Part 2: The Battle of Atlanta

In 1884, John A. Logan, heralded Civil War General, won the nomination for Vice President on the Republican ticket (with Presidential nominee James Blaine). To promote their campaign, Logan commissioned a cyclorama that would vaunt his heroism in the Battle of Atlanta.

I guess he underestimated how long it would take to paint a cyclorama.

Via Wisconsin Historical Society. See more incredible photos of cyclorama painting in Milwaukee here.   

In 1883, the Cyclorama of the Battle of Gettysburg debuted in Chicago. Cycloramas, panoramic in nature but more immersive and over-the-top, were designed to be installed in purpose-built rotundas. You’d walk in, sometimes from winding, narrow tunnels or a staircase beneath the floor, and emerge on a viewing platform. There you were: on a smoke-enshrouded battlefield, amidst dirt and prairie grass and crouching soldiers and corpses. It seemed intensely real.

It was, of course, an elaborate illusion. From Yoni Applebaum’s essay in The Atlantic:

What most astonished observers, though, was the diorama, which began near the edge of the platform and ended at the painting, 45 feet away. Hundreds of cartloads of earth were covered in sod and studded with vegetation, then topped with the detritus of the battlefield. Shoes, canteens, fences, walls, corpses: near the canvas, these props were cunningly arranged to blend seamlessly into the painting. Two wooden poles, painted on the canvas, met a third leaned against it to form a tripod. A dirt road ran out into the diorama.

Also in 1883, a German named William Wehner founded the American Panorama Company in Milwaukee (a city near to my heart, you know). Wehner knew he could find experienced painters in Germany, where panoramas of the Franco-Prussian war were popular. He went to Europe, or worked with agents based in Europe, to recruit some 15 artists to join his crew. In Milwaukee, the artists worked in an octagonal studio at Fifth and Wells — and drank at a bar across the street.

Panorama painters in Milwaukee, 1887 Via Wisconsin Historical Society.

I don’t know who decided, or how, that the Battle of Atlanta would debut in Detroit, but so it was decided. We didn’t have a cyclorama building at the time, but for the Battle of Atlanta, we would build one.

William Wehner traveled here in 1886 to see how things were going. A reporter for the Detroit Tribune caught up with him at the Brunswick bar on December 13, where Wehner — you have to wonder if he was a salty person generally, or just in his cups — complained that the Detroit cyclorama building wasn’t ready yet, then talked trash about another famous cyclorama.

“You had a cyclorama in Detroit some time ago,” said Mr. Wehner, “and I saw it. I am afraid the people of this city will form an opinion of the new exhibit from the old, but that is not fair … People who have seen Battle of Gettysburg only have no idea what a really good cyclorama is. It was certainly the very worst exhibition that I have ever seen.”

Anticipation for the cyclorama, the paper wrote, was at a frenzy — ”The people of Detroit have no idea what it will be like until they see it.” Famous attendees expected to attend the debut included General W.T. Clark, Theodore Davis, and General Logan himself, “who will be present to fight the battle over again.”

Two weeks after this article was published,  General Logan died. (When his widow saw the completed painting in Atlanta years later, it is rumored, she fainted at the sight of his likeness.)

Wehner had hoped the Cyclorama would be open by Christmas, but owing to the delay in completing the cyclorama building (at Bates and Larned — seen above) and the labor-intensive installation of the 42-foot high, 358-foot long painting  the Battle of Atlanta didn’t debut in Detroit until February 1887. When the Battle of Atlanta continued its tour, it was replaced with Custer’s Last Stand. As far as I can tell, those were the only two paintings ever installed at Detroit’s cyclorama building, which was torn down in 1891.

In Milwaukee, the panorama painters created that city’s first vibrant art community; after the panorama craze quelled, those that stayed opened their own studios, became teachers, established schools, and found work decorating the Pabst mansion and painting dioramas for the Milwaukee Public Museum. In Detroit, it seems, as with most other American cities, panoramas were a brief and fantastical flash in the pan, and most of the panoramas exhibited here have long since been lost or destroyed.

You can still see the Battle of Atlanta, though — in Atlanta, naturally — where it remains the largest oil painting in the world.

Further reading:

The Atlanta Cyclorama

Cyclorama — the New Georgia Encyclopedia

What happened to the Panorama Painters? 

