Cullen Washington, Jr.’s work offers meditations on human interconnectivity and “the universal framework that undergirds all things.” Fusing together seemingly disparate concepts via the connective tissues of mixed media, Washington uses non-representational abstraction to understand order, chaos, social relationships, and other natural phenomena. The work takes audiences on a vibrant journey through and with materiality – a concerted and haptic interplay between gestures of painting and drawing and the modes of reproduction.

In the exhibition Cullen Washington, Jr.: The Public Square, his most recent series, Agoras, explores the “agora”— the ancient Greek public space — as a "gathering place" for activated assembly that functions as the heart of the commercial, spiritual, and political life in the city. Washington describes the contemporary agora as an “area of convergence, where the displaced can find a place.”

Washington’s work is in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum and has been exhibited at the Queens Museum, Saatchi Gallery London, and the Studio Museum in Harlem. He has been an artist in residence at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, The Studio Museum in Harlem, Yaddo, and The Joan Mitchell Foundation. He is also a recipient of the Joan Mitchell Foundation Award.

Co-presented by the Penny Stamps Distinguished Speaker Series and UMMA as part of the 2020 Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Symposium.

Cullen Washington, Jr.: The Public Square will be on view at UMMA January 25 - May 17, 2020.

Rion Amilcar Scott’s story collection, The World Doesn’t Require You (Norton/Liveright, August 2019), shatters rigid genre lines to explore larger themes of religion, violence, and love—all told with sly humor and a dash of magical realism.

Scott’s debut story collection, Insurrections (University Press of Kentucky, 2016), was awarded the 2017 PEN/Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction and the 2017 Hillsdale Award from the Fellowship of Southern Writers. His work has been published in journals such as The Kenyon Review, Crab Orchard Review, and The Rumpus, among others. One of his stories was listed as a notable in Best American Stories 2018 and one of his essays was listed as a notable in Best American Essays 2015. He was raised in Silver Spring, Maryland, and earned an MFA from George Mason University where he won both the Mary Roberts Rinehart award and a Completion Fellowship. He is currently a Kimbilio fellow and lives in Annapolis, MD.

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 Cherline Bazile and Aozora Brockman. 

Cherline Bazile is a Haitian-American writer from Florida. She studied at Harvard University and is a Paul & Daisy Soros Fellow. 

Aozora Brockman is a poet, essayist, and dancer. She was raised on an organic vegetable farm in Illinois and often wishes she could be a child again, elbow-deep in dirt. 

Families with children ages six and up are invited to look, learn, and create together in this hands-on workshop. Take a tour of abstract paintings in UMMA's Collection Ensemble installation, as well as work by artists such as Helen Frankenthaler and Joan Mitchell, followed by a hands-on workshop where you will create an abstract painting of your own! Led by local artist and UMMA docent Susan Clinthorne.

Please note:  Adults must accompany children. We cannot guarantee your spot if you arrive more than 15 minutes late.

Please also note: there will be video recording at this event. If you do not wish to participate, talk with an UMMA staff member on-site.

.Everyone and their cousin is trying to become a folk singer these days— Lily Talmers is no exception. Hailing from metro Detroit, and now a student in Ann Arbor, her songwriting is introspective and often cutting, drawing mostly from the 60's folk tradition. She is a singer, and multi-instrumentalist, accompanying herself on guitar, piano, and clawhammer banjo. Her writing technique is delicate, in which she intermingles the political and the extremely personal. Inspired by writers such as Gillian Welch, Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen, and Andrew Marlin (of Mandolin Orange), she perfectly balances the lyrical "heaviness" with a lightness in voice and accompaniment.
You can find her on Instagram, Facebook, and check her out on Spotify.

DescriptionFamilies with children ages six and up are invited to look, learn, and create together in this hands-on workshop. Take a tour of abstract paintings in UMMA's Collection Ensemble installation, as well as work by artists such as Helen Frankenthaler and Joan Mitchell, followed by a hands-on workshop where you will create an abstract painting of your own! Led by local artist and UMMA docent Susan Clinthorne.

Please note:  Adults must accompany children. We cannot guarantee your spot if you arrive more than 15 minutes late.

Please also note: there will be video recording at this event. If you do not wish to participate, talk with an UMMA staff member on-site.

Artist Cullen Washington, Jr. uses non-representational abstraction to understand order, chaos, and social relationships. His practice makes use of the grid to physically and metaphorically flatten hierarchies and rank to create a new conception of the possibilities for a public square. Washington sees this public space as an ideal "gathering place" for activated assembly and inclusive democracy. Historically, the public square has also been the site of spectacles and public humiliations; today, the internet holds out the promise of a level playing field with access for all that also includes space for extreme views and falsehoods.  Please join Mr. Washington and exhibition curator Vera Grant on opening day for a conversation about the role of art, artists, and the “hope of abstraction” within our current battles for the public square.

Light refreshments to follow.
 

This expansive look at the work and concerns of emerging contemporary artist Cullen Washington, Jr. pivots around the artist’s most recent series, Agoras. The compositions explore the ancient Greek public space as a site for activated assembly and the heart of the artistic, spiritual, and political life of the city. UMMA’s installation is designed with an actual public square at its center, complete with sound components featuring noted political and aesthetic discourse and surrounded by Washington’s soaring monumental collages. Works from four earlier series by the artist form the perimeter of the Museum’s largest special exhibition space. The artist describes his work as “abstract meditations on the grid and humanity.”

Dessa Cosma is a social justice activist and the founding director of Detroit Disability Power, which works to bridge the gap between the disability community and social justice movements. For Cosma, disability is a key part of her identity and of critical importance socially and politically—just like race, gender, sexual orientation, and religion. In this informal gallery talk, she will respond to the works of Japanese artist Mari Katayama and reflect upon her experiences and political expression as a disability activist. Mari Katayama uses her disabled body as the subject in her provocative series of works combining photography, sculpture, and textiles. Katayama was born with two fingers on one hand and had both of her legs amputated by the age of nine; she has worn prosthetics ever since. In order to fill a deep gap between her own understanding of self and her physicality in the context of contemporary society’s simplistic categorizations, Katayama began to explore her identity by objectifying her body in her art. 
 

Vera Grant, curator of the UMMA exhibition Cullen Washington, Jr.: The Public Square, presents an expansive look at the exhibition, and the artist’s recent series, Agoras. The compositions explore the ancient Greek public space as a site for activated assembly, through the dual lens of race and humanity.

