DETROIT — In a room with diffuse lighting, the “black box” gallery of the N’Namdi Center for Contemporary Art, a dark pantheon has been assembled. Tylonn Sawyer’s American Gods deftly splits the difference between a wide range of references, most prominently the orisha-based faith of Ifá and Yoruba religions, the codified behaviors […]
DEARBORN, Mich. — If you are feeling a bit disheartened by the current state of affairs here in the United States, perhaps you will find some consolation from this quote, attributed to Charles Eames, one half of the seminal Eames design duo, alongside his wife, Ray: “Beyond the age of […]
DETROIT — I grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area during the proto-tech days of letting one’s freak flag fly, so when I say something is “weird,” I sometimes have to remember, especially in the normalcy-loving Midwest, to offer the caveat that I do not mean it in a […]
Ideas – An Extraordinary Substance: an a.gen.cy lecture series “Ideas— An Extraordinary Substance” is a lecture series that celebrates obsession and ice cream. We ask people obsessively devoted to something to share their research and thoughts with us, and as we listen to their presentation and formulate questions for the Q&A […]
Artist Aaron Fowler manages to invoke a tricky tension in his interdisciplinary and immersive works. Fowler balances the oversize nature of emotion and human-scale drama with the intimacy of personal experience in densely layered pieces which he physically constructs in close quarters, before assembling them into large-scale finished presentations. He recently […]
DETROIT — Color-themed exhibitions often indicate a sense of slapdash or uninspired curatorial practice, which is why it was surprising to hear that Wasserman Projects was mounting Color-Aid for its summer program. Director Alison Wong, an artist in her own right, has never been known to phone it in, so the […]
DETROIT — The Travel Agent squints at her screen and asks what you’d like to do on your trip to Paradise. She offers few suggestions, but seems prepared to accommodate almost anything you can come up with. After each answer, she types busily into her computer — a teal iMac, […]
When I picked up Women of Resistance: Poems for a New Feminism, a collection of poems by 49 female-identified poets published by OR Books, I hoped to report that feminist poetry — and the new feminism that it represents — would not be a tragic, polemic trudge through the trash-pile that patriarchy […]
DETROIT — In today’s climate of alienation and separatist behavior, artists surely cannot be the only ones doing some hard thinking about ways to examine notions of difference, the concept of “enemy” states, and tactics for overcoming such perceived divisions in the interest of unity. But it is possible that […]
DETROIT — A lot of folks, if pressed, could probably come up with some kind of association with the name Bob Ross. If reminded that the Florida native was the host of a long-running instructional painting show on public television, The Joy of Painting, most people could recall Ross’s voluminous […]