Nights at the Museum – Sept. 15-22
Victors for Art: Michigan's Alumni Collectors—Part II: Abstraction, featuring Random International's Swarm Study / II.
UMMA welcomes our new director, Christina Olsen!
Search the UMMA Collection
Now on view: Power Contained
All events are free and take place at UMMA unless otherwise noted.
This tour will include art that features the life of the mind.
Commemorating the University of Michigan’s 2017 Bicentennial, Victors for Art: Michigan’s Alumni Collectors celebrates the deep impact of Michigan alumni on the global art world. This exhibition features works collected by a diverse group of alumni and the artworks themselves span 3,500 years of art making. Victors for Art offers visitors an unprecedented opportunity to view art that may have never been publicly displayed otherwise—and most certainly, not together. Presented in two parts—Figuration (February 18-June 11, 2017) and Abstraction (July 1-October 29, 2017), this second part, Abstraction, invites visitors to explore the pleasures of abstraction across a wide range of media, eras, and genres. UMMA docents will explore the work of artists such as Pablo Picasso, Alberto Giacometti, Louise Nevelson, Christo, Lorna Simpson, José Parlá, Kenojuak Ashevak, and Do Ho Su, as well as other treasures such as a fifth-century Korean roof end tile, an Amish quilt.
Storytelling is one of the oldest forms of educational entertainment known to mankind. From the West African tradition of the Griot to modern day Moth events, storytelling environments have served as a means to pass along history, shape culture, share helpful lessons, and establish a sense of belonging and community.
The U-M Comprehensive Studies Program and Department of Afroamerican and African Studies invite you to explore themes related to campus life, coming of age, learning and growing, at this series of Moth Style Storyteller Lounge events. The theme for September's event is Transitions, stories of transitioning to the University of Michigan or a new school year. Storytellers include students, faculty and staff, and Voices of Wisdom (alums or community members).
Future Value the Voice programs:
Tuesday, November 7 - Mistakes that Made Me Better, stories of lessons learned the hard way;
Tuesday, January 30 - Nobody Told Me, stories of things people wish they would have known before the started a new semester;
Tuesday, March 27 - Triumph, stories of overcoming challenges in the college environment.
Light food and refreshments will be served beginning at 7 p.m. in the UMMA Commons. The Storytelling begins at 7:30 p.m. in the Helmut Stern Auditorium on the Lower Level.
For more information, please contact Keith Jason at mrjason@umich.edu or 734-764-9128
Create your own project inspired by Random International’s LED-light and motion-sensing dynamic sculpture, Swarm Study / II, featured in UMMA's exhibition Victors for Art: Michigan's Alumni Collectors—Part II: Abstraction. UMMA docents will lead a tour of the installation in the Irving Stenn, Jr. Family Gallery followed by a hands-on workshop led by local artist Adrian Deva. Designed for families with children ages six and up to experience art together. Parents must accompany children.
Create your own project inspired by Random International’s LED-light and motion-sensing dynamic sculpture, Swarm Study / II, featured in UMMA's exhibition Victors for Art: Michigan's Alumni Collectors—Part II: Abstraction. UMMA docents will lead a tour of the installation in the Irving Stenn, Jr. Family Gallery followed by a hands-on workshop led by local artist Adrian Deva. Designed for families with children ages six and up to experience art together. Parents must accompany children.
UMMA docents will guide visitors through the galleries on tours as diverse as their interests and areas of expertise. Each docent plans a theme and includes a variety of styles and media to illuminate his or her ideas. Themes may be repeated but each docent's approach and choice of objects is unique.
In celebration of the University of Michigan’s Bicentennial in 2017, artist and distinguished Stamps School of Art and Design professor Jim Cogswell has been invited to create a series of public window installations at the University of Michigan Museum of Art and the Kelsey Museum of Archaeology. For this visionary project, the artist will adhere a procession of vivid images to the glass walls of the museums in a rhythmically evocative narrative of reassembled fragments from a diverse range of artworks in both museums’ permanent collections. By leveraging the buildings’ unique architecture, the artist expands our understanding of a museum as a cultural repository and highlights the significant role of these institutions in the life of the campus community. UMMA docents will introduce the juxtaposed images and help connect the viewer to the origins and meaning of objects and their power to shape knowledge, memory, and identity.
Laura De Becker, exhibition curator and UMMA's Helmut & Candis Stern Associate Curator of African Art, will lead a discussion of the visual elements of so-called "figures of power" from across the African continent on display in the exhibition Power Contained: The Art of Authority in Central and West Africa. Interestingly, the term "figures of power" may refer to wooden sculptures - which were seen as containers of powerful spirits and ancestors in their local context - or to living heads of state, who represent the wealth and power of the nation. Both these categories share important characteristics and are treated in similar ways, bringing into question the distinction between person and object, between individual and community.
Christo is a sculptor known for co-creating large scale ephemeral works worldwide with his longtime artistic partner and wife, Jeanne-Claude (1935-2009). Over the span of his sixty-year career, Christo and Jeanne-Claude have created many public works involving the exterior wrapping of buildings, museums, and public spaces in canvas, tarp, and other materials. Oil barrels have also featured prominently in the couple’s work, selected for their “sculptural effect and low cost.” Their most recent US project, The Gates (completed in 2005) featured 7,503 rectangular arches draped in saffron fabric across New York City’s Central Park. While many speculate on the specific meaning of Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s work, throughout their career, the artists have shunned the idea that their creative work seeks to convey deeper meanings, insisting that they create work to evoke a purely visceral emotional response using visual aesthetic. However, Christo speaks of the public locations of their installations in decidedly democratic terms. “Nobody can buy our projects. Nobody can sell tickets to experience our projects. Freedom is the enemy of possession and possession is equal to permanence. That is why our projects cannot remain and must go away forever. Our projects are “once in a lifetime” and “once upon a time.”
Christo appears in conjunction with the UMMA exhibition Victors for Art: Michigan's Alumni Collectors—Part II: Abstraction (on view through October 29, 2017) which includes one of Christo’s drawings related to The Gates project.
