symphonic music and giving just as many reasons to open up to it. His transcriptions for chamber groups capture the energy, textures and charm of a large orchestra. His compositions offer the power, intimacy and excitement of the great romantic and post-romantic traditions refreshed by urban pop culture in very surprising ways, building bridges across the cultural divide. Robinson’s informal passion for classical gives curious music lovers pause to listen with new ears.
With the DSO famously on strike, in December Robinson began the Detroit chapter of Classical Revolution, a collective social enterprise of local volunteer musicians to hold free, informal, weekly chamber music readings in bars, coffeehouses and restaurants to make classical music part of the nightlife of Detroit. The response couldn’t be more apparent that people who otherwise avoid “clam” (classical music) appreciate its special qualities. Clam engages our imagination with adventurous stories without words when we identify with the melody and its episodes. It grabs us by the lapels, builds to a crisis and transforms us with its inevitable return and surprising changes. We can show that clam is for the masses… that clam is not just for Christmas anymore.
www.cuttime.com
Artist Bio
Rod Klingelhofer is a visual artist living and working in Dearborn, MI. His sculptures use cast-off materials, industrial fabrics and sewn construction to re-interpret urban spaces and cartographies and to comment on systems of ecology and trade. Originally from Macon, GA, he has lived in metropolitan Detroit since 1999, working in the automotive industry as concept and prototype fabricator. In 2005, he graduated from The University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and received his Master of Fine Arts in Fiber at Cranbrook Academy of Art, Bloomfield Hills, MI in 2008. He has shown work throughout Michigan and in Ontario, Canada; Ohio and New York.
www.rodklingelhofer.com
ArtX Project Description
Medium: Installation
Year Created: 2011
Description: Rod Klingelhofer asks, “What do you want?”
In a consumer culture, he believes it is tempting for us to equate getting stuff with being happier. Stuffed: A Theory of Human Motivation questions that equation. Certainly, there is an amount of stuff required for well-being; but at some point the accumulation of more can become an end in itself.
Stuffed is a mechanized sculpture made of vinyl and steel that depicts the modern dilemma of life’s pursuits once basic needs are met. Operating like a grain elevator, ‘stuff’ accumulates at an upper level to the point of overflow. Conveyor belts collect and move the excess through the system, representing the cyclical nature of consumerism. Can the life we want be produced? Do our homes hold us? Does the car take us where we want to go? Do the phones connect us? What do you really want?
www.rodklingelhofer.com
Artist Bio
Born in Detroit in 1964, Russ Orlando received his Bachelor of Fine Arts from Wayne State University, Detroit and his Master of Fine Arts from Cranbrook Academy of Art, Bloomfield Hills, MI. His work is informed by the lure of the sell, shaped from his many years as an advertising agency art director. His sculptures and performances-which he calls experiences-often employ his body as a flash point for social criticism and a viewer's self-examination. Detroit's character and conflicts play a recurring role.
www.russorlando.com
ArtX Project Description
Medium: Installation
Year Created: 2011
Description: Being born and raised in Detroit, most of Russ Orlando’s work deals with his reconciliation with the City. The insertion of himself becomes a conduit—for curiosity, for empathy, for social criticism and introspection. As a maker of moments for contemplation, his work is an attempt to reawaken humanity to itself.
This piece, Dear Detroit, is Orlando’s visual letter of consolation to the City of Detroit. It is represented in stages: birth, life, death and rebirth. His body will be present in the opening of the piece and the impression he leaves in the clay will be a reminder that he was once there. In the end, Orlando considers this piece hopeful.
www.russorlando.com
Artist Bio
Senghor Reid develops figurative paintings and films that explore the connections between culture, art, the social sciences and the conservation of our natural environment. He earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, a Master in Art Education from Wayne State University, Detroit and attended the internationally recognized Marathon program at the New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting and Sculpture. A recipient of the prestigious ArtServe Michigan Governor's Award for an Emerging Artist in 2001, Reid's work has been shown nationally and internationally in galleries and museums and is in both private and public art collections.
www.senghorreid.com
ArtX Project Description
Medium: Installation
Year Created: 2011
Description: Senghor Reid believes that, in Detroit, our lives have been ravaged and altered by the relentless imprint of human activity in a post-industrial age. He feels this experience has had a tremendous effect on our ability to dream, establish goals and execute a strategy that will bring those dreams to fruition. The Burden of Belief is a collection of paintings that document the chemical processes in the human brain and the experiences people have as they endeavor to dream and actualize or sabotage both their personal and collective goals. Reid is searching for the capacity to register the landscape of the human brain and our conscious and unconscious decisions to ignore, scream, run, escape, settle, destroy and rebuild. The Burden of Belief creates a map of the belief and disbelief of our own vision and dreams.