Vera Ingrid Grant is an art consultant, curator, and writer, living in Ann Arbor, MI. Grant served as Deputy Director for Curatorial Affairs, and curator of modern and contemporary art at the University of Michigan Museum of Art (UMMA) in 2018-19. Previously, she was the founding director of the Ethelbert Cooper Gallery of African & African American Art at the Hutchins Center, Harvard University. She most recently curated Cullen Washington, Jr.: The Public Square; Reflections: An Ordinary Day. Grant has an MA in Modern European History from Stanford University with a concentration in comparative studies of race and visual culture and was a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Hamburg. She was the Associate Director for the Program in African and African American Studies (2001-2007) at Stanford University. She was a fellow (2015-16) at the Center for Curatorial Leadership (CCL).
January 29th. 

Michigan Supreme Court Chief Justice Bridget McCormack, legal scholar and practitioner Leonard M. Niehoff, and acclaimed actor John de Lancie explore the work of the courts and the law; how the human impulse for narrative performance and drama informs the inner workings of the courtroom; and how the courtroom is represented on stage and screen. This program will kick off the 2019-2020 Roman J. Witt artist residency project, Witness Lab, a courtroom installation and performance project opening at UMMA on February 15, 2020.
 

Chief Justice Bridget Mary McCormack joined the Michigan Supreme Court in January 2013, and became Chief Justice in January 2019. As the Chief Justice, McCormack has promoted statewide initiatives devoted to improving the courts service to the public, and in particular delivering on a promise that courts are independent, accessible, engaged with their communities and efficient. 

Leonard M. Niehoff is a nationally prominent law practitioner, professor, and scholar in three fields: media law and the First Amendment; higher education law; and trial and appellate litigation. Niehoff is at work on a forthcoming book about the Salem witch trials. 

Best known for his role as “Q” on Star Trek: The Next Generation, John de Lancie’s film and television credits are numerous and include The Hand that Rocks the Cradle, The Fisher King, Breaking Bad, and West Wing. He recently returned from a national tour of the “Scopes Monkey Trial” with Ed Asner where he played Clarence Darrow, and is the first recipient of the Clarence Darrow Award. De Lancie is currently at work on a play about the 2005 Kitzmiller vs. Dover School District trial.

The African Graduate Students Association, the African Students Association, the Seraphine Collective, and University of Michigan Museum of Art (UMMA) invite you to join us for Pan-African Pulp: A Night at UMMA, a celebration of the Diaspora inspired by the new UMMA installation Pan-African Pulp by Botswana-born artist Meleko Mokgosi.

Open-mic performances. Black global music with Detroit-based Seraphine Collective. Refreshments. Gallery viewing of Meleko Mokgosi's work.

SMTD students Grant Flick (fiddle and tenor guitar), and Hannah O’Brien (fiddle), have been working together to compose in multiple genres. With Hannah’s fiddling style rooted in traditional Irish music, and Grant’s background in American old-time, bluegrass and jazz music, the two have worked to fuse these genres as well as explore new traditional folk outlets. The duo will be playing traditional tunes as well as new compositions and arrangements that they are excited to share. 

For a taste of this music, you can find Grant’s work on Instagram as well as his albums with Jacob Warren and their group, Westbound Situation on Spotify and Bandcamp. 

In the midst of the political and cultural upheavals of the 60s and 70s, artists, critics, and the public grappled with the relationship between art, politics, race, and feminism. During these decades, the notion that abstraction was a purely formal and American art form, concerned only with timeless themes disconnected from the present, was met with increased skepticism. Women artists and artists of color began to actively and assertively explore abstraction’s possibilities. The artworks in Abstraction, Color, and Politics: The 1960s and 1970s demonstrate both radical and disarming changes in how artists worked and what they thought their art was about. Their new formal and intellectual strategies—seen here across large-scale and miniature work—dramatically transformed the practice of abstraction in the 1960s and 1970s in a politically shifting American landscape.

Ilya Kaminsky’s widely acclaimed parable in poems, Deaf Republic (Graywolf, 2019), reads like a two-act political drama in which lyric poems trace the experiences of citizens living under martial law. A New Yorker review called it a work of “profound imagination.” Poems from Deaf Republic were awarded Poetry magazine's Levinson Prize and the Pushcart Prize.  

Kaminsky is also the author of Dancing In Odessa (Tupelo Press, 2004), and Musica Humana (Chapiteau Press, 2002). Kaminsky has won the Whiting Writer's Award, the American Academy of Arts and Letters' Metcalf Award, the Dorset Prize, a Ruth Lilly Fellowship, and the Foreword Magazine’s Best Poetry Book of the Year award. Recently, he was on the short-list for the Neusdadt International Literature Prize. His poems have been translated into numerous languages and his books have been published in many countries including Turkey, Holland, Russia, France, Mexico, Macedonia, Romania, Spain and China, where his poetry was awarded the Yinchuan International Poetry Prize. His poems have been compared to work by Anna Akhmatova, Osip Mandelstam, and Marina Tsvetaeva.

He is the editor of several anthologies, among them The Ecco Anthology of International Poetry (Ecco, 2010), co-edited with Susan Harris, which John Ashbery praised as “immediately indispensable;” A God in the House: Poets Talk About Faith (Tupelo Press, 2012), co-edited with Katherine Towler;  Gossip and Metaphysics: Russian Modernist Poets and Prose (Tupelo Press, 2014), co-edited with Katie Farris and Valzhyna Mort; and In the Shape of the Human Body I am Visiting the Earth: Poems from Far and Wide (McSweeney's, 2017) with Dominic Luxford and Jesse Nathan.  With Jean Valentine, he has co-translated Dark Elderberry Branch: Poems of Marina Tsvetaeva.

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 Sofia Ergas Groopman and Isabel Neal.

Sofia Ergas Groopman is a writer from New York. She is a second year in the Helen Zell Writers Program and lives with her dachshund, Roger, in Ann Arbor. 

Isabel is a poet and educator from Boston. She is a Gemini. 

Families with children ages six and up are invited to look, learn, and create together in this hands-on workshop inspired by UMMA's second exhibition of Inuit Art, Reflections: An Ordinary Day. Guided by local artist Sajeev Vadakoottu, participants will make a drawing of an image from their own imagination directly on a screen, essentially creating a stencil, and use that stencil to make prints on paper, bags or t-shirts. (Please bring your own canvas bags or t-shirts!) 

Please note: Adults must accompany children. We cannot guarantee your spot if you arrive more than 15 minutes late.

Please also note: there will be video recording at this event. If you do not wish to participate, talk with an UMMA staff member on-site.

Families with children ages six and up are invited to look, learn, and create together in this hands-on workshop inspired by UMMA's second exhibition of Inuit Art, Reflections: An Ordinary Day. Guided by local artist Sajeev Vadakoottu, participants will make a drawing of an image from their own imagination directly on a screen, essentially creating a stencil, and use that stencil to make prints on paper, bags or t-shirts. (Please bring your own canvas bags or t-shirts!)