Poet and essayist Ocean Vuong is the author of the best-selling, Night Sky with Exit Wounds, winner of the Whiting Award and Thom Gunn Award and named by the New York Times as a Top 10 Book of 2016. A Ruth Lilly fellow from the Poetry Foundation, his other honors include fellowships from the Lannan Foundation, the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, The Elizabeth George Foundation, The Academy of American Poets, and a Pushcart Prize. Vuong's writings have been featured in The Atlantic,The Nation, New Republic, The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Village Voice, and American Poetry Review,which awarded him the Stanley Kunitz Prize for Younger Poets. Born in Saigon, Vietnam, he now lives in Northampton, Massachusetts, where he serves as an Assistant Professor in the MFA Program for Poets and Writers at Umass-Amherst. He is currently at work on his first novel.
David Gates is an American journalist and novelist. His first novel, Jernigan (1991) about a dysfunctional one-parent family, was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 1992 and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Gates has published short stories in The New Yorker, Tin House, Newsweek, The New York Times Book Review, Rolling Stone, and The Paris Review. Gates is also a Guggenheim Fellow. Until 2008, he was a senior writer and editor in the Arts section at Newsweek magazine, specializing in articles on books and music. He teaches in the graduate writing program at The University of Montana, as well as at the Bennington Writing Seminars
Although we visit art museums to look at art, sometimes it looks back at us. During this tour, we will explore some of this art and discover who or what is looking back at us and why.
Before colonization, complex hierarchical societies flourished in Central and West Africa. At their summits were a select few—kings and chiefs whose authority was derived from their direct connection to powerful ancestors and predecessors. These rulers were wrapped in expensive textiles or costly furs, and covered in beads and precious metals, materials that signaled status and safely contained the power they wielded. The famous minkisi (meaning “power figure”) sculptures of Central Africa were similarly activated through the addition of charged materials. UMMA docents will explore the parallels between the adornment of the king’s physical body and minkisi and demonstrates how authority was expressed and power contained across a range of historical cultures.
Join Natsu Oyobe, Curator of Asian Art, on a tour of Victors for Art: Michigan’s Alumni Collectors—Part II: Abstraction, an exhibition that celebrates the rich history of over two thousand years of abstraction in art. The conversation will guide us through works created in different times and locations where the intention of abstraction emerged—from the 5th century Korean ceramic roof-tile, the Chinese calligraphy of the Ming dynasty (1368 – 1644), to the 19th century African reliquary figure—illustrating that abstraction in visual art was not the invention of the modern West.
Magnificent music in a magnificent space: the celebrated U-M Chamber Choir premieres a newly commissioned work by renowned Korean composer Hyo Won Woo and performs works by Rautavaara, MacMillan, Richard Strauss, Esenvalds, and Frank Martin, led by preeminent conductor Jerry Blackstone in his last appearance at UMMA before his retirement. Join us at 6:30 p.m. for a short pre-concert talk with Woo, a visiting scholar with the U-M Nam Center for Korean Studies.
Create your own project inspired by Jim Cogswell's dynamic window installation in UMMA's exhibition Cosmogonic Tattoos. Enjoy a gallery tour with UMMA docents followed by a hands-on workshop led by local artist Susan Clinthorne. Designed for families with children ages six and up to experience art together. Parents must accompany children.
Create your own project inspired by Jim Cogswell's dynamic window installation in UMMA's exhibition Cosmogonic Tattoos. Enjoy a gallery tour with UMMA docents followed by a hands-on workshop led by local artist Susan Clinthorne. Designed for families with children ages six and up to experience art together. Parents must accompany children.
UMMA docents will guide visitors through the galleries on tours as diverse as their interests and areas of expertise. Each docent plans a theme and includes a variety of styles and media to illuminate his or her ideas. Themes may be repeated but each docent's approach and choice of objects is unique.
Focusing on the prominent role of women as the subject of photography, GLOSS: Modeling Beauty explores the shifting ideals of female beauty that pervade European and American visual culture from the 1920s to today. The exhibition features images of sleek and poised female models and celebrities destined for the glossy pages of fashion magazines, images of fashionable women on city streets and mannequins in shop windows juxtaposing haute couture and everyday life, and artists who employ the visual strategies of traditional fashion photography, while offering alternative narratives to mainstream notions of female beauty. Join UMMA docents for a lively review of these photographic strategies.
In 2011, Mark Dion created the the site-specific installation, "Waiting for the Extraordinary," commissioned by the U-M Institute for the Humanities. The work focused on the original blueprint for the University, and it's thirteen distinct classifications of knowledge, incorporating 3D replicas of artifacts from U-M museums and collections. It served as a formal critique on how institutions influence our understanding of history and choreograph our human experiences.
To coincide with the University's Bicentennial year, and the Institute for the Humanities's theme year of Archives and Futures, Dion now re-stages the work in a new iteration in the Institute's gallery. In this special presentation from the Penny Stamps Lecture Series, Dion will speak about his process and ruminate on both the original and the replica.
Join us for a reception at the exhibition opening directly following the lecture, at the U-M Institute for the Humanities at 202 S. Thayer in Ann Arbor.
For more information, please contact the Institute for the Humanities.
Kiki Smith is known for her multidisciplinary practice relating to the human condition and the natural world. Smith uses a broad variety of materials, continuously expanding and evolving a body of work that includes sculpture, printmaking, photography, drawing, and textile. Smith has been the subject of numerous exhibitions worldwide, including over 25 solo museum exhibitions. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and has been the recipient of several awards, including the 2012 National Medal of Arts; the 2010 Nelson A. Rockefeller Award; the 2009 Edward MacDowell Medal, the Skowhegan Medal for Sculpture in 2000, a Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Sculpture Center, among others. She is an adjunct professor at New York University and Columbia University. Smith has been represented by Pace Gallery, New York since 1994.
More information about the Penny Stamps Speaker Series is here.
A series of talks by leading curators and thinkers in African art will launch a reimagining process for the forthcoming reinstallation of UMMA’s Robert and Lillian Montalto Bohlen Gallery of African Art. Mary (Polly) Nooter-Roberts, Professor of World Arts and Cultures at UCLA, will be the first speaker in this series to contribute reflections on her own groundbreaking work in the display of African art.