This exploration of belief will continue on film in the form of W15. This photographic essay follows the travels of a young woman as she examines a fifteen mile stretch along Woodward Avenue, a major core street that runs directly through the City of Detroit. As we look through the eyes of a walking pedestrian, the film documents the human perceptions of the histories, people, architecture, businesses, services and opportunities available in the city. The narrator attempts to reconcile the successes and failures of a City scarred by disbelief, unable to collectively determine its identity and direction in the world.
www.senghorreid.com
Artist Bio
Shiva Ahmadi received her Bachelor of Fine Arts in painting from Azad University in Tehran, Iran, in 1998. Soon after she moved to the United States, Ahmadi earned Master of Fine Arts degrees from Wayne State University, Detroit, in 2003 and from Cranbrook Academy of Art, Bloomfield Hills, MI, in 2005. Since then, she has participated in many solo and group shows all over the United States and the world, including London and Dubai. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, Contemporary 21, L Magazine New York and The Metro Times. Ahmadi's work is also being included in The Chelsea Art Museum's upcoming exhibition, Iran Inside Out.
www.ltmhgallery.com
ArtX Project Description
Medium: Enamel paint and Swarovski Crystal on steel oil drums
Year Created: 2011
Description: Ahmadi is fascinated with oil politics and the major role it plays in the world’s economic and political balance. She thinks that it is clear that competition for petroleum motivates a huge number of international conflicts as well as an equal number of relationships between nations that otherwise would not find cultural commonality. Painting on oil barrels helps Ahmadi to work out and to identify the political and economic complexity and instability that exist in the Middle East today. Look carefully at the images painted on the barrels and you will find not only beautiful patterns and designs deriving from Middle Eastern arts emphasized with reflective crystal beads, but also symbols of violence and conflict such as shields, faceless figures, arrows and fighting animals. Much of this iconography is influenced by Persian and Indian miniature painting. The shiny beads give an impression of the aesthetics of a kind of superficial life-style that derives from oil-wealth, as well as ideas of glory and dominance, while the bleeding bullet wounds in the body of the drums points to pretty obvious connections between the practice of violence and the desire for oil.
Artist Bio
Sioux Trujillo received her Bachelors of Fine Art from College of Creative Studies. Additionally she has worked in the Detroit Art Community for over 11 years as an artist and administrator, and currently as the Associate Director of community+public arts:DETROIT at the College for Creative Studies. Trujillo has received awards and grants for her mixed media works from: Burren College of Art, College for Creative Studies (for study in Europe), and a Michigan Educational Grant. Her exhibition list includes: “Journeys” Muria Art Gallery, Kinvara Ireland, “The Strangers Perception” Burren Art Gallery, Ireland, “Fetes des Cabannes” Point Aven France, “Mini Print Exhibition” Tallergaleria Fort, Barcelona Spain, “CCS Selections: A Fine Art Invitational, Susanne Hillberry Gallery, “Scott Hocking Collaboration,” Ferndale, MI, Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit “Visual Medicine,” Detroit Michigan, and the Pioneer Art Building “18th Annual Open House,” Detroit Michigan.
www.siouxtrujillo.com
ArtX Project Description
Medium: Felt, thread
Year Created: 2011
Description: In my current body of work I’m working with industrial felt and thread because for me fabric holds a collective memory and I see it as a metaphor for the human condition in a post industrial city like Detroit. During the past 3 years I have worked with the concepts of hybridity of the artist in the 21st century and explored the labor of object making to develop my personal visual language. I focused on the deconstruction of memory and the meaning of loss, mourning and labor. Subtlety and Nuance are very important to my work because of the way I think the brain “sees” what is not there. My pieces are hand sewn allowing me to embed spiritual value in every piece. This allows the viewer to experience the seductive, low tech, haptic nature of my sculpture at a pre-industrial pace. This idea of labor is explored on multiple levels in my work: The labor of the artist creating the piece through repetition and obsessive construction, the labor that goes into the manufacturing of the raw materials, the materiality of the felt and the way it carries the human imprint and the sociological role of labor in a contemporary context
I believe that viewing works of art should call for attention and patience, as they push the bodily act of consumption into the mental act of contemplation. Visual art does not unfold in history like a film or a book: It exists all at once. Having no rate of consumption, it throws the viewer back to her own rhythms (or lack thereof), while the act of viewing gives no outward sign of comparison.