Milwaukee County Historical Society — Friedrich W. Heine Diaries

Via Library of Congress

Me being me, after I read them I spent some time (a., freaking out over the now-lost cyclorama of Custer’s Last Stand, which replaced the Battle of Gettsyburg at the Boston Cyclorama in 1888, and (b., scrambling to find out if any cycloramic spectacles were created, or exhibited, in Detroit.

Of course they were! So much so, in fact, that I’m tackling the legacy of the cyclorama in Detroit in two parts.

Part 1: The panorama

Before the rise of the cyclorama in the 1880s, its twin sibling, the panorama, was the rage. 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. Sometimes they were set up on big rollers and scrolled slowly by a seated audience while a narrator explained the passing scenery. One panorama of New York City, painted by Otis Bullard, was 3,000 feet long, rendering 6 miles of the great city with “a view of more than 700 horses and carriages and upward of 10,000 of its people.”

A moving panorama of Dr. Kane’s Arctic Expedition exhibited in Detroit in 1859. Here, an 1857 advertisement for the painting. Source.  

Thomas Mickell Burnham, whose painting of the First State Election in Michigan is one of my stubborn favorites, was a moving panorama painter. So was John Mix Stanley, a most-of-the-time Detroiter who, in 1862, painted a “Polemorama” of scenes from the Civil War:

Commencing Monday Evening, Jan. 12:
Stanley & Conant’s
POLEMORAMA!
Or, Gigantic Illustrations of the War!

And DIO-PANORAMIC REPRESENTATIONS OF THE IMPENDING REBELLION, (the largest Panorama ever contemplated.) Sketched, painted and completed by the eminent Government Artists, Stanley, Conant, walker, Hillyard, Lamb, Healy, McCormick, Bagley. The Polemorama is visiting a few of the prinicpal cities, prior to being placed on the mammoth revolving pedestal in the north wing of the Smithsonian Institute, Washington D.C.

The remarkable Naval Engagement between the MONITOR and MERRIMAC is faithfully illustrated by Moving Models, Undulating Water, &c., &c.

Exhibitions on Wednesday and Saturday Afternoons, and each Evening this week.

Buffalo Daily Courier, via fultonhistory.com

In 1854, a French painter, Mathuren Andrieu, came to Detroit to exhibit his Panorama of the Great West, which included views of Chicago, St. Louis, and Springfield, IL. Those who wished to see Detroit added to the panorama were advised to stop into the nearest bar or hotel and purchase petition tickets. Within the week, Mr. Andrieu announced that, due to popular demand, he would be temporarily closing his exhibition in order to paint Detroit. Call the Biddle House, the paper advertised, for the chance to have your business prominently included. (Raffles and sponsorships like this were built into Mr. Andrieu’s business plan, it seems — the following year he traveled to Cleveland, and subsequently added Cleveland to the painting. Kind of brilliant!)

“Many of our best-known citizens may be seen on the avenue,” wrote the Free Press of Andrieu’s Panorama of Detroit. ”The artist is daily adding some well-known figure.” Famous denizens portrayed in the painting included Bishop LeFevre and former Mayor (then Collector of the Port) John Harmon. To complete the entertainment, Andrieu traveled with a minstrel band, but Mr. Andrieu may have been amusing on his own — in Cleveland, a reporter wrote that Andrieu “delighted the audience … by singing the Marseilles [sic] as only a Frenchman can.”

In part 2: A Milwaukee connection, the long-gone Detroit Cyclorama building, and the creator of the Battle of Atlanta Cyclorama talkin’ trash at a bar.

Stay tuned!

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 the weather turns icky. And that will hamper my adventure-taking plans — at least until I invest in a warmer winter coat and some snow boots.

But before I condemn myself to the library for the next four months, I want to explore another repository of Detroit history treasures: the Detroit Institute of Arts.

The DIA was founded as the Detroit Museum of Arts in 1885 by a gang of wealthy donors and art collectors — who wanted to make Detroit into the artistic hub of the Midwest — and many of their contributions remain central to the DIA’s collection. (More on the history of the DIA at HistoricDetroit.org.)

As one of the top six art collections in the U.S., the DIA is a pretty worldly place. But throughout the museum there are little peeks into the history of its city, including local artists, local artifacts, and local moments in history. Here are just a few of my favorites.

