Abstraction, Color, and Politics in the Early 1970s explores large-scale works of art by Helen Frankenthaler, Louise Nevelson, Sam Gilliam, and Al Loving, within the context of highly-charged debates of the early 1970s about aesthetics, politics, race, and feminism. This exhibition explores the gendered and racialized terms upon which great art was defined and assessed, and the strategy of artists to question the identity and aesthetics of the artist making the art. UMMA docents will help visitors look through the lens of the four artists’ works to explore the aesthetic choices inherent in abstraction as well as the acts of staining, pouring, draping, —or even taking apart the wall itself—within this charged political context.

In conjunction with the exhibition Art in the Age of the Internet, 1989 to Today, UMMA and Vault of Midnight-Ann Arbor partner to present a book club that will read and discuss three comic books that explore some of the extreme possibilities of life in the age of the internet. Books include: The Private Eye (January 20), Snot Girl vol. 1 (February 17), and Bitch Planet vol 1 (March 10). Pick and choose your favorites or come to the whole series. Books will be available for sale at Vault of Midnight. All are invited to read and participate. Please note that these comic books deal with mature material.

Art in the Age of the Internet, 1989 to Today, on view at UMMA from December 15, 2018 to April 7, 2019, examines the radical impact of internet culture on visual art since the invention of the web in 1989. The exhibition presents more than forty works across a variety of media—painting, performance, photography, sculpture, video, and web-based projects. It features work by some of the most important artists working today, including Judith Barry, Juliana Huxtable, Pierre Huyghe, Josh Kline, Laura Owens, Trevor Paglen, Seth Price, Cindy Sherman, Frances Stark, and Martine Syms.

Open galleries from 4-5 p.m. will be hosted by UMMA staff. At 5 p.m. participants will convene for an open discussion about the exhibit. The conversation will begin with a dialogue between the artist Osman Khan (U-M School of Art and Design) and the cultural critic Anna Watkins Fisher (U-M American Culture) facilitated by Jennifer Robertson (Art History and Anthropology). Meet in the exhibition in the A. Alfred Taubman I gallery on floor 2 of the Alumni Memorial Hall wing the the Museum.

Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha (she/they) is a queer disabled nonbinary femme writer and cultural worker of Burger/Tamil Sri Lankan and Irish/Roma ascent. Leah's work has been widely published and anthologized, most recently in The Deaf Poets Society, Glitter and Grit, and Octavia's Brood, including work in the anthologies Dear Sister, Persistence: Still Butch and Femme, and Visible: A Femmethology, among others. A VONA fellow, she holds an MFA from Mills College. In 2010, she was named one of the Feminist Press' 40 Feminists Under 40 Shaping the Future, and she is a 2013 Autostraddle Hot 105 member.

Join Leah and the Spectrum Center for a conversation on the intersection of queerness, race, and disability in today's society. Leah will treat us with her latest work on the aforementioned topics and bring us to her own world. 

Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha is part of a series of keynote speakers Spectrum Center is hosting on campus covering radical queer advocacy and activism work in collaboration with several departments and student organizations at University of Michigan. 

Student Docents explore love and death, politics and humor, history, mythology, materiality, fashion, food, and other ideas in these short & sweet 15-minute peeks at the UMMA collection. ​Meet at the UMMA Store.

Student Docents explore love and death, politics and humor, history, mythology, materiality, fashion, food, and other ideas in these short & sweet 15-minute peeks at the UMMA collection. ​Meet at the UMMA Store.

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 Rachel Cross and Eirill Falck.

Rachel Cross is a writer from the Midwest. Her fiction has appeared in SmokeLong Quarterly, Fugue, Day One, and elsewhere. You can find her online at rcross.net.

Eirill Falck, is a writer from Oslo, Norway.

Storytime at the Museum promotes art enjoyment for our youngest patrons. We read a story in the galleries and include a fun, age-appropriate, hands-on activity related to it. Children ages three to six are invited to join Storytime. Parents must accompany children. Siblings are welcome to join the group. Meet in front of the UMMA Store.

Student Docents or other facilitators will be on hand to provide free sketching materials and facilitate your experience of looking and drawing. Beginners welcome! Meet at the UMMA Store.

The internet has changed every aspect of contemporary life—from how we interact with each other to how we work and play. Art in the Age of the Internet, 1989 to Today, examines the radical impact of internet culture on visual art since the invention of the web in 1989. Join UMMA docents as they explore the more than forty works across a variety of media—painting, performance, photography, sculpture, video, and web-based projects—in this exciting exhibition.