Artist Bio
Longtime Hamtramck, MI resident, Steve Hughes is the writer and publisher of the zine Stupor. Although he might spend too much time drinking beer in local bars, these are his favorite spots to listen to other people talk and to collect their stories, which he digests, then writes and finally assembles into a Stupor. He collaborates with local and national artists who accomplish unique designs and layouts for every issue. Stupor is sold at many stores that offer small-press magazines such as Printed Matter in New York City and Leopold’s Books in Detroit. Hughes is also co-owner of the Public Pool art space in Hamtramck. He runs his own building and renovation company as well. www.gasfanzine.dk/documents/GAS04.pdf
ArtX Project Description
Medium: Book Launch & Reading
Year Created: 2011
Description: For the last 16 years, Steve Hughes has been listening to people he meets in Detroit bars, diners, laundry mats and bus stops talk about their lives. He writes and then publishes the stories they inspire in his zine, Stupor. Their stories – of infidelity, drunkenness, disappointment, and, sometimes, dumb luck – are told like they’re being spoken from the barstool next to you, as raw as they are real. Stupor: a Treasury of True Stories is a collection of 14 issues designed by some of Detroit’s most talented artists in a unique collaboration that depicts a place and its people like no other publication of its era.
Artist Bio
Susan Goethel Campbell earned a Master of Fine Arts in printmaking from Cranbrook Academy of Art, Bloomfield Hills, MI. Her prints, drawings and artist books have been included in numerous solo and group exhibitions throughout the United States, including The Drawing Center, New York and The International Print Center, New York. In 2008, she was awarded a printmaking residency at the Flemish Center for Graphic Arts in Kasterlee, Belgium. Her work is in major public and private collections, including the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C.; the New York Public Library, The Detroit Institute of Arts, Toledo Museum of Art, OH and The University of Michigan Special Collections Library, Ann Arbor.
www.susangoethelcampbell.com
blog: www.weather2250.com
ArtX Project Description
Medium: Video Installation
Year Created: 2011
Description: Susan Goethel Campbell brings a video installation and a guide. Her video installation, Detroit Weather: 365 days, is a project that documents one year of weather in the City of Detroit. The West wall shows a half-year of weather starting from the winter solstice, December 21st, 2009 and ending at the summer solstice, June 21st, 2010. The East wall begins with the summer solstice and ends with the Winter solstice Dec. 21st, 2010.
The images were captured using a web cam placed on the 22nd floor of the Fisher Building, located in Detroit’s Historic New Center. One image was archived each minute, 24 hours a day for an entire year. Running at 30 frames per second, the video shows three different views of the City: the South has views of downtown and mid-town, the Southwest shows views of industry, Zug Island and the Ford Rouge complex, and the East shows the Detroit incinerator and Lake St. Clair.
Cloudspotting Detroit is a guide that focuses on the unique atmosphere of Detroit. The accordion style brochure highlights intriguing man-made clouds as well as those that are occurring naturally. The guide includes a key to identify cloud types and a map showing a bike route to interesting cloud spots in the City.
Susan will be participating in a panel discussion, scheduled for Thursday, April 7th, at the Guyton Studio located at 42 Watson, Detroit, MI 48201, entitled, Taking It to the Streets. This is an open discussion on environmental art, the impact such art has on the community and the environment and the motivations of the artists who create it.
She will also participate in an additional public discussion on Saturday, April 9th, at the Detroit Science Center - Toyota Engineering Theater. Joined by meteorologist, Dave Kook from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Susan Goethel Campbell will discuss her art project, Cloudspotting Detroit, which focuses on the city's unique atmosphere. Seasonal videotaped segments will be screened and copies of the Cloudspotting Detroit guide will be distributed.
www.susangoethelcampbell.com
blog: www.weather2250.com
Artist Bio
At fifteen, Timmy Lampinen needed a punk name. His brother Paul suggested “Timmy Vulgar,” and that’s where it all began. Lampinen’s music compositions are a representation of his life, imagination and creative being. He produces music to entertain a thought or idea that is best expressed sonically, giving listeners a heavy dose of insects, outer space, primitive cultures and prehistoric animals that is all encapsulated in the loud, raunchy, nuclear blast of his guitar. It’s a popular notion that the word vulgar means something offensive, lacking in taste. That’s easy. The real definition Lampinen strives for is “of the people.” www.myspace.com/timmyvlamp
ArtX Project Description
Medium: Music Performance
Year Created: 2011
Description: HUMAN EYE & Timmy’s Organism will be performing at the Magic Stick. HUMAN EYE has been a working band since 2003. They play high energy, raw, and psychedelic cosmic punk. Timmy’s Organism is Lampinen’s solo project, three piece band. This can be considered experimental and "straight-up slimey, ugly, loved musick." They are out for "the salvation of Rock-n-Roll."
