Fall in love with Corrado Parducci, Detroit’s designer extraordinaire

Corrado Parducci designed much more than architectural ornamentation — he also painted intricate designs on the walls of his home, wove tapestries, carved wooden busts of his children, and designed hub caps and bumpers for cars. A guest post about Detroit’s most prolific designer from the maker of a new documentary.

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PANORAMA! Gigantic paintings in Detroit, Part 1

Starting around 1850, Detroiters could pop into Old City Hall or the Firemen’s Hall and, for 25 cents or so, see the latest “greatest painting ever made” — sweeping views of overland route to California, the funeral of Napoleon, Bible scenes, the life of George Washington.

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The Spirit of Detroit

Five years ago today, on the first take-off-your-sweater-nice day in spring, in a college town on the stateline between Wisconsin and Illinois, I walked to a tattoo parlor, had this done, and then went out for a beer.

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Fridays with General Friend Palmer: A most exciting fire

I have always approached weekly themed blog posts, especially those involving alliteration, with trepidation. But then I found Early Days in Detroit, the memoirs of historical Detroit old guy General Friend Palmer (1820 – 1906), and I can’t think of any better way to dig through its 1000+ pages, each of them host to at least one illuminating, endearing, hilarious or otherwise just great anecdote, than to share some of the General’s memories of 19th-century Detroit every week.

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Richard Barnes: Museums, mortality and eternal return

On Sunday we went to Richard Barnes’s lecture on Animal Logic, his installation at the Cranbrook Institute of Science (part of the Artology series, a collaboration presenting “visual and experiential examples of the ways in which art and science frequently parallel or complement each other,” which will hold over creative-types while the Cranbrook Art Museum is closed for renovations).

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The abandoned future at MOCAD

MOCAD opened a new show on Friday — two solo exhibitions by two Scandinavians that occupy the raw concrete gallery space (yes, we know it used to be an auto dealership) with an outstretching emptiness, blanched of color,  goverened by shape and movement, flickers of shadow and whiteness, mechanical noises and unpeopled silences.

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