Singer-songwriter Nadim Azzam will be performing his unique blend of acoustic blues, pop, and hip-hop. Nadim's catchy and conscious lyrics paired with his melodic rapping have earned him the stage at Top of the Park, Sonic Lunch, and Buttermilk Jamboree this year, as well as a national tour with Matisyahu. He will be joined by saxophonist, Jacob LaChance. 

Phil Tinari is the Director and CEO of Ullens Center for Contemporary Art (UCCA), a leading Chinese independent institution of contemporary art in Beijing. At this talk, Tinari will discuss Chinese art and its global context, with reference to his work at UCCA, as well as curatorial projects at the Guggenheim and SFMOMA.
Since 2011, Tinari has led UCCA's transformation from a founder-driven, private museum into China’s leading independent, international institution of contemporary art, culminating in 2017 with a restructuring that has brought the institution, originally known as the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, into the patronage of a new group of mainly Chinese trustees. During Tinari’s tenure, UCCA has become known for both its artistic program and its operational model. It has mounted more than seventy exhibitions and a wide range of public programs, bringing artistic voices both established and emerging, Chinese and international, to a growing audience of nearly a million visitors each year.

Prior to joining UCCA, Tinari launched LEAP, an internationally distributed, bilingual magazine of contemporary art published by the Modern Media Group, in 2009. A widely published writer and critic, he is a contributing editor of Artforum, and was founding editor of that magazine’s Chinese edition in 2007. He was co-curator, with Alexandra Munroe and Hou Hanru, of the 2017 exhibition Art and China after 1989: Theater of the World at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, now on view at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao and opening in November at SFMOMA. In 2016 he was named a fellow of the Public Intellectuals Program of the National Committee on U.S.- China Relations. Fluent in Mandarin and based in Beijing since 2001, Tinari holds degrees from Duke and Harvard, and is currently completing a doctorate in art history at Oxford.

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 Colin Shephard and Augusta Funk. 

Colin Shepherd is a writer and editor from New York City. 

Augusta Laurel Funk was raised in Southwest Montana and Northeast Ohio. Her poems and reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in Tinderbox, Passages North, Meridian, and other journals. She's a Scorpio.

Abstraction, Color, and Politics in the Early 1970s explores large-scale works of art by Helen Frankenthaler, Louise Nevelson, Sam Gilliam, and Al Loving, within the context of highly-charged debates of the early 1970s about aesthetics, politics, race, and feminism. This exhibition explores the gendered and racialized terms upon which great art was defined and assessed, and the strategy of artists to question the identity and aesthetics of the artist making the art. UMMA docents will help visitors look through the lens of the four artists’ works to explore the aesthetic choices inherent in abstraction as well as the acts of staining, pouring, draping, —or even taking apart the wall itself—within this charged political context.

In conjunction with the exhibition Art in the Age of the Internet, 1989 to Today, UMMA and Vault of Midnight-Ann Arbor partner to present a book club that will read and discuss three comic books that explore some of the extreme possibilities of life in the age of the internet. Books include: The Private Eye (January 20), Snot Girl vol. 1 (February 17), and Bitch Planet vol 1 (March 10). Pick and choose your favorites or come to the whole series. Books will be available for sale at Vault of Midnight. All are invited to read and participate. Please note that these comic books deal with mature material.

The internet has changed every aspect of contemporary life—from how we interact with each other to how we work and play. Art in the Age of the Internet, 1989 to Today, examines the radical impact of internet culture on visual art since the invention of the web in 1989. Join UMMA docents as they explore the more than forty works across a variety of media—painting, performance, photography, sculpture, video, and web-based projects—in this exciting exhibition.

The Art, Ideas, & Politics Book Club is a partnership between UMMA and Literati Bookstore in connection with UMMA's exhibition Abstraction, Color, and Politics in the Early 1970s. Surrounded by the large-scale artworks by Sam Gilliam, Helen Frankenthaler, Al Loving, and Louise Nevelson, we will read and discuss bold and critical voices—both fiction and nonfiction—guided by Literati Bookstore's Creative Programs Manager, Gina Balibrera Amyx. Books will explore visions and critiques relevant to abstract art as well as the immense social changes of the period, and include Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power (Jan 10), Art on My Mind, Visual Politics by bell hooks (March 14), Ninth Street Women by Mary Gabriel (May 9), Flamethrowers by Rachel Kushner (July 11), and How We Get Free, edited by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor (Sept 12).
Gina Balibrera Amyx is the Creative Program Manager at Literati Bookstore, and a graduate of Zell MFA Program. Her writing has been featured in the Boston Review, Ploughshares, Michigan Quarterly Review, and The Wandering Song, an anthology of the Central American diaspora.