Helping Angels — from the Unitarian Church, Woodward Avenue

This luminous work of stained glass, which takes up an entire gallery wall, is so compelling; I’d seen it a dozen times before I noticed the names of famous Detroiters lettered upon it. Surprise! This beauty is from Detroit — it once adorned the First Unitarian Church of Detroit on Woodward Avenue, now abandoned (more info here). You can see from the street where the windows used to be.

Charles Merrill, whose name appears in the medallion at the top, was a lumber baron who came to Detroit in 1848. He was a founding member of Detroit’s Unitarian Society. His daughter, Lizzie Merrill Palmer, named a fountain after him, which is now in Palmer Park.

John Judson Bagley, bearded wonder, tobacco magnate and Governor of Michigan 1873-1877, was raised Episcopalian; I do not know when he joined the Unitarian Church but several writers of the day indicate that Gov. Bagley was ”not confined to that denomination … Wherever good men and women met and worshiped the living God there was church,” as George Hopkins said in a memorial address.

The windows were designed by New York stained glass artist John La Farge in 1890.

First State Election in Detroit, Michigan, 1837

I rarely visit the DIA without stopping for a visit with this painting. I have discussed it on the blog before and dedicated a whole chapter to it in my book, in which I call it Detroit’s Washington Crossing the Delaware, except everyone in it is drunk.

Many contemporary writers vouch that this painting is a faithful depiction of that rowdy election day in 1837 when Democrat Stevens T. Mason defended his governorship against Whig challenger C.C. Trowbridge. But during my research, I read a persuasive analysis that the painting may have in fact been an artifact of Whig propaganda, showing a clammy, crooked-faced boy Governor (normally so handsome!) buying votes from drunken rabble while a parade of Democrat fops rides into the Capitol square, led by a silly gilded pony.

I buy it. And I still love this painting. Maybe even moreso, now.

Julius Rolshoven

My first acquaintance with Julius Rolshoven was through tales of his nude ”Brunette Venus,” which hung at Detroit society bar Churchill’s until Prohibition. Then it moved to the Detroit Athletic Club; as Malcolm Bingay wrote in Detroit is My Own Hometown:

Now the lovely lady,who seems always just to be awakening from a deep and peaceful sleep, with an odd kink in her knee, looks down again through the blue haze of a smoke-charged room where men alone forgather — except on such gala occasions as New Year’s night — as they did in the long ago at Charlie Churchill’s, a mystic tie between the Detroit that was and the Detroit that is, between the roaring decades of our youth and the forties of our maturity.

(I love that, by the way. Mystic ties.)

Rolshoven was born a Detroiter, but left the city when he was 18 to study art in Europe. Later he settled in Taos, New Mexico, and joined the Taos Society of Artists.

This painting of his at the DIA strikes me as a hilariously far cry from the scandalous brown-haired naked lady that made him so notorious in social circles. Also, does anyone know if the brunette Venus is still at the D.A.C.?

John Mix Stanley

[John Mix Stanley, Indian Telegraph, 1860. More here.]

Consider this goal for 2012 hereby set: I have to know more about John Mix Stanley. First of all, what kind of a name is Mix? The kind of name I love, that’s what. Then there’s the fact that Mr. Stanley’s life includes so much dramatic American history: chief artist for the Pacific railroad survey, portrait painter of Hawaiian King Kamehameha III, and dreamer-upper of  a never-completed illustrated atlas of the American Indian. For an extra dimension of tragedy/mystery/loss, most of his work was destroyed in a massive 1865 fire at the Smithsonian.

Born in Canandaigua in 1814, Stanley first came to Detroit in 1834 and started painting here (though he evidently had no formal art education) the following year. He spent most of the next 30 years on expeditions and exhibiting, but returned to Detroit permanently in 1864, and died here in 1872. The DIA has a number of his works in their collection.

Gari Melchers

Perhaps the most famous painter ever to come from Detroit, naturalist Gari Melchers is responsible for these murals at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. (among many other works). Gari Melchers was the son of cigar-store Indian sculptor Julius Melchers.

Take your pick from any of his paintings at the DIA! This is not one of them, but it is a Gari Melchers portrait of Teddy Roosevelt. NICE!

(Source)

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

What compelled me? I was a kid. The bad-ass mystique of Detroit still impressed my friends. And I suspected that I loved the city. Because of the train station. Because occasionally my cool friends from home would take me to someone’s “artist loft” for a scene-y CCS party, or smuggle me into some blues bar to see a cover band.