Please note: Adults must accompany children. We cannot guarantee your spot if you arrive mroe than 15 minutes late.

Please also note: there will be video recording at this event. If you do not wish to participate, talk with an UMMA staff member on-site.

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 midterms, led by a U-M RecSports teacher. All levels and community members welcome. This event is free but registration is required. Please bring your own yoga mat.​

Our second exhibition on Inuit art explores the serene expressions of day-to-day activities found in mid-century to contemporary Inuit prints and sculptures. Donors inspired by the Power gift and the development of a Power Program for Inuit Art at UMMA contributed to this exhibition with diffuse offerings to incorporate into our holdings, or with loans to expand our conversations. 

The votes are in! For the last four months UMMA visitors have voted for their top favorite photographs of the 1,000 on view in the Take Your Pick exhibition. Now what? Join Jennifer M. Friess, Assistant Curator of Photography, to look at the 250 winning photographs that will be acquired into the Museum’s permanent collection and discuss the exciting research and exhibition potential of this new acquisition, as well as the significance of snapshot photography in the digital age.

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). 

Collection Ensemble presents the first major reinstallation of UMMA's iconic entry space in over a decade. It exchanges Alumni Memorial Hall's previous focus on European and American painting for a broad mix of American, European, African, and Asian art from across media, sampling the Museum's remarkable, disparate holdings. The installation is organized into thematic and formal vignettes that respond to the concepts and ideas resonating from an extraordinary large-scale photograph of a vacant cathedral by contemporary German artist Candida Höfer. Featuring works of art by numerous famous and not-so-famous artists, many of them artists of color and women—including Charles Alston, Christo, Theaster Gates, Jenny Holzer, Roni Horn, Do-Ho Suh, Kara Walker, and others, Collection Ensemble reimagines the collection not as a fixed entity with one set of meanings to be unearthed, but instead as an active, creative, sometimes startling source of material and ideas, open for debate and interpretation.

Please join us for a monthly gathering that offers a starting point to discover a variety of narratives pertaining to the cultures of North American Indigenous people featuring the works of Inuit and indigenous authors. We will meet on the third Sunday of each month in the University of Michigan Museum of Art’s exhibition, Reflections: An Ordinary Day. The prints, drawings, and sculptures featured in this exhibition of Inuit art explore the relationship between the artist and the representation of everyday experiences. Each of the four gatherings will present an opportunity to enjoy traditional storytelling as well as discuss books written by contemporary Inuit and Native American authors. Our book club facilitator is Elizabeth James, a Detroit-based Powhatan storyteller and Program Manager at the U-M Department for AfroAmerican and African Studies.​

3rd Sunday of the month at at 3 p.m. 

January 19: The Right to Be Cold: One Woman's Story of Protecting Her Culture, the Arctic and the Whole Planet by Sheila Watt-Cloutier 

February 16: House Made of Dawn [50th Anniversary Ed]: A Novel (P.S.) Anniversary Edition
by N. Scott Momaday 

March 22: Sanaaq:  An Inuit Novel by Mitiarjuk Nappaaluk (Author), Peter Frost (Translator)

April 19: Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer

Books will be available for sale in the UMMA Shop. Book Club participants will receive a 10% discount.
 

Courtney McClellan is an artist and writer from Greensboro, N.C., and the current Roman Witt Artist in Residence at the Stamps School of Art & Design. Her work addresses public ritual, institutional space, and objects that invite or demand speech. Her explorations result in sculpture, performance, installation, writing, and video. Her studio practice includes experimenting with materials, but also reaches to fields like law, theater, and journalism. For the past five years she has studied legal simulation.

At UMMA, McClellan will mount Witness Lab, an architectural courtroom installation and performance series. The facsimile courtroom located in the glassed-in Stenn Gallery will host legal simulations from participating groups including The Trial Advocacy Society and the Oral Argument Competition from the University of Michigan Law School, as well as the undergraduate team of the Collegiate American Mock Trial Association. Additionally, court transcript readings and trial advocacy workshops will be performed in the gallery. Stamps students will observe and document the courtroom activity through drawing, text, photography, and video. The accumulated documents will result in a publication. 

Witness Lab offers audiences a complex truth. By studying the courtroom as a space of performance, and the lawyers as agents of justice, participants and passersby consider the physical and social architecture of the law.

Acclaimed by The New Yorker as “an American Master,” Composer David Lang is part visionary sound artist, part musical mad scientist.  With one foot in the classical tradition and one in the future, his music explores meaning and musical relationships in a way that is at once fiercely intellectual and plain-spoken.  Join the U-M Chamber Choir, under the direction of Eugene Rogers, for a stunning performance of Lang's Pulitzer-Prize winning work, the little match girl passion. The New York Times describes this touching work as “understated and ethereal… tender and mysterious.” The performance on February 18  will be the opening event of his week-long William Bolcom Guest Residency at the University of Michigan, which will feature performances of his music and other events across campus.  
 

Catherine Lacey’s short story collection, Certain American States (FSG, 2018), portrays Americans tortured by the mundanity of their lives. The Chicago Tribune calls it "exactly what you would expect from Lacey: perfect sentences, penetrating insights, devastating epiphanies.”

Lacey is also the author of The Answers (FSG, 2017), a New York Times Top 10 Book of 2017, and Nobody is Ever Missing (FSG, 2014), a New Yorker Best Book of 2014. She has won a Whiting Award, was a finalist for the NYPL's Young Lions Fiction Award, was named one of Granta Magazine's Best Young American Novelists, and has been compared to both Don DeLillo and Margaret Atwood.

Writing about The Answers, The Los Angeles Times said, "Like the work of Clarice Lispector or Rachel Cusk, Lacey’s novels seem to be on the verge of inventing a new genre somewhere between prose poem and fugue state." Discussing The Answers with Interview Magazine, Lacey notes, “I want things to be both beautiful and readable. I’m not trying to alienate a reader, or make someone think they can’t read it because they like more commercial things. I hope that there’s room for any sort of mind to encounter the book.”

Her work has been translated into French, Italian, Spanish, Dutch and German. With Forsyth Harmon, she co-authored a nonfiction book, The Art of the Affair. Her work has appeared in McSweeney’s Quarterly, The Believer, The Paris Review Daily, The Atlantic, and others.

Storytime at the Museum promotes art enjoyment for our youngest patrons. Join us as we travel around the world and look at art from different countries. We read a story in the galleries and include a fun, age-appropriate, hands-on activity related to it. Parents must accompany children. Siblings are welcome to join the group. Meet in front of the UMMA Shop.