The Art, Ideas, & Politics Book Club will meet on the second Thursday of the month, 12-1 p.m. in the exhibition gallery. Pick and choose or come to all of them. Books will be available for sale at Literati Bookstore as well as after book club meetings at UMMA, at a 15% book club discount.

Professor Emerita at San Diego State University and presently serving as a Chancellor at the Academy of American Poets, Marilyn Chin is an award-winning poet and author. Born in Hong Kong and raised in Portland, Oregon, her works have become Asian American classics and are taught in classrooms internationally. Marilyn Chin’s books of poems include A Portrait of the Self as Nation, Hard Love Province, and Rhapsody in Plain Yellow, and she has also published a book of magical fiction.
 
Chin has won numerous awards, including the United Artist Foundation Fellowship, the Radcliffe Institute Fellowship at Harvard, the Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship at Bellagio, the Anisfield Wolf Book Award, two NEAs, the Stegner Fellowship, the PEN/Josephine Miles Award, five Pushcart Prizes, and a Fulbright Fellowship to Taiwan. She is featured in a variety of anthologies, including The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women and The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry, The Penguin Anthology of 20th Century Poetry, and The Best American Poetry.

Student Docents will enliven your afternoon and kick off the weekend with a brisk but intense encounter with a few key pieces of art and an engaging theme connecting their selections. Love and death, politics and humor, history, mythology, materiality, fashion, food, or other entry points will draw you in for a sweet peek at the UMMA collection. Each tour will last 10-15 minutes. Meet at the UMMA Store. 

Student Docents will enliven your afternoon and kick off the weekend with a brisk but intense encounter with a few key pieces of art and an engaging theme connecting their selections. Love and death, politics and humor, history, mythology, materiality, fashion, food, or other entry points will draw you in for a sweet peek at the UMMA collection. Each tour will last 10-15 minutes. Meet at the UMMA Store. 

How has Robert Mapplethorpe's legacy evolved in the thirty years since his death from AIDS in 1989? How did the NEA funding controversy and charges of indecency surrounding his posthumous exhibition The Perfect Moment shape the way his work has been remembered? How have contemporary artists been influenced by, and commented on, his large and varied body of work? In conjunction with UMS's world premiere of Triptych (the eyes of one on another), a new music theatre work about Mapplethorpe's life and work, noted art historian Richard Meyer will unpack Mapplethorpe's complicated afterlife in the public imagination. 

Richard Meyer, Robert and Ruth Halperin Professor in Art History at Stanford University, teaches courses in twentieth-century American art, the history of photography, arts censorship and the first amendment, curatorial practice, and gender and sexuality studies. His first book, Outlaw Representation: Censorship and Homosexuality in Twentieth-Century American Art, was awarded the Charles C. Eldredge Prize for Outstanding Scholarship from the Smithsonian American Art Museum. In 2013, he published What Was Contemporary Art?, a study of the idea of "the contemporary" in early twentieth-century American art, and, with Catherine Lord, Art and Queer Culture, a survey focusing on the dialogue between visual art and non-normative sexualities from 1885 to the present. 

Families with children ages six and up are invited to look, learn, and create together during UMMA's Family Art Studio sessions. Create your own project inspired by the UMMA exhibition The Power Family Program for Inuit Art: Tillirnanngittuq​ (which means "sensing the invisible just beyond it" or unexpected), followed by a hands-on workshop with local artist and UMMA docent Sophie Grillet. 

Storytime at the Museum promotes art enjoyment for children ages three to six and their families. We read a story in the galleries and include a fun, age-appropriate, hands-on activity related to it.  In March, we will be visiting the UMMA exhibition The Power Family Program for Inuit Art: Tillirnanngittuq​ (which means "sensing the invisible just beyond it" or unexpected) and reading Nessa’s Fish, a story about a young girl and the animals she encounters in the Arctic environment. Parents must accompany children. Siblings are welcome to join the group. Meet in front of the UMMA Store.

In celebration of UMMA’s new Power Family Program for Inuit Art, the Museum presents a special exhibition of two incredible, intertwining stories. One traces the development of contemporary Inuit art in the Canadian Arctic from the 1950s to the present. The other relates the fascinating story of the Power family’s important role in supporting and promoting Inuit art from the outset, bringing public attention to its artistic strength and cultural importance. The Power family’s collection is unusual in its strong representation of early contemporary carvings, incised drawings on ivory and antler, soapstone sculptures, and prints that evolved as Inuit artists developed their own artistic voices and responded creatively to their changing world. 

