• Culture

    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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    Lazy Monday flu-ridden round-up

    by  • January 25, 2010 • Culture, metro Detroit • 0 Comments

    Besides feeling swamped with projects, I’m terrified that I’m coming down with some kind of flu, so here are a few items to keep you busy in the event that I become bedridden or shackled to my (other, metaphorical, paid-gig) desk this week. Katie Barkel makes neat videos The MetroTimes music department was kind...

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    Giants

    by  • January 13, 2010 • Culture, History, Meditations • 2 Comments

    This weekend, for the first time since moving back to Farmington, we finally made it to that chapel of childlike astonishment, Marvin’s Marvelous Mechanical Museum. My many, many visits to Marvin’s — as an awestruck child, a teenager with nowhere to go on a summer night, an adult with friends in town to impress...

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    Lost and found: Hamtramck family photos

    by  • December 7, 2009 • Culture, History, Local Color • 1 Comment

    Well, well. If it isn’t the internet, up to its old tricks! During my usual late-night internet scrounging — browsing lazily for Detroit Christmas artifacts — I found an incredible Flickr haul of old photos, which had themselves been found somewhere between Detroit and Hamtramck. Besides a lot of great mugging in front of...

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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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    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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