And because Detroit was where I’d come from, and where generations of both sides of my family had come to, and from, in their quests to improve their lives.

That said, I really didn’t know anything about the Spirit of Detroit. (Also: I didn’t really know anything about Detroit.) Brutal honesty: I thought it was a sculpture of a man letting some birds eat out of his hand. I REALLY DID.

A mere hour before I had this heroic little man inked into my leg for the ages, I went to the library and did some research.

The sculptures of Marshall Fredericks, I learned, are some of Michigan’s most beloved works of public art. As a young teacher at Cranbrook, he won a national competition in 1936 to create the Levi L. Barbour Memorial Fountain on Belle Isle — the wheeling gazelle, his first public monument.

Fredericks worked in bronze on a gargantuan scale. Look at this room full of humongous treasures. His crucifix at Indian River was at the time, and may still be, the largest crucifix in the world.

He worked with huge ideas and emotions, too. His sculptures are lofty. Like, here’s Man and the Expanding Universe, 1964:

The Cleveland War Memorial Fountain (the “Fountain of Eternal Life”), 1964:

The nudes of “Star Dream” rising over Royal Oak, 1997:

(He had a way with animals, too, that I really appreciate:

LOOK AT THOSE BUDDIES!)

Over and over again, the triumphant theme of the human spirit, in harmony with nature, ascending from forces of violence, evil, war and suffering, to an eternity on high. Ad astra per aspera: to the stars, through adversity.

So. The Spirit.

(Of COURSE, the only picture I have of him in my personal collection includes a marching band.)

He’s a hunk, that one. By one account, the largest hunk of bronze cast since the Renaissance. A dream of perfected humanity, with wavy hair and washboard abs. In one hand, he holds a gilded orb, representing God, casting rays of light on the world.

Like a lot of Marshall Fredericks’ work, there’s a touch of the Disney — a wholly uncynical dream of man’s potential, cartoonishly rendered. But I will always love this sculpture for this tiny, gleaming reason:

This is not a bunch of birds eating out of a man’s hand. It’s a family.

This weekend, my fella and I will start a tiny new family, in front of our much larger family, and our family of friends and loved ones, in the magnificent, magnanimous city of Detroit, where our families have lived for years. That’s why we included a silhouette of the Spirit on our invitations (designed by the amazing husband-wife duo of Perfect Laughter). (I’ll include a picture, but I can’t find anything right now, because, GOOD LORD, WE’RE GETTING MARRIED IN THREE DAYS, and our place is a shambles.)

After the wedding, we’re honeymooning in New Orleans. When we return, I will settle in to write my BOOK (!!!!) of quirky tales from Detroit’s pre-automotive past.

So I guess this is my long-winded way of saying farewell, for a while. Posts will continue in May. See you when I’m MARRIED! Meanwhile, be good to your family, be good to Detroit, and enjoy the spring.

Love,

The Night Train

So, we’ll see if this sticks. But for this Friday, at least, welcome to Fridays with General Friend Palmer. If you hate this I’ll stop it, but I don’t think you’ll hate this.

This week: The General has a whole chapter on Detroit fires that he remembers, specifically fires that destroyed famous buildings. When a wool mill on Randolph street caught fire in the summer of 1832, Friend writes, it “lit up the whole county of Wayne and parts of Canada, apparently … Out where we lived, on Woodward at John R., the illumination was so great one could see to read by it.”

I was really taken with his account of the fire on the steamer Great Western, which went up in flames while it was docked in Detroit sometime around 1838 (his memory was bad when he wrote his book and he died before his editors could help him do rewrites):

One important fire, and so considered at the time … and that was the partial burning of the then finest and most magnificent steamer on the lakes, the Great Western, while lying at her dock, Gillett & Desnoyer’s, near foot of Shelby Street. It happened about 1838 on a summer Sunday afternoon, about 5 o’clock. I have forgotten the exact date. She had arrived that forenoon on her down trip from Chicago to Buffalo. I was present at the fire with engine company No. 4 (that far off time, it seems but yesterday). She was the pride of the lakes, and of her owner and commander, Captain Augustus Walker. She was the first steamer to have her cabins on the upper deck, passengers heretofore having had to dive down between decks if they had any idea of sleeping or eating, and most of them had.