The film The Living Stone is a 1958 Academy Award winning documentary film showcasing stone carving: visitors can watch the creation of a work depicting Sedna, the sea goddess on view in the UMMA exhibition The Power Family Program for Inuit Art: Tillirnanngittuq​.

Families with children ages six and up are invited to look, learn, and create together during UMMA's Family Art Studio sessions. Create your own project inspired by the UMMA exhibition The Power Family Program for Inuit Art: Tillirnanngittuq​ (which means "sensing the invisible just beyond it" or unexpected), followed by a hands-on workshop with local artist and UMMA docent Sophie Grillet. 

In celebration of UMMA’s new Power Family Program for Inuit Art, the Museum presents a special exhibition of two incredible, intertwining stories. One traces the development of contemporary Inuit art in the Canadian Arctic from the 1950s to the present. The other relates the fascinating story of the Power family’s important role in supporting and promoting Inuit art from the outset, bringing public attention to its artistic strength and cultural importance. The Power family’s collection is unusual in its strong representation of early contemporary carvings, incised drawings on ivory and antler, soapstone sculptures, and prints that evolved as Inuit artists developed their own artistic voices and responded creatively to their changing world. 

Collector Philip Power will join Inuit art experts Marion (Mame) Jackson and Patricia Feheley in a conversation about the story of the Inuit collections gifted by Philip and Kathy Power. All three speakers were introduced to Inuit art as young people and have had a lifetime connection with Inuit art. This conversation will share how two generations of the Power family connected Ann Arbor with the Arctic, and the relationship of both traditional and innovative ways of making art with the lifeways and environment of the Inuit peoples. Marion (Mame) Jackson is an art historian and professor emerita, Wayne State University and the University of Michigan. Patricia Feheley is the owner and director of Feheley Fine Arts gallery, an internationally-renowned gallery specializing in early and contemporary Inuit art. Jackson and Feheley have worked closely with UMMA to develop the first exhibition of this stellar collection of nearly 250 objects from a formative period in Inuit art-making.
 

In celebration of UMMA’s new Power Family Program for Inuit Art, the Museum presents a special exhibition of two incredible, intertwining stories. One traces the development of contemporary Inuit art in the Canadian Arctic from the 1950s to the present. The other relates the fascinating story of the Power family’s important role in supporting and promoting Inuit art from the outset, bringing public attention to its artistic strength and cultural importance. The Power family’s collection is unusual in its strong representation of early contemporary carvings, incised drawings on ivory and antler, soapstone sculptures, and prints that evolved as Inuit artists developed their own artistic voices and responded creatively to their changing world. 

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. Storytellers include students, faculty and staff, and Voices of Wisdom (alums or community members).​ 
Light food and refreshments will be served in the Commons at 6:30 prior to the start of the program.​

Value the Voice will take place on Tuesdays, September 18, November 13, January 22, March 19, 7 p.m. UMMA Auditorium.

For more information, please contact Keith Jason at mrjason@umich.edu or 734-764-9128

Buddhist experiences can engage six senses: taste, touch, sight, sound, smell, and thought. In this evening presentation that ranges from incense to hand-stitched vestments to meditation, get a peek into the concepts and concerns that inspired the University of Michigan Museum of Art exhibition The Six Senses of Buddhism with Susan Dine, UMMA curatorial fellow 2017-18 and exhibition curator. In the spirit of experience, be ready for some hands-on interaction. The incorporation of incense may trigger the scent sensitive.

Susan Dine is a doctoral candidate in the University of Michigan's History of Art department. She served as a curatorial fellow at the University of Michigan Museum of Art in 2017-2018 and has been a research fellow at the Smithsonian's Freer | Sackler for this academic year (2018-2019). Her dissertation explores representations of language in medieval Buddhist visual culture of Japan.

Anthony Marra is the author of The Tsar of Love and Techno and New York Times bestseller A Constellation of Vital Phenomena, longlisted for the National Book Award and winner of the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize, the Anisfield-Wolf​ Book Award in fiction, and the Barnes and Noble Discover Award, the Grand prix des lectrices de Elle in France and was the first English-language novel to win the Athens Prize for Literature in Greece. Marra received his MFA from the Iowa Writers Workshop before fellowship and teaching at Stanford University.
 

His work has been honored with the National Magazine Award, the Whiting Award, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, and in 2017, Marra was included in Granta’s decennial list of best young American novelists, and won the $50,000 Simpson Prize in 2018, which he will put toward finishing a new novel about exiles in 1940s Hollywood, slated for release in 2019.