www.humaneyedetroit@myspace.com
Please note the following change in the schedule for Timmy's performance on Saturday, April 9:
12:30 – 1:15 am – Majestic Theater Center – Magic Stick
Music Performance, Timmy Lampinen’s band, Timmy’s Organism. Human Eye will not be performing. This performance will be preceded and followed by a DJ.
Artist Bio
Primarily a painter and an installation artist, Tyree Guyton has also been described as an urban environmental artist. Through his art, Guyton has drawn attention to the plight of Detroit's forgotten neighborhoods and spurred discussion and action. He continues to live and work in the city. Guyton studied at the College for Creative Studies in Detroit. His work is featured in The Detroit Institute of Arts, The Studio Museum in Harlem and many others institutions around the world. His work has earned him over 20 awards, locally and nationally. He has been featured extensively in major publications and media, including the Oprah Winfrey Show, and was the subject of a 2007 Michigan Notable Book published by Wayne State University Press, Detroit: Connecting the Dots, Tyree Guyton's Heidelberg Project. In May of 2009, Guyton was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts by the College for Creative Studies.
www.tyreeguyton.com
www.heidelberg.org
ArtX Project Description
Medium: Installation Unveiling
Year Created: 2011
Description: Tyree Guyton questions, “What is art today, right now at this moment in time?” This installation is a social commentary that addresses the issue of homelessness here in the city of Detroit and throughout the world.
According to Guyton:
People in the streets and the changing world! Its challenges! There are people living in the streets, sleeping in the street, and people being forced into the streets. All kinds of people are in the streets. As I walk the streets, I find people in their minds and out of their minds. Then when you think you’ve seen it all, keep looking. You see people sleeping in heat vents to stay warm—even dogs, packs of dogs, running through the street. I wonder what they’re looking for. Some of the streets are dirty, dark and mean right down to the bone. There are blocks with no houses on them and the street becomes very picturesque. The streets are wide open around the clock, night people and day people—they live there too.
Our system of government here in the USA is known for helping to put people out into the streets in a very under-handed way. The closing of factories and the debacle with wall street etc., etc, etc, Oh, and let’s not forget about the war… that’s not even needed.
The streets have no respect of persons and all colors, shapes, size are welcome to the streets. Street Folk are day by day and moment by moment people. You sleep where you can and eat what is at hand. I’ve witnessed people eating out of the trash cans with no shame in mind. What the hell is shame when the streets are your refuge?
The street has no respect of person so there are no guarantees. You may not be on the street today, but you might be tomorrow. The messiah took his ministry to the streets in hopes of winning people over to a truth. It makes me ask this question, what is truth and what are we really looking for? My work is a medicine for the human mind and for the soul.
The shoes are a reflection of people, all going in different directions and yet they are all in the streets. The streets have no closing hours they are open 7 days a week, 24 hours a day, all year long. You have night people living in the streets and you have day people living in the streets but we’re all living in the streets chasing whatever your life calls for. In some cases you don’t know what you’re your life is calling for. In the end, we are all Street Folk.
