• Art

    Detroit history at the DIA

    by  • November 18, 2011 • Art, Culture, History • 1 Comment

    I miss history field trips. After spending most of the summer cooped up to write a book (and most of the fall re-assembling my life), I have been eager to start making excursions again — to cemeteries, parks, historic markers, battlefields, the woods. But it seems my time has started to free up just as...

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    The Spirit of Detroit

    by  • April 13, 2011 • Art, Best of THE NIGHT TRAIN, Meditations • 12 Comments

    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. Because it was sunny and warm. Because spring fever does funny things to people. What compelled...

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    UMMA’s magnificent Maximilien Sebastien Foy

    by  • December 3, 2009 • Art, Culture, History • 0 Comments

    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. Our destination: the beautifully renovated University of Michigan Museum of Art. We...

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    Avedon at the DIA; Free water at Leopold’s

    by  • October 26, 2009 • Art, Culture, metro Detroit • 0 Comments

    Suzy Parker with Robin Tattersall and Gardner McKay, evening dress by Lanvin-Castillo, Café des Beaux-Arts, Paris, August 1956. © 2009 Richard Avedon Foundation. (*Edit: how could I have neglected to mention? Richard Avedon: Fashion Photographs, 1944-2000 runs through January 17, 2010 at the Detroit Institute of Arts. Golly.) Richard Avedon was 21 when he...

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    This week on Backstage: Dwellephant!

    by  • October 7, 2009 • Art, Podcasts • 0 Comments

    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. Mark reveals himself...

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    Richard Barnes: Museums, mortality and eternal return

    by  • October 6, 2009 • Art, Culture • 0 Comments

    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...

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    Weekend watch-out: Art Detroit Now picks

    by  • October 2, 2009 • Art, Culture • 0 Comments

    I am so excited for this opening at the Cranbrook Art Museum: a mid-career survey of photographer and installation artist Richard Barnes called Animal Logic. I’m not familiar with Barnes’s work, but from the looks of it his work combines some of my very favorite things: animals, nature, museums, science and deep thinking about...

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    How to go to a gallery opening: BTYB Real Detroit

    by  • September 21, 2009 • Art, Culture, Detroit media • 0 Comments

    On the cover of this week’s Real Detroit: a five-point beginner’s guide for attending gallery openings entitled “Free Booze, Expensive Art.” There was a folk saying, back in Milwaukee, during the brief and wondrous life of the Armoury Gallery, about attending art openings. It went something like, “it’s not an opening until Amy Elliott...

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    The abandoned future at MOCAD

    by  • September 15, 2009 • Art, Culture • 0 Comments

    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. Except,...

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    Secret Velazquez

    by  • September 11, 2009 • Art • 0 Comments

    In yesterday’s New York Times: a painting long relegated to the “school of Velazquez,” with a deep-cleaning, turns out to be the work of the master himself. Art conservation belongs, to me, in the same poetic category as wreck diving,  digging up cities in the desert, recovering heisted jewels and putting together skeletons. In...

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