Today, we live inside the digital. Increasingly, our public and private lives are conducted online and in digital space where our relationships are forged, nurtured, or deleted, where our bills are paid and finances tracked, and where our ideologies are fed and our politics balkanized by our respective media bubbles. And while the digital now constitutes more and more of our daily routines, it can also offer a distorting abstraction of “external life.” Swiping left is easier than breaking up, and even the most civil among us can become an entitled consumer on Yelp. At once, our digital environments offer new grounds for engagement and interaction, and immersive venues for escape from the exigencies of the outside world. This session will discuss this dialectic. Drawing contributors from across art, architecture, design, and media studies, we will examine the digital as both a totalizing environment unto itself – a bubble apart from the external lifeworld – and a new venue for social organization and engagement.

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 Katarina Bishop and Thea Chacamaty. 

Katarina Bishop is a writer from Alabama. Her favorite things about the South are buttermilk biscuits and chocolate gravy. 

Thea Chacamaty is a writer from California. Her writing is devoted to the coast, the desert, San Francisco, and rock & roll. 

Relax and think about art by drawing in the galleries. Taking the time to look carefully and record what you see in a drawing enhances your enjoyment and understanding of art in the museum. Student Docents or other facilitators will be on hand to provide free sketching materials and facilitate your experience of looking and drawing. Beginners welcome! Meet by the Museum Store. 

Student Docents will enliven your afternoon and kick off the weekend with a brisk but intense encounter with a few key pieces of art and an engaging theme connecting their selections. Love and death, politics and humor, history, mythology, materiality, fashion, food, or other entry points will draw you in for a sweet peek at the UMMA collection. Each tour will last 10-15 minutes. Meet at the UMMA Store. 

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.

The works in the UMMA exhibition Abstraction, Color, and Politics in the Early 1970s explore intersections of social justice, race and gender through the large scale, abstract works of the artists. Join Larry M. Gant, Professor of Social Work and Professor, Penny W. Stamps School of Art & Design for an interpretative retrospective of the large-scale abstract works of Al Loving and Sam Gilliam. Gant explores the challenges and controversies experienced by the artists, suggesting  ways that their approaches have and continue to generate, in the words of James Baldwin, “the evidence of things unseen."

Student Docents will enliven your afternoon and kick off the weekend with a brisk but intense encounter with a few key pieces of art and an engaging theme connecting their selections. Love and death, politics and humor, history, mythology, materiality, fashion, food, or other entry points will draw you in for a sweet peek at the UMMA collection. Each tour will last 10-15 minutes. Meet at the UMMA Store. 

Student Docents will enliven your afternoon and kick off the weekend with a brisk but intense encounter with a few key pieces of art and an engaging theme connecting their selections. Love and death, politics and humor, history, mythology, materiality, fashion, food, or other entry points will draw you in for a sweet peek at the UMMA collection. Each tour will last 10-15 minutes. Meet at the UMMA Store. 

On the occasion of the exhibition Art in the Age of the Internet, UMMA and Vault of Midnight-Ann Arbor have partnered up to form the UMMA Book Club: The Age of the Internet in Comic Books. Join David Choberka, Andrew W. Mellon Manager of Academic Outreach & Teaching, for a discussion in the gallery that connects the art on view to  themes in the selected comics. Open to anyone, regardless of participation in the book club.

Art museums generally give primacy to the sense of sight. Religious and ritual objects, on the other hand, stimulate an array of multisensory experiences. Focusing on works from UMMA’s collection associated with different types of Japanese Buddhism, we engage all of the six senses in this exhibition. These six are integral to Buddhist devotion: sight, hearing, smell, touch, taste, and mind (or the activity of thinking, including what is perceived via the other senses). The “Six Senses” gallery experience extends beyond vision to include: the sound of chanting and ritual implements; the fragrance of incense; the feel of bronze, ceramic, and silk; and the creation of mental images. Gain a deeper understanding of the nature and histories of objects used in Buddhist practice with a docent tour of this fascinating exhibition.

UM Chamber Choir 
Eugene Rogers, conductor
with Imani Winds

SMTD@UMMA welcomes UM Chamber Choir’s new director Eugene Rogers for an evening of new and favorite works celebrating discovery and freedom, including the premiere of Jocelyn Hagen’s multi-movement The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci for chorus, chamber orchestra, and projected visuals. Grammy-nominated quintet Imani Winds joins the flagship SMTD choral ensemble on this and an arrangement of American Spirituals by Imani Winds member Jeff Scott. Also featured are Eric Whitacre’s Leonardo and his Flying Machine and Lee Hoiby’s Last Letter Home.