Mary (Polly) Nooter Roberts is a Full Professor in UCLA’s Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance, and Consulting Curator for African Art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). She holds a PhD in Art History from Columbia University, and has served as Senior Curator at The Museum for African Art in New York, and as Deputy Director and Chief Curator of the Fowler Museum at UCLA.
Roberts studies the philosophical underpinnings of particular African visual and performance-based arts; museum and curatorial studies; the body and female representation; arts of divination and healing; and cross-cultural approaches to memory, writing, and inscription. With Allen F. Roberts, she produced the award-winning works Memory: Luba Art and the Making of History (1996) and A Saint in the City: Sufi Arts of Urban Senegal (2003). She is also the author/curator of Secrecy: African Art that Conceals and Reveals (1993); and co-author of Exhibition-ism: Museums and African Art (1994); Inscribing Meaning: Writing and Graphic Systems in African Art (2007); and Luba in the “Visions of Africa” series (2007). Her most recent exhibition at LACMA is entitled The Inner Eye: Vision and Transcendence in African Arts.
Roberts has been a Getty Postdoctoral Fellow and held other grants and awards; served as President of the Arts Council of the African Studies Association; and is an editor of African Arts journal. In 2007, she was decorated by the Republic of France as a Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters for her promotion of African art and artists of francophone countries.
Additional featured speakers include:
Thursday, November 2, 7 p.m.: Pamela McClusky, Curator of African and Oceanic Art, Seattle Art Museum
Thursday, November 30, 7 p.m.: Christa Clarke, Senior Curator Arts of Global Africa, Newark Museum
One MFA student of fiction and one of poetry, each introduced by a peer, will read their work. The Mark Webster Reading Series presents emerging writers in a warm and relaxed setting. We encourage you to bring your friends - a Webster reading makes for an enjoyable and enlightening Friday evening.
This week's reading features Kristin Nelson, Jeffrey Henebury, and Jonathan Holland.
Kristin Nelson is a fellow of the strangest mind in the world. She delights in masques and revels sometimes altogether.
Jeff Henebury is a fiction writer. A Massachusetts native and Minnesotan transplant currently studying at the University of Michigan, he hopes to visit every M-state at least once.
Jon Holland has split his life between the Midwest and South. Recently graduated from Indiana University, he has facilitated art and writing groups in community centers, transitional houses, and a jail. He is currently grateful for his partner, his two three-legged cats (Wallace and Wallace Jr.), his garden, and for all of this.
Storytime at the Museum promotes art enjoyment for our youngest patrons. Children ages three to six are invited to join in on some children’s fun, hear a story, and do a short activity responding to the art on display. Parents must accompany children. Siblings are welcome to join the group. Meet in front of the UMMA Store.
In this tour an UMMA docent will consider art that features heads of all kinds and the tales or stories that go along with them.
Commemorating the University of Michigan’s 2017 Bicentennial, Victors for Art: Michigan’s Alumni Collectors celebrates the deep impact of Michigan alumni on the global art world. This exhibition features works collected by a diverse group of alumni and the artworks themselves span 3,500 years of art making. Victors for Art offers visitors an unprecedented opportunity to view art that may have never been publicly displayed otherwise—and most certainly, not together. Presented in two parts—Figuration (February 18-June 11, 2017) and Abstraction (July 1-October 29, 2017), this second part, Abstraction, invites visitors to explore the pleasures of abstraction across a wide range of media, eras, and genres. UMMA docents will explore the work of artists such as Pablo Picasso, Alberto Giacometti, Louise Nevelson, Christo, Lorna Simpson, José Parlá, Kenojuak Ashevak, and Do Ho Su, as well as other treasures such as a fifth-century Korean roof end tile, an Amish quilt.
Assistant Professor of Percussion Jonathan Ovalle presents an eclectic program of 20th and 21st century music on themes of abstraction and exploration as illustrated by the UMMA exhibition Victors for Art: Michigan's Alumni Collectors—Part II: Abstraction. Students and faculty from the U-M School of Music, Theater & Dance join him in performing cutting-edge works by Morton Feldman, Missy Mazzoli, Hannah Lash, Viet Cuong, Aaron Siegel, and John Cage.
Jason Yates, a Detroit native, currently lives and works in Los Angeles. Yates’ work focuses on a collaborative ethos and bridging the gap between various genres — namely art, music, fashion, and design. The rich cultural history of Detroit is hugely influential in Yates’ work and has been since his teenage years, when he became friends and artistic collaborators with musician George Clinton. He received his BFA from the University of Michigan in 1995 before moving to Los Angeles to study with Mike Kelley, Mayo Thompson, and Liz Larner in the MFA program at Art Center in Pasadena. Yates formed 'Fast Friends Inc.' a collaborative project to disseminate art outside the conventional gallery system and to distribute the work on the artist’s own terms. Chris Kraus writes in Where Art Belongs: “Yates is an exceptional artist.” For six years as Fast Friends Inc., he created band posters for Ariel Pink, Matt Fishbeck (of the band Holy Shit), and others that are also original art works.
More information about the Penny Stamps Speaker Series is here.
Monica Youn is the author of three books of poetry: Blackacre (Graywolf Press, 2016); Barter(Graywolf Press, 2003); and Ignatz (Four Way Books, 2010), which was a finalist for the National Book Award. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including the New Yorker, the Paris Review, and the New York Times Magazine, and she has been awarded fellowships from the Library of Congress and Stanford University, among other awards. A former attorney, she now teaches poetry at Princeton University and at the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers. She previously taught at Bennington College, Columbia University, and at the Sarah Lawrence College MFA Program. Youn’s poetry has been described as “interested in the intersection between the beauty we want in life, and the darkness that often serves as an invisible barrier for it,” with her background in law allowing her to “probe and navigate these gray areas gently, using an economy of language that both cuts to the heart of the matter and reveals nuanced layers of caution, lust, and desperation.”