The news that this steamer was ablaze spread like wildfire and hurried everyone to the scene; indeed, all Detroit was on hand. The engines hustling down Wayne and Shelby Streets came near running over the men and boys who had hold of the drag ropes, so wild was the excitement. No. 4 engine company came first in this encounter. It had its station on the dock between the warehouse and the burning steamer, and three of its members had the post of honor during the fire. William Green, the foreman who had the pipe, was assisted by Barney Campau and Kin Dygert. They held the fort, so to speak. They were stationed on the upper deck of the steamer abaft the wheelhouse.

The scene lives in an oil painting by Thomas Burnham, a well known local artist of that day. This painting is now the property of some citizen of this city who should, it seems to me, donate it to the Art Museum or to the present fire department. The upper cabins of the Great Western abaft the wheelhouses and the ladies cabin below were badly wrecked; otherwise the steamer did not sustain much damage. But it was a most exciting fire while it lasted as any one now living who was present at the time will I am sure bear witness.

Okay. I love a sleuth. Where’s this Thomas Burnham painting? Did “some citizen of the city” give it to the now-DIA as General Friend Palmer thought he or she should? Not sure, although an online collection search turns up another Thomas Mickell Burnham painting, First State Election in Detroit, Michigan, 1837 (timely, right?):

And the man was apparently known for his marine and maritime paintings as well, like this one, An English Cutter Gives Chase to a Smuggler, 1836:

So where’s the burning Great Western? Does it indeed belong to the fire department? Is it in some art historian’s special collection of boat paintings or a museum’s American Art gallery?

I’ll put out some feelers. I haven’t really looked yet, having just learned about this painting about a half-hour ago, so if it’s somewhere obvious, tell me now.

Our destination: the beautifully renovated University of Michigan Museum of Art. We arrived with no particular art-seeing aims, just the need to give our brains something to do besides worry about the week to come.

The first painting we saw was on a lamp post flag outside the building, inviting us to get inspired — a handsome face, a gilded uniform.

“Who is that?” I asked.

“Oliver Hazard Perry?” I think he was half-joking; Perry has been on the brain.

The larger-than-life portrait hanging gloriously in the Museum Apse is actually of General Maximilien Sébastien Foy, a French military leader and statesman who led campaigns in Portugal, Spain and served in the Battles of the Pyrennes and Waterloo. Foy was severely wounded an astonishing 15 times during his career; during the Battle of Orthez, he was left for dead on the field.

Maximilien Sébastien Foy was an adored public figure, according to his obituary in an 1826 issue of the British Register of Literature, Sciences and Belles-Lettres, perhaps due to his career as a writer and eloquent public speaker after he retired from the military in 1815. He also seem to have been suspicious of Napoleon’s absolutist aims; one anecdote has him refusing to toast to the Emperor’s health:

After one of Buonaparte’s victories, he was at a diner of the officers, when, upon “the health of the emperor” having been given, he alone declined drinking it. In vain was he pressed on the point. “I am not thirsty,” said he.

More than 6000 mourners attended his funeral procession, including the Duc D’Orléans Louis-Phillipe III, who would become the last King of France, and the founder of French romanticism, the Vicomte de Chateaubriand.

Baron François Gérard, a distinguished painter and portraitist and a student of Jacques-Louis David, made this post-mortem portrait on commission from Foy’s widow, but refused payment, as the General was a personal friend. Maybe it’s projection, but to me the portrait seems emotionally bright, affectionate; set against a broiling storm, Foy’s face and hands are ethereal, his aspect resolute but peaceful. His decorations are fabulously wrought and, although they were earned on earth, they radiate as though they were adorned from on high.

And of course, it helps that the painting is almost eight-and-a-half feet tall, hung a few feet off the ground so the General towers over you from the mountain, his black cape swelling in the wind, enfolding the General in the warmth and transcendence of death.

It’s a lush, grand-manner military hero portrait, but it’s so strangely moving. You should go see it.

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 was first published in Harper’s Bazaar. It was 1944. Sixty years later, on a shoot for The New Yorker, Avedon died of a brain hemorrhage. His life and career plots an uninterrupted course through 20th century fashion — and fashion’s animation of the joyful and spirited cultural moments that defined what was beautiful in the modern world.