Student Docents will enliven your afternoon and kick off the weekend with a brisk but intense encounter with a few key pieces of art and an engaging theme connecting their selections. Love and death, politics and humor, history, mythology, materiality, fashion, food, or other entry points will draw you in for a sweet peek at the UMMA collection. Each tour will last 10-15 minutes. Meet at the UMMA Store. 

Join the U-M History of Art department as they honor longtime faculty members Alexander Potts and Susan Siegfried during this symposium on the social history of art featuring renowned art historians Thomas Crow (Institute of Fine Arts, NYU) and Darcy Grigsby (UC Berkeley).

Student Docents will enliven your afternoon and kick off the weekend with a brisk but intense encounter with a few key pieces of art and an engaging theme connecting their selections. Love and death, politics and humor, history, mythology, materiality, fashion, food, or other entry points will draw you in for a sweet peek at the UMMA collection. Each tour will last 10-15 minutes. Meet at the UMMA Store. 

Fang Zhang, Hughes Fellow at the U-M Liberthal-Rogel Center for Chinese Studies and wife of the artist Wang Qingsong, will lead a public tour of Wang Qingsong/Detroit/Beijing to kick off the symposium Chinese Contemporary Art: Exhibition, Collection, and Criticism. 

The symposium will take place at UMMA on Saturday, April 6, beginning at 9 a.m., and focus on the contributions of museums, exhibitions, collections and criticism to expand our understanding contemporary Chinese art practice.

Presented during the UMMA exhibition Wang Qingsong/Detroit/Beijing (February 2 - May 26, 2019), this symposium celebrates three decades of active engagement between American and Chinese artists, museum directors, curators, collectors, and scholars. The program includes two panels and two roundtable discussions that will focus on the contributions of museums, exhibitions, collections and criticism to expand our understanding contemporary Chinese art practice.

A public tour of Wang Qingsong/Detroit/Beijing will kick off the symposium on Friday, April 5, at 4 p.m. 

Consider art from a new and irreverent angle. Join representatives of UM student improv groups as they approach the lesser known un-highlights of the collection, uncover the shady ladies and gents within the frames, and make unexpected connections between various art works on the walls. With humor, contemporary pop culture references, and possibly games, these tours will be lively and entertaining, not necessarily enlightening. Join the fun and add your voice to these diverting episodes in the galleries. Meet at the UMMA Store.

The internet has changed every aspect of contemporary life—from how we interact with each other to how we work and play. Art in the Age of the Internet, 1989 to Today, examines the radical impact of internet culture on visual art since the invention of the web in 1989. Join UMMA docents as they explore the more than forty works across a variety of media—painting, performance, photography, sculpture, video, and web-based projects—in this exciting exhibition.

This program explores belief during times of crisis within a newly conceived narrative. Runyonland Productions rethinks Adam Guettel’s song cycle Myths & Hymns with a fresh cast of characters. Students in SMTD’s celebrated Musical Theater program, guided by Broadway director Geoff Packard with Broadway music director Jason DeBord leading an expanded instrumental arrangement, join art historians and leaders from three world religions to draw out a 21st-century moral of understanding and acceptance.

This program explores belief during times of crisis within a newly conceived narrative. Runyonland Productions rethinks Adam Guettel’s song cycle Myths & Hymns with a fresh cast of characters. Students in SMTD’s celebrated Musical Theater program, guided by Broadway director Geoff Packard with Broadway music director Jason DeBord leading an expanded instrumental arrangement, join art historians and leaders from three world religions to draw out a 21st-century moral of understanding and acceptance.

A 2009 MacArthur fellow, Edwidge Danticat is the author of several books, including Breath, Eyes, Memory, an Oprah Book Club selection, and Krik? Krak!, a National Book Award finalist. She is also the editor of The Butterfly’s Way: Voices from the Haitian Dyaspora in the United States, Best American Essays 2011, and has written six books for children and young adults, including Anacaona, Behind the Mountains, and Eight Days. Her memoir, Brother, I’m Dying, was a 2007 finalist for the National Book Award and a 2008 winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for autobiography. The Art of Death: Writing the Final Story, published in 2017, was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism.

A 2009 MacArthur fellow, Edwidge Danticat is the author of several books, including Breath, Eyes, Memory, an Oprah Book Club selection, and Krik? Krak!, a National Book Award finalist. She is also the editor of The Butterfly’s Way: Voices from the Haitian Dyaspora in the United States, Best American Essays 2011, and has written six books for children and young adults, including Anacaona, Behind the Mountains, and Eight Days. Her memoir, Brother, I’m Dying, was a 2007 finalist for the National Book Award and a 2008 winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for autobiography. The Art of Death: Writing the Final Story, published in 2017, was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism.