One of the most prolific American writers of the 20th century, Joyce Carol Oates counts historical biographies, depictions of working class families, and magical realist Gothic fiction among her oeuvre. She often depicts hardships and violence in American towns, and has received both critical and popular acclaim in her 50-year career. Oates is the author of over 70 books, including the novels them (1969), winner of the National Book Award; Bellefleur (1980); You Must Remember This (1987); Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart (1990); We Were the Mulvaneys (1996); Blonde (2000), winner of the National Book Award; The Gravedigger’s Daughter (2007); and The Accursed (2013). Her short stories and essays have appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, The Atlantic, and Harper’s, and have been widely anthologized. In an interview for the Paris Review, she says: “I try to write books that can be read in one way by a literal-minded reader, and in quite another way by a reader alert to symbolic abbreviation and parodistic elements. And yet, it's the same book—or nearly. A trompe l'oeil, a work of ‘as if.’”
UMMA docents will guide visitors through the galleries on tours as diverse as their interests and areas of expertise. Each docent plans a theme and includes a variety of styles and media to illuminate his or her ideas. Themes may be repeated but each docent's approach and choice of objects is unique.
In celebration of the University of Michigan’s Bicentennial in 2017, artist and distinguished Stamps School of Art and Design professor Jim Cogswell has been invited to create a series of public window installations at the University of Michigan Museum of Art and the Kelsey Museum of Archaeology. For this visionary project, the artist will adhere a procession of vivid images to the glass walls of the museums in a rhythmically evocative narrative of reassembled fragments from a diverse range of artworks in both museums’ permanent collections. By leveraging the buildings’ unique architecture, the artist expands our understanding of a museum as a cultural repository and highlights the significant role of these institutions in the life of the campus community. UMMA docents will introduce the juxtaposed images and help connect the viewer to the origins and meaning of objects and their power to shape knowledge, memory, and identity.
Morehshin Allahyari is an Iranian media artist, activist, educator, and curator who uses computer modeling and digital fabrication techniques to explore the intersection of art and activism. “I want my work to respond, resist, and criticize the current political and cultural situation that we experience on a daily basis,” she explains. Allahyari’s Material Speculation: ISIS, a digital fabrication project that inspects petropolitical and poetic relationships between 3D printing, oil, techno-capitalism, and jihadism, has achieved wide acclaim for proposing 3D printing technology as a tool both for resistance and documentation. The many publications featuring the work include the New York Times, Huffington Post, Wired, NPR, Rhizome, Hyperallergic, Dazed Digital, and VICE. She has exhibited at numerous institutions and festivals throughout the world, including Centre Pompidou, Paris; Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences, Australia; Hartware MedienKunstVerein and Transmediale in Germany. Allahyari was recently awarded a 2016 Sculpture Award from the Institute of Digital Art. Allahyari relocated to the United States in 2007 and currently lives in New York.
Learn more about the Penny Stamps Speaker Series.
A series of talks by leading curators and thinkers in African art will launch a reimagining process for the forthcoming reinstallation of UMMA’s Robert and Lillian Montalto Bohlen Gallery of African Art. Pamela McClusky, Curator of African and Oceanic Art, Seattle Art Museum, will be the second speaker in this series to contribute reflections on her own groundbreaking work in the display of African art.
McClusky established a department for the Art of Africa, Oceania and the Americas at the Seattle Art Museum in the 1980s. It became the museum’s fastest growing department, receiving several significant collections, and hosting a vast range of exhibitions. Honoring the depth of the African holdings, she led a collaborative process with African artists, scholars, and advisors to create a national tour, publication and web resource entitled: Long Steps Never Broke a Back in 2002-2004.
During the last decade, she has collaborated on exhibitions such as Nick Cave: Meet Me at the Center of the Earth, Gauguin and Polynesia: An Elusive Paradise, and Colors of the Oasis: Central Asian Ikats. When the Seattle Art Museum expanded in 2007, she curated multiple galleries of African art, along with experimental installations that mixed cultural perspectives and cross continental boundaries. In 2012, she led an effort to place Australian art in the permanent galleries and oversaw an exhibition, publication and tour called Ancestral Modern: Australian Aboriginal Art. Recently, she was the lead curator for Disguise: Masks and Global African Art, a national touring exhibition that combined masks of the past with masquerading of the present, and Mood Indigo: Textiles from Around the World. She is now working on a new design and interpretation of the African collection galleries which will focus on the distinctions between public and private art and the ways they are presented in museums.
Additional featured speakers include:
Thursday, October 19, 7 p.m.: Mary (Polly) Nooter Roberts, Professor, UCLA Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance and Consulting Curator for African Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA)
Thursday, November 30, 7 p.m.: Christa Clarke, Senior Curator Arts of Global Africa, Newark Museum
Stop in to UMMA on select Friday evenings to enjoy special exhibitions and engaging activities at Fridays After 5! With all of UMMA's galleries remaining open until 8:00 p.m., this exciting series provides an interactive atmosphere for all audiences.
Park in the Maynard Structure (between Liberty and William) and receive free, validated parking. The Museum is always free.
Join us for upcoming Fridays After 5:
One MFA student of fiction and one of poetry, each introduced by a peer, will read their work. The Mark Webster Reading Series presents emerging writers in a warm and relaxed setting. We encourage you to bring your friends - a Webster reading makes for an enjoyable and enlightening Friday evening.
This week's reading features Michelle Cheever and Colin Walker.
Michelle Cheever is a writer from Boston, Massachusetts. Her writing has appeared in The Huffington Post, The Advocate, PANK, The Austin Review, and Armchair/Shotgun, among others. She has a collection of stories with Wilde Press out of Emerson College.
Colin Walker is not a renaissance man; he's a renaissance, man. He is originally from the Pacific Northwest, and, coincidentally, a poet.
UMMA docents will guide visitors through the galleries on tours as diverse as their interests and areas of expertise. Each docent plans a theme and includes a variety of styles and media to illuminate his or her ideas. Themes may be repeated but each docent's approach and choice of objects is unique.
In celebration of the University of Michigan’s Bicentennial in 2017, artist and distinguished Stamps School of Art and Design professor Jim Cogswell has been invited to create a series of public window installations at the University of Michigan Museum of Art and the Kelsey Museum of Archaeology. For this visionary project, the artist will adhere a procession of vivid images to the glass walls of the museums in a rhythmically evocative narrative of reassembled fragments from a diverse range of artworks in both museums’ permanent collections. By leveraging the buildings’ unique architecture, the artist expands our understanding of a museum as a cultural repository and highlights the significant role of these institutions in the life of the campus community. UMMA docents will introduce the juxtaposed images and help connect the viewer to the origins and meaning of objects and their power to shape knowledge, memory, and identity.