I don’t really follow fashion — my wardrobe is built with an eye for solid colors, comfortable fabrics and not looking too clueless —  nor am I very smart about photography in an art-historical sense. But there is lots to love about this exhibition, and you can pretty much just walk in the door and love it, no questions asked, and I think that’s the greatest testament to Avedon’s mastery. The clothes are beautiful, even if you, like me, can’t tell a Dior from a Balenciaga; the models are strikingly, naturally gorgeous, and everyone is glamorous and having a good time.

Avedon was most certainly in control of every detail of his photo shoots, which were as complicated as movie-making and frequently required blocked-off streets and generator trucks. Nonetheless, there is a fundamental free-and-easy-ness to these works that feels captured, not contrived: a model in a circus-huge hat posing with contortionists and street musicians in a Paris alleyway; Dorian Leigh hugging a rough, delighted bicyclist; Buster Keaton, Gardner McKay and Zsa Zsa Gabor at the Moulin Rouge in campy Western wear, giggling and drinking. And there are animals everywhere — monkeys, big silly dogs, little silly dogs and, famously, elephants, which add an animating liveliness and perhaps remind the viewer to let fashion to bring levity into our lives.

“The 1940s,” Stephanie Seymour, hat and suit by Charvet, Paris, April 1995. © 2009 Richard Avedon Foundation.

It’s not all folksiness-couture, gambling in evening gowns and topless showgirls, of course. Avedon’s studio works are full of movement and fun, too, but they are also where Avedon really showcases his peculiar taste in faces — doe eyes, sharp noses, comically long necks — and dramatically highlights the sculptural quality of the garments.

Veruschka, dress by Kimberly, New York, January 1967. © 2009 Richard Avedon Foundation.

The show is an ambitious survey of Avedon’s entire career in fashion, crisply and stylishly installed with little elaboration in text. Even if you don’t think this exhibition is your “thing,” I’d recommend a visit if you’re feeling drab, uninspired, or in need of a quick infusion of spring in your step. My boyfriend, who was not overly prepared to enjoy himself, had a wonderful time.

We left the museum when it closed at 5 pm and strolled next door to the Park Shelton (15 E. Kirby) in hopes of visiting brand-new Leopold’s Books (right next door to Good Girls Go to Paris crêperie). Posted hours say Leopold’s also closes at 5, but owner Greg Lenhoff lets us hang out for a while to browse his small but sumptuous and well-curated collection of art and literary magazines, graphic novels and comic books, zines, small and local press publications and contemporary and classic literature.

Underneath a city streets map painted by Emily Linn from City Bird (also opening a storefront soon — look out!) is a prominent drinking fountain which Greg says the City Inspector made him install. When he saw a patron tentatively lingering near it, he said “Please! By all means — have a drink.”

Greg wants all of the trouble he took to have a drinking fountain installed to be appreciated by his customers and members of his community, and we encouraged him to promote it as a value-added aspect of the Leopold’s shopping experience.

So, Detroit: if your Nalgene is in need of a refresher, hop into Leopold’s and help yourself. Also maybe buy something. I picked up a Believer collection of interviews, which is very handsome and makes me look hip when I read it in public, but if that’s not your style, might I also recommend a little matchbook-sized collection of Detroit trivia cards, published by the Detroit Historical Society?

Here are a few questions to pique your curiosity. Best guesses in the comments:

GEOGRAPHY: What does the name “Detroit” mean in French?

HISTORY: In what year was the first car driven on the streets of Detroit?

BUSINESS: The Michigan Telephone Company, established 125 years ago in Detroit, is now known under what name?

PEOPLE: What Native American leader laid seige to Detroit in 1763?

SPORTS: In what year did the Red Wings win their first Stanley Cup?

ARTS AND ENTERTAINMENT: Name the three chart-topping hits by Diana Ross and the Supremes released in 1965.

Your move!

Mark reveals himself to be an anti-capitalist anarchist, Dwell reveals himself to be a little OCD about cleanliness, and everyone has a really good time.

You can listen online at ThirdCoast Digest or subscribe to the podcast on iTunes.

More interviews with illustrators and artists to come in the next couple of weeks!

The photographer gave a comprehensive introduction to his life as a photographer — working on assignment, documenting archeological excavations for universities and museums — and as an installation artist. His work, at its most basic, is about objects in space: buildings (like the Unabomber’s cabin, a series that is not on display in this exhibition but which Barnes discussed extensively in his lecture), tools, fetishized objects of trades and professions, the body as object and objects on display. There’s a sculptural element to this work — something formal.