Student Docents will enliven your afternoon and kick off the weekend with a brisk but intense encounter with a few key pieces of art and an engaging theme connecting their selections. Love and death, politics and humor, history, mythology, materiality, fashion, food, or other entry points will draw you in for a sweet peek at the UMMA collection. Each tour will last 10-15 minutes. Meet at the UMMA Store. 

Student Docents will enliven your afternoon and kick off the weekend with a brisk but intense encounter with a few key pieces of art and an engaging theme connecting their selections. Love and death, politics and humor, history, mythology, materiality, fashion, food, or other entry points will draw you in for a sweet peek at the UMMA collection. Each tour will last 10-15 minutes. Meet at the UMMA Store. 

​Storytime at the Museum promotes art enjoyment for our youngest patrons. We read a story in the galleries and include a fun, age-appropriate, hands-on activity related it. Children ages three to six are invited to join us as we celebrate The Six Senses of Buddhism by meeting a giant panda named Stillwater in the book Zen Shorts. Parents must accompany children. Siblings are welcome to join the group. Meet in front of the UMMA Store.

Relax and think about art by drawing in the galleries. Taking the time to look carefully and record what you see in a drawing enhances your enjoyment and understanding of art in the museum. Student Docents or other facilitators will be on hand to provide free sketching materials and facilitate your experience of looking and drawing. Beginners welcome! Meet by the Museum Store. 

Student Docents will enliven your afternoon and kick off the weekend with a brisk but intense encounter with a few key pieces of art and an engaging theme connecting their selections. Love and death, politics and humor, history, mythology, materiality, fashion, food, or other entry points will draw you in for a sweet peek at the UMMA collection. Each tour will last 10-15 minutes. Meet at the UMMA Store. 

In celebration of UMMA’s new Power Family Program for Inuit Art, the Museum presents a special exhibition of two incredible, intertwining stories. One traces the development of contemporary Inuit art in the Canadian Arctic from the 1950s to the present. The other relates the fascinating story of the Power family’s important role in supporting and promoting Inuit art from the outset, bringing public attention to its artistic strength and cultural importance. The Power family’s collection is unusual in its strong representation of early contemporary carvings, incised drawings on ivory and antler, soapstone sculptures, and prints that evolved as Inuit artists developed their own artistic voices and responded creatively to their changing world. 

Daring Dances Student Fellows present global dance exploration of social issues in this  evening performance. The Daring Dances project, led by U-M dance professor Clare Croft, embraces how dance invites us into difficult conversations. This project  includes a Student Fellowship program to support U-M students with interests in dance and social justice.

Abstraction, Color, and Politics in the Early 1970s explores large-scale works of art by Helen Frankenthaler, Louise Nevelson, Sam Gilliam, and Al Loving, within the context of highly-charged debates of the early 1970s about aesthetics, politics, race, and feminism. This exhibition explores the gendered and racialized terms upon which great art was defined and assessed, and the strategy of artists to question the identity and aesthetics of the artist making the art. UMMA docents will help visitors look through the lens of the four artists’ works to explore the aesthetic choices inherent in abstraction as well as the acts of staining, pouring, draping, —or even taking apart the wall itself—within this charged political context.

Join us for a close up look at the collage art of contemporary artist, Mark Bradford. Using paper, interesting materials, and surprising techniques we will create abstract landscapes or cityscapes. The workshop begins with a tour of UMMA's gallery of Modern and Contemporary art, followed by a hands-on workshop with local artist, and UMMA community Docent, Susan Clinthorne. Designed for families with children of ages six and above. Parents must be present during the workshop.

Join us for a close up look at the collage art of contemporary artist, Mark Bradford. Using paper, interesting materials, and surprising techniques we will create abstract landscapes or cityscapes. The workshop begins with a tour of UMMA's gallery of Modern and Contemporary art, followed by a hands-on workshop with local artist, and UMMA community Docent, Susan Clinthorne. Designed for families with children of ages six and above. Parents must be present during the workshop.

​Participate in the ancient practice of yoga in the beautiful surroundings of the Museum of Art. This will be gentle yoga, especially appropriate for students in the throes of exams, led by a U-M RecSports teacher. All levels and community members welcome. This event is free but registration is required. Registration will open in March. Please bring your own yoga mat.