Gloss: Modeling Beauty explores ideals of female beauty in European and American photography from the 1920s to the present—from glamorous studio photographs of Edward Steichen and Philippe Halsman, to candid photographs of fashionable women by Andy Warhol and Guy Bourdin. Accompany Jennifer Friess, UMMA’s Assistant Curator of Photography for a conversation about photography’s role in shaping and challenging expectations of female beauty.
Storytelling is one of the oldest forms of educational entertainment known to mankind. From the West African tradition of the Griot to modern day Moth events, storytelling environments have served as a means to pass along history, shape culture, share helpful lessons, and establish a sense of belonging and community.
The U-M Comprehensive Studies Program and Department of Afroamerican and African Studies invite you to explore themes related to campus life, coming of age, and learning and growing, at this series of Moth Style Storyteller Lounge events. The theme for November's event will be Mistakes that Made Me Better, stories of lessons learned the hard way. Storytellers include students, faculty and staff, and Voices of Wisdom (alums or community members).
Future Value the Voice programs:
Tuesday, January 30 - Nobody Told Me, stories of things people wish they would have known before the started a new semester;
Tuesday, March 27 - Triumph, stories of overcoming challenges in the college environment.
Light food and refreshments will be served beginning at 7 p.m. in the UMMA Commons. The Storytelling begins at 7:30 p.m. in the Helmut Stern Auditorium on the Lower Level.
For more information, please contact Keith Jason at mrjason@umich.edu or 734-764-9128
Since the publication of his first volume of verse, Turtle, Swan, in 1987, Mark Doty has been recognized as one of the most accomplished poets in America. Hailed for his elegant, intelligent verse, Doty has often been compared to James Merrill, Walt Whitman and C.P. Cavafy. His syntactically complex and aesthetically profound free verse poems, odes to urban gay life, and quietly brutal elegies to his lover, Wally Roberts, have been hailed as some of the most original and arresting poetry written today. The recipient of numerous grants and fellowships, Doty has also won a number of prestigious literary awards, including the Whiting Writer’s Award, the T. S. Eliot Prize, the National Poetry Series, the Los Angeles Times Book Award, the National Book Critics’ Circle Award, the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for first nonfiction, and the National Book Award for Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems (2008). A long-time resident of Provincetown, Massachusetts, Doty teaches at Rutgers University in New Jersey.
Described by John Updike as an “ambitious, resourceful novelist,” Fernanda Eberstadt is the author of Low Tide, Isaac and His devils, When the Sons of Heaven Meet the Daughters of the Earth, The Furies, and Rat. The New York Times Book Review praised Rat as “shrewd and sensuous,” hailing “Eberstadt's preoccupation with "the footloose life of the wilfully dispossessed" and writes that "in her novels, idealists and fast trackers wrestle with thorny problems of love and social identity." In 1998, Eberstadt went to live on a vineyard in the French Pyrenees, outside the city of Perpignan. She became friends with a family of French gypsy musicians. Her first work of non-fiction, Little Money Street—In Search of Gypsies and Their Music in the South of France, which portrays that friendship, was released by Knopf in March 2006. Eberstadt also writes extensively for The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, Vogue, and Vanity Fair.
Storytime at the Museum promotes art enjoyment for our youngest patrons. Children ages three to six are invited to join in on some children’s fun, hear a story, and do a short activity responding to the art on display. Parents must accompany children. Siblings are welcome to join the group. Meet in front of the UMMA Store.
Three men from a provincial town are in urgent need of money and decide to buy a lottery ticket. They win the lottery, but soon after their ticket gets stolen. See the the here. Q & A with U-M Lecturer in Germanic Languages and Literature Ramona Uritescu-Lombard to follow the screening.
This program is part of the 9th Annual Romanian Film Festival at UMMA. Schedule of screenings:
November 11 3:30 p.m. Two Lottery Tickets (Două Lozuri, 2016; Paul Negoescu, Comedy, English Subtitles, 86 min)
5:30 p.m.The Treasure (Comoara, 2015, Corneliu Porumboiu, Drama, English Subtitles, 89 min)
November 12
3:30 p.m.Everybody in Our Family (Toata lumea din familia noastra, 2012, Radu Jude; Comedy, English Subtitles, 107 min)
5:15 p.m.By the Rails (Dincolo de calea ferata, 2016; Cătălin Mitulescu, Drama, English Subtitles, 88 min)
The mission of the American Romanian Festival is to create a bridge between the two cultures, helping to foster mutual understanding. To learn more about ARF and upcoming events and ways to be involved, please visit americanromanianfestival.org.
Costi leads a peaceful life until one day when his neighbor pays him an unexpected visit and shares with him that his grandparents' garden has a buried treasure. He offers Costi half of what they will find on the condition that Costi will rent a metal detector. Costi eventually accepts the proposal. See the trailer here. Q & A with U-M Lecturer in Germanic Languages and Literature Ramona Uritescu-Lombard to follow the screening.
This program is part of the 9th Annual Romanian Film Festival at UMMA. Schedule of screenings:
November 11
3:30 p.m.
Two Lottery Tickets (Două Lozuri, 2016; Paul Negoescu, Comedy, English Subtitles, 86 min)
5:30 p.m.
The Treasure (Comoara, 2015, Corneliu Porumboiu, Drama, English Subtitles, 89 min)
November 12
3:30 p.m.
Everybody in Our Family (Toata lumea din familia noastra, 2012, Radu Jude; Comedy, English Subtitles, 107 min)
5:15 p.m.
By the Rails (Dincolo de calea ferata, 2016; Cătălin Mitulescu, Drama, English Subtitles, 88 min)
The mission of the American Romanian Festival is to create a bridge between the two cultures, helping to foster mutual understanding. To learn more about ARF and upcoming events and ways to be involved, please visit americanromanianfestival.org.