Radio Campfire and UMMA present Town Square -- audio stories that unfold in public places
 
Set to the backdrop of artist Cullen Washington’s large scale abstract Agoras paintings, this Radio Campfire event will feature a series of creative audio stories, soundscapes, and sonic postcards that, like Washington’s paintings, tell us stories about the places where civic life ensues.  

Radio Campfire is a community listening event series based in southeast Michigan. Going to a Radio Campfire is “like going to the movies for your ears.” We gather, we dim the lights, and listen to a specially curated selection of creative audio stories on a theme. If you like podcasts, you’ll love Radio Campfire.
 
Inspired by the UMMA exhibition Cullen Washington, Jr.: The Public Square (on view through May 17, 2020), Radio Campfire: Town Square will be hosted and produced by Stephanie Rowden and Juliet Hinely.
 
The event begins at 7 p.m. Doors open at 6:45 p.m. The gallery is located on Floor 2 of the Alumni Memorial Hall building.
  
UMMA is wheelchair accessible.
 
This event is best for ages 14+

Join a docent on a journey through time and memory, as you explore over 1,000 found photographs together. Take Your Pick invites you—the Museum’s visitors—to select photographs for our permanent collection. What belongs in a permanent collection, and why? Who and what should be represented, and how should we decide? This exhibition considers these questions in regard to 1,000 amateur photographs on loan from the private collection of Peter J. Cohen, who has gathered more than 60,000 snapshots while exploring flea markets in the United States and Europe over two decades. The images he has collected depict all aspects of daily life and reveal the dynamic histories of amateur photography. Such pictures have particular significance in the current digital age, when it is much less common to make physical copies of personal photographs. They constitute important artifacts of twentieth-century visual culture and precedents for the photographs we still make today. You are invited to make your voice heard in the selection process by voting for the photographs that resonate most with you!  

The notion that abstraction was a purely formal and American art form, concerned only with timeless themes disconnected from the present, was met with increased skepticism in the midst of the political and cultural upheavals of the 1960s and 70s. Kaleidoscope, UMMA’s third and final edition of this exhibition series, examines the constantly changing practices of local Detroit artists, women artists, and artists of color as they actively embraced abstraction’s possibilities. Their strategies dramatically transformed the practice of abstraction in a shifting American political landscape. Join an UMMA docent on a tour through this eye-opening exhibition. 

Families with children ages six and up are invited to look, learn, and create together in this hands-on workshop inspired by the UMMA exhibition Cullen Washington, Jr.: The Public Square.  Visit the exhibition—the compositions are soaring monumental collages exploring the idea of the public square as the heart of the artistic, spiritual, and political life of the city —and create an original art work. Led by local artist and long-time UMMA docent Susan Clinthorne.

Parents must accompany children. We cannot guarantee your spot if you arrive more than 15 minutes late.

Families with children ages six and up are invited to look, learn, and create together in this hands-on workshop inspired by the UMMA exhibition Cullen Washington, Jr.: The Public Square.  Visit the exhibition—the compositions are soaring monumental collages exploring the idea of the public square as the heart of the artistic, spiritual, and political life of the city —and create an original art work. Led by local artist and long-time UMMA docent Susan Clinthorne.

Parents must accompany children. We cannot guarantee your spot if you arrive more than 15 minutes late.

Our second exhibition on Inuit art explores the serene expressions of day-to-day activities found in mid-century to contemporary Inuit prints and sculptures. Donors inspired by the Power gift and the development of a Power Program for Inuit Art at UMMA contributed to this exhibition with diffuse offerings to incorporate into our holdings, or with loans to expand our conversations. 

On the evening of the Michigan primaries, UMMA offers up a late night student event with live music, food, and election updates in partnership with the Center for World Performance Studies and the Ginsberg Center’s Big Ten Voter Challenge.

This program is part of UMMA's on-going commitment to and partnership with the Big Ten Voter Challenge and is offered in connection with the winter term exhibition Cullen Washington, Jr.: The Public Square (on view January 25 - May 17, 2020) in which questions about democratic society are expressed through large-scale abstract art.​
 

Professor Leonard M. Niehoff will lead a U-M Law seminar discussion on the Salem Witch Trials. Using Arthur Miller’s The Crucible as source material, aspects of the Witch Trials will be performed in order for students to consider colonial American law. The course addresses the research for Professor Niehoff’s forthcoming book about the Salem Witch Trials.

Before Grace Lin was an award-winning and New York Times bestselling author and illustrator of picture books, early readers and middle grade novels, she was the only Asian girl (except for her sisters) going to her elementary school in Upstate New York. That experience, good and bad, has influenced her books—including her Newbery Honor Where the Mountain Meets the Moon, her Geisel Honor Ling & Ting, her National Book Finalist When the Sea Turned to Silver and her Caldecott Honor A Big Mooncake for Litte Star​.

That experience also causes Lin to persevere for diversity: She is an occasional New England Public Radio commentator, she gave a TEDx talk titled “The Windows and Mirrors of Your Child’s Bookshelf,” and she authored a PBSNewHour video essay called "What to do when you realize classic books from your childhood are racist?" She continues this mission with her two podcasts kidlitwomen* and Book Friends Forever. In 2016, Lin’s art was displayed at the White House and Lin was recognized by President Obama’s office as a Champion of Change for Asian American and Pacific Islander Art and Storytelling.

Greenhills Middle School students will speculate about a trial that never happened. Riffing on Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, students will put Romeo on trial. You decide: Is Romeo responsible for Tybalt’s death?

​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 Zahir Janmohamed and Joumana Altallal.

Zahir Janmohamed is a fiction writer from Sacramento, California. 

Joumana Altallal is an Iraqi-Lebanese poet and educator. Before moving to Ann Arbor, she lived in Charlottesville, Virginia. 

Collection Ensemble presents the first major reinstallation of UMMA's iconic entry space in over a decade. It exchanges Alumni Memorial Hall's previous focus on European and American painting for a broad mix of American, European, African, and Asian art from across media, sampling the Museum's remarkable, disparate holdings. The installation is organized into thematic and formal vignettes that respond to the concepts and ideas resonating from an extraordinary large-scale photograph of a vacant cathedral by contemporary German artist Candida Höfer. Featuring works of art by numerous famous and not-so-famous artists, many of them artists of color and women—including Charles Alston, Christo, Theaster Gates, Jenny Holzer, Roni Horn, Do-Ho Suh, Kara Walker, and others, Collection Ensemble reimagines the collection not as a fixed entity with one set of meanings to be unearthed, but instead as an active, creative, sometimes startling source of material and ideas, open for debate and interpretation.

Professor Leonard M. Niehoff will lead a U-M Law seminar discussion on the Salem Witch Trials. Using Arthur Miller’s The Crucible as source material, aspects of the Witch Trials will be performed in order for students to consider colonial American law. The course addresses the research for Professor Niehoff’s forthcoming book about the Salem Witch Trials.

