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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Part 2: From Germany, to Milwaukee, to Atlanta, to Detroit: the cyclorama of the Battle of Atlanta.
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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.
Read more →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...
Read more →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...
Read more →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...
Read more →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...
Read more →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...
Read more →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...
Read more →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...
Read more →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...
Read more →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...
Read more →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,...
Read more →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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