February 6, 2014
Early photography in early Detroit: J. Jex Bardwell
Celebrating the life and work of Detroit’s oldest photographer.
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October 4, 2013
Rembrandt Peale’s Court of Death at the Detroit Institute of Arts
The story of a painting at the DIA. It’s not the best, the most famous, or the most important, but it is the most gigantic.
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July 19, 2012
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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February 17, 2012
CYCLORAMA! Gigantic Paintings in Detroit, Part 2
Part 2: From Germany, to Milwaukee, to Atlanta, to Detroit: the cyclorama of the Battle of Atlanta.
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February 16, 2012
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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November 18, 2011
Detroit history at the DIA
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April 13, 2011
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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January 28, 2010
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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December 3, 2009
UMMA’s magnificent Maximilien Sebastien Foy
The mister and I took a field trip to Ann Arbor last Sunday, desperate to get out of the apartment and into the world after three and a half long days of family visits, plans with out-of-town friends and eating/drinking too much.
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October 26, 2009
Avedon at the DIA; Free water at Leopold’s
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October 7, 2009
This week on Backstage: Dwellephant!
This is what I love about working on this podcast: meetings of great minds. Illustrator/live artist/smart guy/mystery man Dwellephant dropped by the WMSE studios to talk to Mark Metcalf about art, advertising, graffiti, working on a book with Justin Shady, setting goals for the future and why he trys anything once.
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October 6, 2009
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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September 21, 2009
How to go to a gallery opening: BTYB Real Detroit
On the cover of this week’s Real Detroit: a five-point beginner’s guide for attending gallery openings entitled “Free Booze, Expensive Art.”
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September 15, 2009
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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September 11, 2009
Secret Velazquez
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