Jenny Zhang’s story collection, Sour Heart (Lenny, 2017), centers on immigrants who have traded their endangered lives as artists in China and Taiwan for the constant struggle of life at the poverty line in 1990s New York City. It examines the many ways that family and history can weigh us down and also lift us up. From the young woman coming to terms with her grandmother’s role in the Cultural Revolution to the daughter struggling to understand where her family ends and she begins, to the girl discovering the power of her body to inspire and destroy, these seven stories illuminate the complex and messy inner lives of girls struggling to define themselves.

Zhang is also the author of the poetry collection Dear Jenny, We Are All Find. Her second collection of poetry, My Baby First Birthday, is forthcoming from Tin House. She is the recipient of the Pen/Bingham Award for Debut Fiction and the LA Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction. 
 

​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 Sarah Duffett and Michael M. Weinstein. 

Sarah Duffett is a writer from New England and the cohost of the Webster Reading Series. She currently lives in Ann Arbor. 

Michael M. Weinstein is a poet, teacher, translator, and cohost of the Webster Reading Series. Originally from New York, he now lives in Ann Arbor. 

Storytime at the Museum promotes art enjoyment for our youngest patrons. Join us as we travel around the world and look at art from different countries. We read a story in the galleries and include a fun, age-appropriate, hands-on activity related to it. Parents must accompany children. Siblings are welcome to join the group. Meet in front of the UMMA Shop.

Jacob Warren is a multi-style bassist originally from Ann Arbor, MI. Jacob's background and interests include a wide variety of acoustic styles, such as classical, traditional and contemporary folk, jazz, bluegrass, newgrass, Swedish, and many others. He obtained his Bachelor's in Music Performance at the University of Michigan School of Music, Theatre & Dance. He also holds a Masters of Music in Improvisation and Chamber Music from the University of Michigan. This program will feature an eclectic mix of solo double bass arrangements from many different genres.

You can find him on Instagram and Facebook.

This expansive look at the work and concerns of emerging contemporary artist Cullen Washington, Jr. pivots around the artist’s most recent series, Agoras. The compositions explore the ancient Greek public space as a site for activated assembly and the heart of the artistic, spiritual, and political life of the city. UMMA’s installation is designed with an actual public square at its center, complete with sound components featuring noted political and aesthetic discourse and surrounded by Washington’s soaring monumental collages. Works from four earlier series by the artist form the perimeter of the Museum’s largest special exhibition space. The artist describes his work as “abstract meditations on the grid and humanity.”

Please join us for a monthly gathering that offers a starting point to discover a variety of narratives pertaining to the cultures of North American Indigenous people featuring the works of Inuit and indigenous authors. We will meet on the third Sunday of each month in the University of Michigan Museum of Art’s exhibition, Reflections: An Ordinary Day. The prints, drawings, and sculptures featured in this exhibition of Inuit art explore the relationship between the artist and the representation of everyday experiences. Each of the four gatherings will present an opportunity to enjoy traditional storytelling as well as discuss books written by contemporary Inuit and Native American authors. Our book club facilitator is Elizabeth James, a Detroit-based Powhatan storyteller and Program Manager at the U-M Department for AfroAmerican and African Studies.​

3rd Sunday of the month at at 3 p.m. 

January 19: The Right to Be Cold: One Woman's Story of Protecting Her Culture, the Arctic and the Whole Planet by Sheila Watt-Cloutier 

February 16: House Made of Dawn [50th Anniversary Ed]: A Novel (P.S.) Anniversary Edition
by N. Scott Momaday 

March 22: Sanaaq:  An Inuit Novel by Mitiarjuk Nappaaluk (Author), Peter Frost (Translator)

April 19: Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer

Books will be available for sale in the UMMA Shop. Book Club participants will receive a 10% discount.
 

Witness Lab is a project of Roman Witt Artist-in-Residence, Courtney McClellan. It is part museum exhibit, part performance art, part research project, which seeks to illuminate the intersection of performance and the law in new ways. Join McClellan for a discussion of her exploration of the act of witnessing as it relates to her art practice. Additionally, she will share motivations for creating Witness Lab and current findings from work in progress. 

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.

Ambiance Dance Team, a U-M Student organization, is a collective of dancers interested in fostering a social, artistic and diverse community. Their latest work, Deviation, acknowledges the struggle and strength of young women making their mark in a male dominated world.

Arabesque Dance Troupe, a U-M Student organization, brings focus to Middle Eastern and North African Culture through artmaking. “Arab Expressions” brings these art forms together for a yearly celebration. Arabesque will perform an excerpt from this concert, highlighting their history, culture and experiences. 

Iraqi Student Association (ISA) aims to promote and raise awareness of Iraqi and Middle Eastern culture. The association strives to bring the Iraqi community together while educating the student population at the University of Michigan on topics within the Iraqi and Middle Eastern society. ISA will invite the audience to join in learning “Chobi”, a traditional dance performed at public events and weddings. *Audience Participation Optional 

Queer Artist Collective, an organization founded by dance majors Alana ​Packo and Rose Janusiak, aims to create a space where Queer artists from any craft can establish community. Their latest work, “An Exploration of Intimacy in Queer Friendship," asks the question how can two people of the same sexuality develop a friendship of deep intimacy despite the prospect of attraction?  

Meleko Mokgosi's monumental installation Pan-African Pulp presents a complex and multi-layered reflection on histories of Pan-Africanism, Black Consciousness, and Southern African resistance movements. Made up of five parts, it engages with its audience in various ways, encouraging visitors to access this rich history through the medium of history painting, through popular posters, through comic books, academic literature or stories written in Mokgosi's mother tongue - Setswana. Multiple interpretations and readings are not only possible but are explicitly encouraged by the artist, whose work is saturated with archival research, theory and deep thinking about the history of artmaking and the powerful role artworks have (and continue to have) as sites of resistance and activism.

Taking Pan-African Pulp as their starting point, five different speakers from the University of Michigan and Michigan State University will bring their unique points of view to the table, offering up new and perhaps unexpected interpretations, exploring how one artwork may act as a prism for diverse readings. 

The program will take place in the Mokgosi installation on the first floor between the UMMA Shop and Cafe. 
Speakers include:

Bénédicte Boisseron, from the U-M Department of Afroamerican and African Studies (DAAS), will respond to the mural examining the complexity of blackness;

Anita Gonzalez, from the U-M School of Music, Theatre & Dance, the stories from Setswana oral tradition.