UMMA docents will guide visitors through the galleries on tours as diverse as their interests and areas of expertise. Each docent plans a theme and includes a variety of styles and media to illuminate his or her ideas. Themes may be repeated but each docent's approach and choice of objects is unique.
Before colonization, complex hierarchical societies flourished in Central and West Africa. At their summits were a select few—kings and chiefs whose authority was derived from their direct connection to powerful ancestors and predecessors. These rulers were wrapped in expensive textiles or costly furs, and covered in beads and precious metals, materials that signaled status and safely contained the power they wielded. The famous minkisi (meaning “power figure”) sculptures of Central Africa were similarly activated through the addition of charged materials. UMMA docents will explore the parallels between the adornment of the king’s physical body and minkisi and demonstrates how authority was expressed and power contained across a range of historical cultures
Marius, a divorced father, is frustrated that his five-year-old daughter Sofia lives with her mother. When he wants to take his daughter with him on holiday, he is told that she is ill. Suspecting a lie, he insists to take her with him, leading to a series of comic mishaps, lies, police interventions, all to the tune of children’s songs. With famed Romanian actress Stela Popescu. See the trailer here. Q&A with U-M Lecturer in Germanic Languages and Literature Ramona Uritescu-Lombard to follow the screening.
This program is part of the 9th Annual Romanian Film Festival at UMMA. Schedule of screenings:
November 11
3:30 p.m.
Two Lottery Tickets (Două Lozuri, 2016; Paul Negoescu, Comedy, English Subtitles, 86 min)
5:30 p.m.
The Treasure (Comoara, 2015, Corneliu Porumboiu, Drama, English Subtitles, 89 min)
November 12
3:30 p.m.
Everybody in Our Family (Toata lumea din familia noastra, 2012, Radu Jude; Comedy, English Subtitles, 107 min)
5:15 p.m.
By the Rails (Dincolo de calea ferata, 2016; Cătălin Mitulescu, Drama, English Subtitles, 88 min)
The mission of the American Romanian Festival is to create a bridge between the two cultures, helping to foster mutual understanding. To learn more about ARF and upcoming events and ways to be involved, please visit americanromanianfestival.org.
Radu has come back from Italy after a year and finds his wife totally changed. They spend the night trying to rediscover themselves. The distance has created distrust and confusion between them but Radu hopes for a new beginning. See the trailer here. Q&A with U-M Lecturer in Germanic Languages and Literature Ramona Uritescu-Lombard to follow the screening.
This program is part of the 9th Annual Romanian Film Festival at UMMA. Schedule of screenings:
November 11
3:30 p.m.
Two Lottery Tickets (Două Lozuri, 2016; Paul Negoescu, Comedy, English Subtitles, 86 min)
5:30 p.m.
The Treasure (Comoara, 2015, Corneliu Porumboiu, Drama, English Subtitles, 89 min)
November 12
3:30 p.m.
Everybody in Our Family (Toata lumea din familia noastra, 2012, Radu Jude; Comedy, English Subtitles, 107 min)
5:15 p.m.
By the Rails (Dincolo de calea ferata, 2016; Cătălin Mitulescu, Drama, English Subtitles, 88 min)
The mission of the American Romanian Festival is to create a bridge between the two cultures, helping to foster mutual understanding. To learn more about ARF and upcoming events and ways to be involved, please visit americanromanianfestival.org.
Synthesize: Art & Technology is collaboration between UMMA and the Ann Arbor Hand’s-On Museum that invites teens to explore the intersection between Art & Technology, and the different ways they can be used together to create the tangible, and the abstract.
Jennifer Friess, Assistant Curator of Photography, will lead a tour of Random International's LED-light and motion-sensing dynamic sculpture, Swarm Study / II, featured in UMMA's exhibition Victors for Art: Michigan's Alumni Collectors—Part II: Abstraction, followed by demonstrations and conversations with Lauro Ojeda, Assistant Research Scientist, Mechanical Engineering, Sophia Brueckner, Assistant Professor, Stamps School of Art & Design, Gus Schissler, Art & Design Major and Jule Schatz, Engineering Major, Art & Design Minor.
Synthesize: Art & Technology is designed for teens, but everyone is welcome to attend.
One MFA student of fiction and one of poetry, each introduced by a peer, will read their work. The Mark Webster Reading Series presents emerging writers in a warm and relaxed setting. We encourage you to bring your friends - a Webster reading makes for an enjoyable and enlightening Friday evening.
This week's reading features Christina Kim and Chelsea Welsh.
Christina Kim is a writer from Los Angeles.
Chelsea is an artist from Walbridge, Ohio. She received a BFA in 2-Dimensional Studies from Bowling Green State University in 2009, and an MFA in photography from Massachusetts College of Art and Design in 2013. Before moving to Michigan, she spent the last six years as a live-in supervisor of a transitional group home for adults with mental illnesses.
Create your own project inspired by UMMA's exhibition, Power Contained: The Art of Authority in Central and West Africa, which features power figures—wooden carvings adorned with textiles, animal skin, metal, and beads—from different areas of the continent. UMMA docents will lead a tour of the exhibition followed by a hands-on workshop led by local artist Sophie Grillet. Designed for families with children ages six and up to experience art together. Parents must accompany children.
Create your own project inspired by the power figures featured in UMMA's exhibition Power Contained: The Art of Authority in Central and West Africa. UMMA docents will lead a tour of the exhibition followed by a hands-on workshop led by local artist Sophie Grillet. Designed for families with children ages six and up to experience art together. Parents must accompany children.
UMMA docents will guide visitors through the galleries on tours as diverse as their interests and areas of expertise. Each docent plans a theme and includes a variety of styles and media to illuminate his or her ideas. Themes may be repeated but each docent's approach and choice of objects is unique.
Focusing on the prominent role of women as the subject of photography, GLOSS: Modeling Beauty explores the shifting ideals of female beauty that pervade European and American visual culture from the 1920s to today. The exhibition features images of sleek and poised female models and celebrities destined for the glossy pages of fashion magazines, images of fashionable women on city streets and mannequins in shop windows juxtaposing haute couture and everyday life, and artists who employ the visual strategies of traditional fashion photography, while offering alternative narratives to mainstream notions of female beauty. Join UMMA docents for a lively review of these photographic strategies.