Art museums generally give primacy to the sense of sight. Religious and ritual objects, on the other hand, stimulate an array of multisensory experiences. Focusing on works from UMMA’s collection associated with different types of Japanese Buddhism, we engage all of the six senses in this exhibition. These six are integral to Buddhist devotion: sight, hearing, smell, touch, taste, and mind (or the activity of thinking, including what is perceived via the other senses). The “Six Senses” gallery experience extends beyond vision to include: the sound of chanting and ritual implements; the fragrance of incense; the feel of bronze, ceramic, and silk; and the creation of mental images. Gain a deeper understanding of the nature and histories of objects used in Buddhist practice with a docent tour of this fascinating exhibition.

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.

The Art, Ideas, & Politics Book Club is a partnership between UMMA and Literati Bookstore in connection with UMMA's exhibition Abstraction, Color, and Politics in the Early 1970s. Surrounded by the large-scale artworks by Sam Gilliam, Helen Frankenthaler, Al Loving, and Louise Nevelson, we will read and discuss bold and critical voices—both fiction and nonfiction—guided by Literati Bookstore's Creative Programs Manager, Gina Balibrera Amyx. Books will explore visions and critiques relevant to abstract art as well as the immense social changes of the period, and include Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power (Jan 10), Art on My Mind, Visual Politics by bell hooks (March 14), Ninth Street Women by Mary Gabriel (May 9), Flamethrowers by Rachel Kushner (July 11), and How We Get Free, edited by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor (Sept 12).

Gina Balibrera Amyx is the Creative Program Manager at Literati Bookstore, and a graduate of Zell MFA Program. Her writing has been featured in the Boston Review, Ploughshares, Michigan Quarterly Review, and The Wandering Song, an anthology of the Central American diaspora.

The Art, Ideas, & Politics Book Club will meet on the second Thursday of the month, 12-1 p.m. in the exhibition gallery. Pick and choose or come to all of them. Books will be available for sale at Literati Bookstore as well as after book club meetings at UMMA, at a 15% book club discount.

The Art, Ideas, & Politics Book Club is a partnership between UMMA and Literati Bookstore in connection with UMMA's exhibition Abstraction, Color, and Politics in the Early 1970s. Surrounded by the large-scale artworks by Sam Gilliam, Helen Frankenthaler, Al Loving, and Louise Nevelson, we will read and discuss bold and critical voices—both fiction and nonfiction—guided by Literati Bookstore's Creative Programs Manager, Gina Balibrera Amyx. Books will explore visions and critiques relevant to abstract art as well as the immense social changes of the period, and include Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power (Jan 10), Art on My Mind, Visual Politics by bell hooks (March 14), Ninth Street Women by Mary Gabriel (May 9), Flamethrowers by Rachel Kushner (July 11), and How We Get Free, edited by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor (Sept 12).

Gina Balibrera Amyx is the Creative Program Manager at Literati Bookstore, and a graduate of Zell MFA Program. Her writing has been featured in the Boston Review, Ploughshares, Michigan Quarterly Review, and The Wandering Song, an anthology of the Central American diaspora.

The Art, Ideas, & Politics Book Club will meet on the second Thursday of the month, 12-1 p.m. in the exhibition gallery. Pick and choose or come to all of them. Books will be available for sale at Literati Bookstore as well as after book club meetings at UMMA, at a 15% book club discount.

The Art, Ideas, & Politics Book Club is a partnership between UMMA and Literati Bookstore in connection with UMMA's exhibition Abstraction, Color, and Politics in the Early 1970s. Surrounded by the large-scale artworks by Sam Gilliam, Helen Frankenthaler, Al Loving, and Louise Nevelson, we will read and discuss bold and critical voices—both fiction and nonfiction—guided by Literati Bookstore's Creative Programs Manager, Gina Balibrera Amyx. Books will explore visions and critiques relevant to abstract art as well as the immense social changes of the period, and include Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power (Jan 10), Art on My Mind, Visual Politics by bell hooks (March 14), Ninth Street Women by Mary Gabriel (May 9), Flamethrowers by Rachel Kushner (July 11), and How We Get Free, edited by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor (Sept 12).

Gina Balibrera Amyx is the Creative Program Manager at Literati Bookstore, and a graduate of Zell MFA Program. Her writing has been featured in the Boston Review, Ploughshares, Michigan Quarterly Review, and The Wandering Song, an anthology of the Central American diaspora.

The Art, Ideas, & Politics Book Club will meet on the second Thursday of the month, 12-1 p.m. in the exhibition gallery. Pick and choose or come to all of them. Books will be available for sale at Literati Bookstore as well as after book club meetings at UMMA, at a 15% book club discount.