Annette Joseph-Gabriel, from the U-M Department for Romance Languages and Literatures, the 1969 Algiers Pan-African manifesto annotated by the artist;

Jamie Monson, Director, African Studies Center at Michigan State University, on the historical posters from internationalist and Pan-African movements from around the world;

Randall Scott, from the MSU Comic Art Collection, the large-scale panels inspired by African photo novels of the 1960s and ’70s.

The discussion will be moderated by Laura De Becker, UMMA’s Helmut & Candis Stern Associate Curator of African Art.

Chief Justice Bridget McCormack teaches the basics of the Michigan Supreme Court. Using famous Michigan cases, McCormack will illuminate today’s important judicial decisions. Attend one or both.

Judge Timothy Connors and Margaret Connors will teach vital lessons from their lauded U-M trial advocacy class. Law students and viewers will consider the importance of performance and movement when mediating a case. Traditional courtroom negotiations will be addressed, as well as alternative forms of adjudication.

Upon the 50th anniversary year of his groundbreaking book “Expanded Cinema” author Gene Youngblood will present “Secession From the  Broadcast: Expanded Cinema in the 21st Century” as a part of the 58th Ann Arbor Film Festival. The presentation will begin with a  30-minute documentary about the author made by Bryan Konefsky, titled: “Secession From the Broadcast: Gene Youngblood and the Communications Revolution." Following the film Mr. Youngblood will discuss the meaning of “Secession From the Broadcast” and describe his current publishing project, Tarnished Angel: The Diaries of George Kuchar, co-authored with my wife Jane Youngblood.
 
Gene Youngblood is an internationally known theorist of media arts and politics, and a scholar of alternative cinemas. His book Expanded Cinema (1970) was seminal in establishing media art and computer art as recognized artistic and scholarly disciplines. The term “expanded cinema” has long been generic, and the book is considered a classic. A 50th Anniversary Edition of Expanded Cinema was published in 2020 by Fordham University Press in New York City. Youngblood is also widely known as a pioneering voice in the media democracy movement in the U.S. He has taught, written and lectured on the political economy of mass media since 1970, more recently under the title Secession From the Broadcast.

Kathleen Graber’s poetry collection, The River Twice (Princeton University Press, 2019), is an elegiac meditation on impermanence and change. She presents a fluid world in which so much―including space and time, the subterranean realm of dreams, and language itself―seems protean.
Graber is also the author of two previous books of  poetry, Correspondence and The Eternal City, which was a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. She is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Guggenheim Foundation. She is an associate professor of English at Virginia Commonwealth University.

Join Docent Laura Seligman for a contemplative gallery experience. You will have the opportunity to personally engage with one work of art for an extended period of time, followed by brief discussion. Tour will begin promptly. Please meet outside the Museum Shop. No prior meditation experience is necessary. Laura Seligman is a visual artist and has been practicing mindful meditation for decades. 

Native American students and faculty at the University of Michigan have been bringing the annual powwow to the Ann Arbor area since 1972. At this year’s 48th Annual Dance for Mother Earth Powwow, Isabel Engel, the Andrew W. Mellon Academic Teaching Fellow at the University of Michigan Museum of Art, will share images from and information about UMMA’s new Power Family Program for Inuit Art.  This collection of sculptures and prints from Kinngait (Cape Dorset), in the Nunavut region of Canada, will foster rich inquiry and discussion. Learn about the current installation, Reflections: An Ordinary Day, the art and the artists, and plans for the future of the program.

The powwow is one of the largest in North America and is a time for "celebration for and by the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and Native American communities alike," according to the Native American Student Association, which coordinates the event. The two-day event begins Saturday and features vendors, traditional music, dancing, and ceremonial outfits. 

Join Docent Laura Seligman for a contemplative gallery experience. You will have the opportunity to personally engage with one work of art for an extended period of time, followed by brief discussion. Tour will begin promptly. Please meet outside the Museum Shop. No prior meditation experience is necessary. Laura Seligman is a visual artist and has been practicing mindful meditation for decades. 

Jury Duty is a jazz quartet consisting of U-M School of Music, Theatre and Dance (SMTD) sophomores Eric Banitt, Mitchell Dangler, Reuben Stump, and Ian Thompson. The group began playing together in preparation for their annual performance examinations in the jazz department. These examinations are called "juries," birthing the group's name. After adequately preparing for their freshman year jury, Jury Duty began writing and performing their original compositions in dorm rooms, houses, and other venues around Ann Arbor.

A yooper hailing from Marquette, Michigan, Eric Banitt is a jazz piano major. With his roots in classical music, Eric also plays the trumpet and violin. Mitch Dangler is a sophomore from Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Mitch plays the drum-set, and if you’re lucky he’ll whip out a couple of spoons. Reuben Stump is from Lansing, Michigan, and has been playing the bass for over 4 years. Reuben grew up performing and listening to the Great American Songbook. Ian Thompson is from Troy, Michigan and has been playing guitar for 5 years. Ian's roots are in classical and rock music, having studied the piano and trumpet before switching to guitar.

Judge Timothy Connors and Margaret Connors will teach vital lessons from their lauded U-M trial advocacy class. Law students and viewers will consider the importance of performance and movement when mediating a case. Traditional courtroom negotiations will be addressed, as well as alternative forms of adjudication.

New York based artist Abigail DeVille creates immersive works and installations designed to bring attention to these forgotten stories, such as with the sculpture she built on the site of a former African American burial ground in Harlem. With family roots spanning back at least two generations, DeVille’s work about New York City is both personal and political. Acting as an archaeologist, DeVille collects and reallocates found materials to give physical presence to unspoken stories and forgotten pasts. Her work often focuses around themes of displacement, migration, marginalization, and cultural invisibility. As an extension of her installation practice, DeVille also designs sets for theatrical productions, including the Stratford Festival and Harlem Stage. Her work is part of some of the most prestigious collections in the world and has been exhibited internationally, including the Institute of Contemporary Art (Los Angeles); The Studio Museum in Harlem (New York); the Pinchuk Art Centre (Kiev); New Museum (New York); and the Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam).  An honors fellow at The Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, a Creative Capital grantee, and an OBIE Award for Design recipient, DeVille is currently in residence at the American Academy in Rome. 

Co-presented with the Institute for Humanities, presenting No Space Hidden (Under Heaven), an exhibition of work by Abigail DeVille, on view at the IH Gallery April 1-May 7, 2020. There will be an exhibition reception at the IH Gallery following this event.​

The notion that abstraction was a purely formal and American art form, concerned only with timeless themes disconnected from the present, was met with increased skepticism in the midst of the political and cultural upheavals of the 1960s and 70s. Kaleidoscope, UMMA’s third and final edition of this exhibition series, examines the constantly changing practices of local Detroit artists, women artists, and artists of color as they actively embraced abstraction’s possibilities. Their strategies dramatically transformed the practice of abstraction in a shifting American political landscape. Join an UMMA docent on a tour through this eye-opening exhibition. 