Meet Me at UMMA invites people with mild memory loss to enjoy a guided gallery experience along with family members or care partners. This program is designed for people who live at home and their companions.
If you or someone you care about is experiencing mild memory loss, research has shown that the visual and expressive arts can be good for your mind. In addition, great enjoyment is to be found in seeking out the sights, sounds, textures, and good feelings that come with looking at, learning, and sharing feelings about paintings, music, and other creative arts.
UMMA's trained docents will accompany small groups for a guided tour and provide the opportunity for everyone to experience different kinds of art and share their responses.
UMMA docents will guide visitors through the galleries on tours as diverse as their interests and areas of expertise. Each docent plans a theme and includes a variety of styles and media to illuminate his or her ideas. Themes may be repeated but each docent's approach and choice of objects is unique.
Sam Nhlengethwa, a contemporary artist based in Johannesburg, South Africa, is a prolific artist who has worked in a range of media, exploring multiple themes: life under the Apartheid regime, jazz icons, daily life in South Africa’s townships, and miners.
For his Tribute series, Nhlengethwa created a range of prints that pay homage to several artists that have "paved the way for South African art." These include South African artists such as David Goldblatt, William Kentridge, and Gerard Sekoto, but also international artists such as Romare Bearden, Henri Matisse, and Jean-Michel Basquiat. UMMA Docents will discuss their influences upon his own work, Nhlengethwa shows an exchange of ideas within and across borders that moves past the oft-stated influence of African artworks on avant-garde European artists. His Tribute Series confirms that African artists are by no means working in an isolated context, but are active participants in a global art world.
Sam Nhlengethwa, a contemporary artist based in Johannesburg, South Africa, is a prolific artist who has worked in a range of media, exploring multiple themes: life under the Apartheid regime, jazz icons, daily life in South Africa’s townships, and miners.
For his Tribute series, Nhlengethwa created a range of prints that pay homage to several artists that have "paved the way for South African art." These include South African artists such as David Goldblatt, William Kentridge, and Gerard Sekoto, but also international artists such as Romare Bearden, Henri Matisse, and Jean-Michel Basquiat. UMMA Docents will discuss their influences upon his own work, Nhlengethwa shows an exchange of ideas within and across borders that moves past the oft-stated influence of African artworks on avant-garde European artists. His Tribute Series confirms that African artists are by no means working in an isolated context, but are active participants in a global art world.
This installation highlights two works from Nhlengethwa’s Tribute series recently acquired by UMMA.
Justine Mahoney's sculptures and collages have captivated audiences for their deceptively innocent approach to exploring the dark side of human existence. Drawing inspiration from the disparate realities of growing up white in 1970s Johannesburg during some of the most tumultuous decades of South African apartheid, Mahoney is deeply influenced by her childhood experiences.
In Tainted, her 2017 exhibition, Mahoney explores emotional and physical states of struggle through convoys of toy-like sculptures. These childlike figures — referred to by the artist as “an army of toy soldiers” — offer an inspired view into this world of collaged fantasy, with themes centered on her own observations of gender, landscape, aspiration, and oppression. “I portray emotional states like resilience and braveness in the face of adversity, and see my child soldiers as standing steadfast and strong…Their role is to bring on a sense of one’s ability to move forward through extreme situations.” Julian McGowan of the Southern Guild Gallery aptly describes it as “Malice in Wonderland.” Mahoney is a graduate of Technikon Witwatersrand (’91).
More information about the Penny Stamps Speaker Series is here.
A series of talks by leading curators and thinkers in African art will launch a reimagining process for the forthcoming reinstallation of UMMA’s Robert and Lillian Montalto Bohlen Gallery of African Art. Christa Clarke, Senior Curator Arts of Global Africa, Newark Museum, will be the third and final speaker in this series to contribute reflections on her own groundbreaking work in the display of African art.
Clarke is Senior Curator, Arts of Global Africa at the Newark Museum, where she has organized numerous exhibitions ranging from men’s fashion to Nigerian modernism since her appointment in 2002. Clarke’s scholarship on the history of collecting and display and the politics of representation includes Representing Africa in American Art Museums: A Century of Collecting and Display (co-edited with Kathleen Berzock; 2010), which examines the impact of museum practice on the formation of meaning and public perception of African art. Her recent book, African Art in the Barnes Foundation (Rizzoli; 2015), received the James A. Porter and David C. Driskell Book Award for African American Art History and a First Place Award for Excellence from the Association of Art Museum Curators (AAMC) in 2016.
Clarke has held fellowships at the Smithsonian, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Clark Art Institute, and teaching appointments at NYU Abu Dhabi, University of Pennsylvania, George Washington University, Rutgers University, Purchase College, and Drew University. In addition, she was a Center for Curatorial Leadership Fellow in 2012 and currently serves as President of the Association of Art Museum Curators (AAMC). In 2017-2018, Clarke will be a fellow at the Hutchins Center at Harvard's DuBois Institute, where she will be working on a book project, The Activist Collector: Recovering the Story of an African American Woman in Pre-Apartheid South Africa.
Additional featured speakers include:
Thursday, October 19, 7 p.m.: Mary (Polly) Nooter Roberts, Professor, UCLA Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance and Consulting Curator for African Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA)
Thursday, November 2, 7 p.m.: Pamela McClusky, Curator of African and Oceanic Art, Seattle Art Museum
Alternate Endings, Radical Beginnings is the 28th iteration of Visual AIDS’ longstanding Day With(out) Art project. Curated by Erin Christovale and Vivian Crockett for Visual AIDS, the video program prioritizes Black narratives within the ongoing AIDS epidemic, commissioning seven artists—Mykki Blanco, Cheryl Dunye (with Ellen Spiro), Reina Gossett, Thomas Allen Harris, Kia Labeija, Tiona McClodden and Brontez Purnell—to create new and innovative short videos.
In spite of the impact of HIV/AIDS within Black communities, these stories and experiences are often excluded from larger artistic and historical narratives. In 2016, African Americans represented 44% of all new HIV diagnoses in the United States. Given this context, it is increasingly urgent to feature a myriad of stories that consider and represent the lives of those housed within this statistic. Alternate Endings, Radical Beginnings seeks to highlight the voices of those that are marginalized within broader Black communities nationwide, including queer and trans folks.