www.tyreeguyton.com
Artist Bio
Valeria Montes is an acclaimed performer, choreographer and teacher in the art form of flamenco. Montes has emerged as the most talked about flamenco artist in Michigan, with her performances called "mesmerizing" by the Detroit Free Press and "beauty in motion" by Metro Times. Known as “La Chispa” (The Spark), she learned her art in her native Mexico and the United States, and she perfected it with the masters of Flamenco Puro (Pure Flamenco) in Spain. Montes is especially known for her passionate and graceful interpretation of flamenco cante (song) and for the fireworks of her complex rhythmic zapateado (footwork). www.lachispaandcompany.com
ArtX Project Description
Medium: Dance Performance
Year Created: 2011
Description: Valeria Montes has emerged as the most talked about Flamenco artist in Michigan, with her performances called “mesmerizing” by The Detroit Free Press and “beauty in motion” by Metro Times. Known as “La Chispa” (The Spark), she learned her art in her native Mexico and The United States, and perfected it with the masters of Flamenco Puro (Pure Flamenco) in Spain. Montes is known for her passionate and graceful interpretation of Flamenco cante (song) and her complex rhythmic zapateado (footwork). For her Art X Detroit performances, Ms. Montes is joined by some of the nation’s most gifted Flamenco Artists: acclaimed singers Alfonso Cid, Chayito Champion and Vincente Griego; renowned guitarist Jose de la Vega; and nationally-recognized dancer Jesus Munoz. Montes states her inspiration for Raices/Roots came from her desire to introduce Detroit audiences to the roots of Flamenco, as it is performed in its birthplace of Andalucia, in southern Spain. As her project progressed she found herself exploring her own roots. She claims it became an exciting and sometimes scary journey of self discovery. It has made her look deep into herself to understand where she came from and where she wants to go. Montes hopes that Raices/Roots will not only take the audience on a journey to the roots of Flamenco, but will also make them seek to find an emotional connection to the ways in which we all develop as human beings. Montes believes that Flamenco, like life itself, is deeply connected. She hopes that it will become a very real place in your heart…your roots.
Please note the following change for the performance time of Raices/Roots:
9:30 – 11:00 pm – Detroit Institute of Art – Rivera Court
(Valeria Montes' performance time on Sunday, April 10, at MOCAD, remains the same: 3:30-5:00pm.)
Artist Bio
Vievee Francis, author of Blue-Tail Fly (Wayne State University Press, 2006), has had work published in several notable journals and anthologies including Callaloo, Crab Orchard Review and Approaching Literature (Bedford/St. Martin’s Press, 2008), among others. In 2009, she won a Rona Jaffe Award and was the 2009-10 Alice Lloyd Hall Scholars Program poet-in-residence at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. A Callaloo and Cave Canem fellow, she currently works with Springfed Arts and tutors. Work is forthcoming in Best American Poetry 2010 and Angles of Ascent: A Norton Anthology of Contemporary African American Poetry.
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/callaloo/v032/32.1.francis.html
ArtX Project Description
Medium: Poetry Reading
Year Created: 2011
Description: Francis believes there are some key characteristics that can be broadly assigned to current streams in poetry: the poet riles of wit and witness are no longer relegated to opposing critical poles, an inherent relationship has developed between poetry and the arts that is a result of the vital investigations and experiments of earlier periods, there is an organic interrogation of a range of cultural assumptions through keen attention to craft, and an eclectic plentitude in subject and approach.
Artist Bio
Vince Carducci has written about the arts and culture for more than 25 years, with a special interest in Detroit and its environs. His articles have appeared in many periodicals, including Art & Australia, Artforum, Art in America, Eye, Metro Times, PopMatters and Sculpture, as well as scholarly publications, such as Canadian Journal of Sociology, Journal of Consumer Culture, Logos and Radical Society. He is adjunct faculty in liberal arts at College for Creative Studies, Detroit, and lecturer in sociology at Oakland University, Rochester, MI. He has also taught at Wayne State University, Detroit, and in 2007-08, he coordinated the Critical Studies/Humanities Program at Cranbrook Academy of Art, Bloomfield Hills, MI. www.motownreviewofart.blogspot.com
ArtX Project Description
Medium: Panel Discussion
Year Created: 2011
Description: The “Do-It-Yourself” aesthetic of the Detroit scene has received international attention as of late in online, print, and broadcast media coming from as far away as Australia. The New York Times, Time magazine, Der Speigel, The Toronto Star, and the San Francisco-based design magazine Juxtapoz have all published feature articles on contemporary Detroit art and artists in recent months. The BBC and others have included the perspectives of local artists in their Detroit coverage.
Carducci asks, what makes current Detroit art unique? Where did it come from? Where is it going? This panel discussion will explore these topics and more from the point of view of the people who live it every day, local artists and other hometown observers of the Detroit scene. Artists and critics will discuss the broad range of art being produced in the City and reflect on the local conditions and history that have influenced it. The audience will be invited to take part in the conversation. Panel moderator and Kresge Fellow Vince Carducci is editor and publisher of the blog Motown Review of Art. He has covered the Detroit art scene for local and national publications for more than 25 years.
Panel Discussion: The Art of the Commons: A Discussion About Contemporary Art in Detroit
Panelists: Glenn Mannisto, Metro Times; and artists: Scott Hocking, Kate Daughdrill, and Amy Kaherl. Location: College for Creative Studies - Anderson Auditorium. Time: 6:00-7:30pm.
www.motownreviewofart.blogspot.com