Chief Justice Bridget McCormack teaches the basics of the Michigan Supreme Court. Using famous Michigan cases, McCormack will illuminate today’s important judicial decisions. Attend one or both.

Lauren Groff’s latest book, Florida (Riverhead Books, 2018), explores loneliness, rage, family, and the passage of time. With shocking accuracy and effect, she pinpoints the moments, decisions and connections behind human pleasure and pain, hope and despair, love and fury—the moments that make us alive. Florida won the Story Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Award, the Southern Book Prize, and the Kirkus Prize. 

Groff is also the author of the short story collection, Delicate Edible Birds, and three novels: The Monsters of Templeton, a finalist for the Orange Prize for New Writers; Arcadia, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Fiction; and Fates and Furies, a finalist for the National Book Award, National Book Critics Circle Prize, and the Kirkus Prize, and the winner of the Grand Prix de l'Héroïne in France. 

Groff’s short fiction has won prizes including the Pushcart Prize, the PEN/O. Henry Prize, and the Paul Bowles Prize, and has appeared frequently in the New Yorker and the Best American Short Stories anthology. She has held fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Radcliffe Foundation, and her work has been published in over 30 languages. She lives in Gainesville, Florida.

Njideka Akunyili Crosby, a 2017 MacArthur Genius Grant recipient, is a Nigerian-born visual artist working in Los Angeles. Crosby uses collage and photo transfer-based paintings to expose and explore moments of collision, moments of unity, and moments of hybridity found in cross-cultural relationships and in cultures of colonization. Crosby’s work is both personal and universal, as she draws upon her lived experience with interracial marriage, immigration, and dual ideas of home, and the deep traces of colonization in Nigeria. In 2019, Crosby was a participant in the Venice Biennale 58th International Art Exhibition, May You Live in Interesting Times, curated by Ralph Rugoff. Recent solo exhibitions include Njideka Akunyili Crosby: The Beautyful Ones at the National Portrait Gallery in London and Counterparts, which debuted at the Baltimore Museum of Art in 2017 before traveling to the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas, in 2018. She received an honorary doctorate of art from Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania in 2019 and was named among the Financial Times' “Women of the Year” in 2016. 

Lauren Groff’s latest book, Florida (Riverhead Books, 2018), explores loneliness, rage, family, and the passage of time. With shocking accuracy and effect, she pinpoints the moments, decisions and connections behind human pleasure and pain, hope and despair, love and fury—the moments that make us alive. Florida won the Story Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Award, the Southern Book Prize, and the Kirkus Prize. 

Groff is also the author of the short story collection, Delicate Edible Birds, and three novels: The Monsters of Templeton, a finalist for the Orange Prize for New Writers; Arcadia, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Fiction; and Fates and Furies, a finalist for the National Book Award, National Book Critics Circle Prize, and the Kirkus Prize, and the winner of the Grand Prix de l'Héroïne in France. 

Groff’s short fiction has won prizes including the Pushcart Prize, the PEN/O. Henry Prize, and the Paul Bowles Prize, and has appeared frequently in the New Yorker and the Best American Short Stories anthology. She has held fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Radcliffe Foundation, and her work has been published in over 30 languages. She lives in Gainesville, Florida.

How do we arrive at an understanding of truth within our courts and justice system? What constitutes witnessing in our current tech and data saturated context? Courtney McClellan, the 2019-2020 Roman J. Witt Artist in Residence, will discuss Witness Lab, an installation and performance project that investigates who performs the role of witness in our society and examines the relationship between performance and law. She will be joined by an international group of science and technology studies (STS) scholars—humanists and social scientists who study the relationships between science, technology, politics, and society—for an informal conversation that explores the role of science and technology in our understanding of witnessing and the construction of standards of truth.
 
Following the gallery discussion, please join us for a film screening of El Panóptico Ciego (The Blind Panopticon) at 5:30 p.m. in UMMA’s Helmut Stern Auditorium.

In August of 2014 a film crew stumbled across a century-old bureaucratic archive of the main men’s prison in Quito, Ecuador.  Roof-high stacks of paperwork crammed into a nineteenth-century vault. This decaying archive recorded the daily institutional life of Ecuador’s oldest penitentiary, Centro de Rehabiltacion de Varones, Numero Uno Quito (CRSVQ1); originally titled Penal Garcia Moreno after the President who oversaw its construction between 1869 and 1874. El Panóptico Ciego (Blind Panopticon) documents an extensive array of official records hoarded during 139 years of prison functioning, countless everyday items left behind by prisoners transferred without notice also became part of this archive, and the prison itself came to constitute an archive of events inscribed on its walls.
 
2015. 52 min. In Spanish with English subtitles. Director: Mateo Herrera; scriptwriter and ethnography: Jorge Núñez; photography: Simón Brauer; producer: Nathalie Moller; and subtitles: Jennifer Fleetwood.  
 
Followed by a Q&A with Jorge Nuñez.

Emma Lee Aboukasm is an award-winning, Detroit-based recording artist, vocalist, pianist, and composer. Educated in classical and jazz music at the University of Michigan, she is now performing in a variety of venues, ranging from intimate venues like the Dirty Dog Jazz Cafe to the Detroit Jazz Festival. Emma Lee is on the vanguard of contemporary music in the heart of metro-Detroit. 

Aboukasm won the Youth Vocal Jazz Competition in Detroit in 2014. In 2015, she made the top five finalists out of 2,000 applications worldwide in the International Sarah Vaughan Vocal Jazz Competition. There, she performed for a panel of judges including Christian McBride and Cyrille Aimée and played tracks from her CD on WBGO radio in Newark, NJ. 

Currently, Emma Lee Aboukasm resides in Southeast Michigan as she completes her bachelor degrees in Jazz Studies and Science in Information Analysis at the University of Michigan. She continues to write and arrange music for a new project to be announced soon. 

Alex Anest has been teaching, performing, and recording music professionally in the Southeast Michigan area since 1996. He founded and leads the Ann Arbor Guitar Trio and is also currently playing with the Alex Anest Trio, the Bluewater Kings, Kat Steih, and Klezmephonic. Alex studied guitar with Miles Okazaki and Chris Buzzelli. He holds a Masters of Music in Improvisation from University of Michigan, where he studied with Benny Green, Mark Kirschenmann, and Ellen Rowe. Alex was a founding member of the electric jazz group Giraffe, the Jericho Guitar Trio, Never Nebula, Secret 7, and Delta 88. He has toured Switzerland, Germany, Austria and Italy with songwriter Kevin Meisel and has played on stages throughout the Midwest and New England. Alex has also appeared on over 30 albums, mostly recorded in Michigan.