Presented by the UMMA Student Engagement Council whose members will facilitate a post-screening conversation with a panel of student leaders to explore topics raised in the films followed by a Q&A with the audience.
UMMA docents will guide visitors through the galleries on tours as diverse as their interests and areas of expertise. Each docent plans a theme and includes a variety of styles and media to illuminate his or her ideas. Themes may be repeated but each docent's approach and choice of objects is unique.
In celebration of the University of Michigan’s Bicentennial in 2017, artist and distinguished Stamps School of Art and Design professor Jim Cogswell has been invited to create a series of public window installations at the University of Michigan Museum of Art and the Kelsey Museum of Archaeology. For this visionary project, the artist will adhere a procession of vivid images to the glass walls of the museums in a rhythmically evocative narrative of reassembled fragments from a diverse range of artworks in both museums’ permanent collections. By leveraging the buildings’ unique architecture, the artist expands our understanding of a museum as a cultural repository and highlights the significant role of these institutions in the life of the campus community. UMMA docents will introduce the juxtaposed images and help connect the viewer to the origins and meaning of objects and their power to shape knowledge, memory, and identity.
Gregory Pardlo was born in Philadelphia and grew up in Willingboro, New Jersey. He is the author of Totem (2007), winner of the APR/Honickman First Book Prize, and Digest (2014), winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. The Pulitzer judges cited Pardlo’s “clear-voiced poems that bring readers the news from 21st Century America, rich with thought, ideas and histories public and private.” In 2017, Pardlo was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. Pardlo’s poems, reviews, and translations have been widely published and are noted for “language simultaneously urban and highbrow … snapshots of a life that is so specific it becomes universal.” A memoir and collection of essays, Air Traffic, is forthcoming from Knopf. He is an associate editor for the literary journal Callaloo and teaches creative writing at Columbia University. He lives in Brooklyn.
Gregory Pardlo was born in Philadelphia and grew up in Willingboro, New Jersey. He is the author of Totem (2007), winner of the APR/Honickman First Book Prize, and Digest (2014), winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. The Pulitzer judges cited Pardlo’s “clear-voiced poems that bring readers the news from 21st Century America, rich with thought, ideas and histories public and private.” In 2017, Pardlo was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. Pardlo’s poems, reviews, and translations have been widely published and are noted for “language simultaneously urban and highbrow … snapshots of a life that is so specific it becomes universal.” A memoir and collection of essays, Air Traffic, is forthcoming from Knopf. He is an associate editor for the literary journal Callaloo and teaches creative writing at Columbia University. He lives in Brooklyn.
Stop in to UMMA on select Friday evenings to enjoy special exhibitions and engaging activities at Fridays After 5! With all of UMMA's galleries remaining open until 8:00 p.m., this exciting series provides an interactive atmosphere for all audiences.
Park in the Maynard Structure (between Liberty and William) and receive free, validated parking. The Museum is always free.
Join us for upcoming Fridays After 5:
One MFA student of fiction and one of poetry, each introduced by a peer, will read their work. The Mark Webster Reading Series presents emerging writers in a warm and relaxed setting. We encourage you to bring your friends - a Webster reading makes for an enjoyable and enlightening Friday evening.
This week's reading features Sylvan Thomson and Kaylie Johnson.
Sylvan is a writer from New Zealand. He is a 2017 recipient of the Horoeka Lancewood Grant. Recent publications include Great New Zealand Nonfiction and the New Zealand Review of Books.
Kaylie Johnson is a poet from Grand Rapids, Michigan. Her work has been published in Dunes Review and Shark Reef, among others. She currently lives in Ann Arbor with her cat Wallaby who is very good and handsome.
UMMA docents will guide visitors through the galleries on tours as diverse as their interests and areas of expertise. Each docent plans a theme and includes a variety of styles and media to illuminate his or her ideas. Themes may be repeated but each docent's approach and choice of objects is unique.
Before colonization, complex hierarchical societies flourished in Central and West Africa. At their summits were a select few—kings and chiefs whose authority was derived from their direct connection to powerful ancestors and predecessors. These rulers were wrapped in expensive textiles or costly furs, and covered in beads and precious metals, materials that signaled status and safely contained the power they wielded. The famous minkisi (meaning “power figure”) sculptures of Central Africa were similarly activated through the addition of charged materials. UMMA docents will explore the parallels between the adornment of the king’s physical body and minkisi and demonstrates how authority was expressed and power contained across a range of historical cultures
UMMA docents will guide visitors through the galleries on tours as diverse as their interests and areas of expertise. Each docent plans a theme and includes a variety of styles and media to illuminate his or her ideas. Themes may be repeated but each docent's approach and choice of objects is unique.
This exhibition of drawings by Henri Matisse showcases the mastery of draftsmanship by two of the most significant artists of the twentieth century: Henri Matisse (1869–1954) and Ellsworth Kelly (1923–2015). Curated by Kelly in 2014, the exhibition speaks to his admiration for Matisse, as well as to the centrality of drawing in both artists’ practices. Accompanying the forty-five rarely exhibited works by Matisse, Kelly selected nine of his own lithographic drawings that derive from his time in France when the American artist studied Matisse’s sketches and studies of nature and human figures. Join UMMA docents as they explore this artistic dialogue, seeing one artist through the eyes of another.
Matisse Drawings: Curated by Ellsworth Kelly from The Pierre and Tana Matisse Foundation Collection is organized by the American Federation of Arts and the Mount Holyoke College Art Museum in collaboration with The Pierre and Tana Matisse Foundation.
Stop in to UMMA on select Friday evenings to enjoy special exhibitions and engaging activities at Fridays After 5! With all of UMMA's galleries remaining open until 8:00 p.m., this exciting series provides an interactive atmosphere for all audiences.
Park in the Maynard Structure (between Liberty and William) and receive free, validated parking. The Museum is always free.
Join us for upcoming Fridays After 5:
UMMA makes for a memorable wedding, reception, or party.