But there’s also something intensely interrogatory at the heart of his work; in the Unabomber series, Barnes explores the building on trial, the building as an object of interrogation. And in a series on the excavation of the Legion of Honor Museum in San Francisco — built over a Gold Rush-era cemetary — Barnes explores what goes inside of museums and what stays outside (or underneath) them and questions the authority of the museum in preserving, displaying and creating our past.

(I’m reminded of a recent conversation about the British Museum, which a friend described as hilarious, and how the artifacts, although they should probably be returned to the nations they were looted from, are in the British Musuem to stay, and unintentionally create a shadow museum — a permanent exhibition on the history of British colonialism. But that’s another blog.)

Animal Logic is about museums, too — specifically, natural history museums — and what goes on underneath them, in this case in a more figurative sense, as the artist explores museum objects (mostly taxidermy) in transition, or in storage. The museum is a theater, and Barnes allows us to go backstage with him to see the rigging.

The exhibition is like a Victorian cabinet of curiosities: disarticulated skulls, bird nests made out of trash, beheaded mallards, tiny stuffed parakeets so bright they look like they’ve been painted, installed on their backs with their skinny legs in the air. (Further reading on Animal Logic should include the New York Times’ piece on “New Antiquarians” and the Morbid Anatomy blog and the artwork of Cassie Smith.)

It’s a critical survey of the way we see nature from inside an institution, but with the incorporation of “Murmur,” a 2007 multimedia installation about starling migration in Rome, the exhibition takes on a layer of graveyard meditation, too: the defiance of death through the eternity of taxidermy (hints of humanity’s romance with ancient Egypt, and Barnes worked there on a dig with Yale); the creepy liveliness of a mounted stag’s head; the second death of a stuffed specimen taken off display; with the starlings, aspirations of eternal return.

New photographs and specimens for the exhibition were taken behind-the-scenes from Cranbrook’s extensive ornithology collection, and it’s amazing to go upstairs after spending some time with Animal Logic and see the Science Institute dazzlingly refreshed. Richard Barnes makes art from artifact; upstairs in the science museum, the artifacts on display— dinosaur bones, stuffed peacocks, pinned butterflies—look curiously like art.

Barnes also has corresponding exhibitions at the University of Michigan Museum of Art (through December) and Uof M’s Institute of Humanities (through October 30). For another perspective on photography, the Detroit Institute of Arts hosts a comprehensive study of Richard Avedon’s fashion photography through January 17. If objects in space are more your style, Breeding Ground continues at the Museum of New Art through November 21.

Animal Logic runs through January 3. Next up in the Artology series, Cape Farewell (hint: it’s about climate change. Fun!) opens January 13.

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 how we experience all of those things, and how all of those things inform each other and us.

From Cranbrook’s website:

“Integral to Animal Logic will be new photography and installations utilizing the collections of Cranbrook Institute of Science.  During three extended visits to Cranbrook in 2009, Barnes explored and photographed the Institute’s vast collection of over 150,000 objects distributed across nine fields of study, including items from the collections of Anthropology, Ornithology and Paleontology.  The resulting photographs, as well as large selections of the objects themselves, will provide a rich context for Barnes’s mid-career survey.”

The exhibition opens on Saturday in tandem with Art Detroit Now, a major contemporary art event that includes a midtown culture crawl, tours of area art galleries with lectures and workshops and other goodies and an open house at the Russell Industrial Center. You can download The Gallery Guide (which is also useful for general Detroit-area art-seeing reference) here.

Also opening this weekend: a new show, Breeding Grounds: New Detroit Sculpture at the Museum of New Art in Pontiac (I have never been there; is it awesome?). The show features work by Kevin Beasley, Christopher Samuels,  Nathan Morgan, Abigail Newbold, Andrew Thompson and the Detroit Projection Project (go meet them on Facebook)! There’s a panel discussion tomorrow night on the state of the arts and sculpture, specifically, in Detroit metro’s social landscape. We believe this to be worth checking out.

And the new Burton Theatre, an independent art house in the Cass Corridor, opens this weekend. But you already knew that!

It’s also time for us to take in our recycling, but that is neither here nor there.