Our second exhibition on Inuit art explores the serene expressions of day-to-day activities found in mid-century to contemporary Inuit prints and sculptures. Donors inspired by the Power gift and the development of a Power Program for Inuit Art at UMMA contributed to this exhibition with diffuse offerings to incorporate into our holdings, or with loans to expand our conversations. 

UMMA is partnering with WeListen, a grassroots campus organization focused on building empathy across the political spectrum with the goal of creating listeners across the country, to catalyze a conversation about the fundamental building blocks of our society. This interactive dialogue will take up questions like: what is democracy and what role do citizens really play in shaping their government? What values should guide our government and how have your experiences shaped your beliefs? Has the United States government expanded too far beyond its purpose? Or should it do more to fulfill the needs of its citizens? Join us to discuss all of these questions and more!

Arrive at 7:30 p.m. for light refreshments and a chance to preview the gallery. Program to begin at 8 p.m.
 

Jacob Warren and Grant Flick explore the nuanced textures of a two-person band. Using both original material and  personally arranged standards from many genres, the group finds new depth in the simplicity of duets. The two met at the 2015 Acoustic Music Seminar, a program accepting only sixteen young string players from around the world to participate in a week of intense improvisation, composition and performance training. With Jacob’s classical foundation and Grant’s experience in bluegrass and jazz, their contrasting backgrounds give Warren & Flick a unique and compelling musical narrative.
​
You can find out more on their website, or follow them on Instagram and Facebook.

Collection Ensemble presents the first major reinstallation of UMMA's iconic entry space in over a decade. It exchanges Alumni Memorial Hall's previous focus on European and American painting for a broad mix of American, European, African, and Asian art from across media, sampling the Museum's remarkable, disparate holdings. The installation is organized into thematic and formal vignettes that respond to the concepts and ideas resonating from an extraordinary large-scale photograph of a vacant cathedral by contemporary German artist Candida Höfer. Featuring works of art by numerous famous and not-so-famous artists, many of them artists of color and women—including Charles Alston, Christo, Theaster Gates, Jenny Holzer, Roni Horn, Do-Ho Suh, Kara Walker, and others, Collection Ensemble reimagines the collection not as a fixed entity with one set of meanings to be unearthed, but instead as an active, creative, sometimes startling source of material and ideas, open for debate and interpretation.

Please join us for a monthly gathering that offers a starting point to discover a variety of narratives pertaining to the cultures of North American Indigenous people featuring the works of Inuit and indigenous authors. We will meet on the third Sunday of each month in the University of Michigan Museum of Art’s exhibition, Reflections: An Ordinary Day. The prints, drawings, and sculptures featured in this exhibition of Inuit art explore the relationship between the artist and the representation of everyday experiences. Each of the four gatherings will present an opportunity to enjoy traditional storytelling as well as discuss books written by contemporary Inuit and Native American authors. Our book club facilitator is Elizabeth James, a Detroit-based Powhatan storyteller and Program Manager at the U-M Department for AfroAmerican and African Studies.​

3rd Sunday of the month at at 3 p.m. 

January 19: The Right to Be Cold: One Woman's Story of Protecting Her Culture, the Arctic and the Whole Planet by Sheila Watt-Cloutier 

February 16: House Made of Dawn [50th Anniversary Ed]: A Novel (P.S.) Anniversary Edition
by N. Scott Momaday 

March 22: Sanaaq:  An Inuit Novel by Mitiarjuk Nappaaluk (Author), Peter Frost (Translator)

April 19: Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer

Books will be available for sale in the UMMA Shop. Book Club participants will receive a 10% discount.
 

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). 

Join Docent Laura Seligman for a contemplative gallery experience. You will have the opportunity to personally engage with one work of art for an extended period of time, followed by brief discussion. Tour will begin promptly. Please meet outside the Museum Shop. No prior meditation experience is necessary. Laura Seligman is a visual artist and has been practicing mindful meditation for decades. 

In conjunction with Earth Day's 50th anniversary and its Artists for the Earth program, The Vocal Arts Ensemble of Ann Arbor will be presenting a new choral drama at UMMA. Curated by Ben Cohen, Music for a Meanwhile Earth, interlaces actors, soloists and choral artists in a program that is both an existential exploration and a call to action.  Antaeus, the giant who draws strength when in contact with the earth, faces a crisis when Hercules lifts him off the ground on his way to his eleventh labor.  What do they say to each other in the bearhug? Music and texts from the Renaissance to contemporary surround and intersperse the story, including a world premiere by composer Evan Hause, a setting of Yeats' poem "The Two Trees".  

Families with children ages six and up are invited to look, learn, and create together in this hands-on workshop. Take a tour of Collection Ensemble, the vibrant reinstallation of UMMA’s Tisch Apse, followed by a watercolor and assemblage workshop where you will learn painting techniques and create two of your own works of art. Led by Stamps School of Art and Design students Emily Considine and Bre Boersma.

Parents must accompany children. We cannot guarantee your spot if you arrive more than 15 minutes late.

Storytime at the Museum promotes art enjoyment for our youngest patrons. Join us as we travel around the world and look at art from different countries. We read a story in the galleries and include a fun, age-appropriate, hands-on activity related to it. Parents must accompany children. Siblings are welcome to join the group. Meet in front of the UMMA Shop.

Families with children ages six and up are invited to look, learn, and create together in this hands-on workshop. Take a tour of Collection Ensemble, the vibrant reinstallation of UMMA’s Tisch Apse, followed by a watercolor and assemblage workshop where you will learn painting techniques and create two of your own works of art. Led by Stamps School of Art and Design students Emily Considine and Bre Boersma.

Parents must accompany children. We cannot guarantee your spot if you arrive more than 15 minutes late.

Join Docent Laura Seligman for a contemplative gallery experience. You will have the opportunity to personally engage with one work of art for an extended period of time, followed by brief discussion. Tour will begin promptly. Please meet outside the Museum Shop. No prior meditation experience is necessary. Laura Seligman is a visual artist and has been practicing mindful meditation for decades. 

This expansive look at the work and concerns of emerging contemporary artist Cullen Washington, Jr. pivots around the artist’s most recent series, Agoras. The compositions explore the ancient Greek public space as a site for activated assembly and the heart of the artistic, spiritual, and political life of the city. UMMA’s installation is designed with an actual public square at its center, complete with sound components featuring noted political and aesthetic discourse and surrounded by Washington’s soaring monumental collages. Works from four earlier series by the artist form the perimeter of the Museum’s largest special exhibition space. The artist describes his work as “abstract meditations on the grid and humanity.”