Upcoming Highlights from Art X Detroit
This spring marks the return of Art X Detroit – a free 10-day arts experience kicking off April 9. The biennial festival, which hosted its inaugural event in 2011, will include dance, music, literary and theatrical performances featuring Kresge Arts Fellows at over 20 venues throughout Detroit. Allied Media Projects is pleased to be a promotional sponsor of the festival.
AXD will take place over a three-week period in April and is free to the public. Events will take place on the following dates: April 9-12, 16-19, 25-26.
The festival opens with the debut of the AXD 2015 Visual Arts Exhibition, on display at MOCAD from April 9 – 26. This exhibit presents selected works from the collection of 2013 and 2014 Kresge Eminent Artists in the fields of painting, sculpture, photography, ceramics, animation, video, and mixed-media installations.
AMP is excited to support several AXD events including the Octavia’s Brood reading and book signing on April 18, Rola Nashef’s artist talk on April 16, a live scored conversation with dream hampton and Ed Love on April 26, and Oren Goldenberg’s visual installation at the MOCAD, opening April 9.
Read more about these events below and check out the full schedule.
Rola Nashef
The Director’s Cut, artist conversation and film screening
April 16, 6:30-8:30pm at Detroit Film Theatre
In Rola Nashef, The Director’s Cut, 2014 Kresge Artist Fellow, artist and filmmaker Rola Nashef takes us from her early years of arriving to Lansing, Michigan, as a Lebanese immigrant and ESL child, to her outer life as an imaginative and engaged kid with friends and relationships that crossed highly diverse and often segregated communities in Michigan. Through powerful and lively storytelling, Nashef reflects on her own life experiences and introduces audiences to an entire cast of characters who would later become the inspiration for Detroit Unleaded. A lifetime in the making, Rola Nashef, The Director’s Cut is a unique and emotionally provocative performance that moves back and forth between personal memoir and director’s commentary, featuring never-before-seen clips from her short and feature films, behind-the-scenes footage, family photos, and personal stories about life growing up Arab in America.
Octavia’s Brood
Detroit Visionary Fiction Generator, projection and reading
April 18th, 4:30-6:00 at Garden Theater
Detroit Visionary Fiction Generator will bring together several aspects of 2013 Kresge Artist Fellow adrienne maree brown’s collaborative work, starting with a Science Fiction and Social Multimedia Presentation that will feature writers from Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction from Social Justice Movements, the recently published anthology that brown co-edited with Walidah Imarisha. This anthology features the works of prominent science fiction writers alongside writing from social justice organizers and thinkers. These writers will be joined by artists and activists who participated in the Detroit Sci-Fi Generator Writing Salons that adrienne hosted in 2014, as well as youth from the James and Grace Lee Boggs School, who have created a sci-fi comic Future of Detroit project with adrienne as one of their 2015 school projects. Amongst others, Detroit Visionary Fiction Generator will showcase Autumn Brown, Oren Goldenberg, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Dream Hampton, Walidah Imarisha, Dani McClain, and Gabriel Teodros.
Octavia’s Brood Reception and Release Party
April 18th, 8:00-11:00pm at the Garden Theater
This event will act as a reception for 2013 Kresge Artist Fellows adrienne maree brown and Chace “Mic Write” Morris, as well as a release party for Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction from Social Movements, the anthology co-edited by brown and Walidah Imarisha.
dream hampton
A Live Scored Conversation with Detroit Legend Ed Love
April 26, 11:00am-1:00pm at Trinosophes
2014 Kresge Artist Fellow dream hampton is a writer, award-winning filmmaker, director, organizer, and cultural producer. hampton has written about music, culture and politics since 1990; among other magazines, she was a contributor to Vibe magazine for its first 15 years, while her essays have been included in more than a dozen anthologies.
In an ongoing effort to honor our storytellers and history keepers, particularly those who work in the sacred, oral tradition, hampton will film an onsite live conversation between journalist Kim Heron and legendary Detroit jazz musician Ed Love. This interview will be scored by 5-piece ensemble McKinney Zone, and musically directed by Gayelynn McKinney.
Oren Goldenberg
A Requiem for Douglass, visual installation
April 9-26 at the MOCAD
After documenting the drastic dismantlement of Detroit Public Schools and Detroit Public Housing, Oren Goldenberg created the series The Future is Changing : Rituals for Spatial Change to publicly explore the possibilities of catharsis for the ever-changing city. A Requiem for Douglass is the final iteration of this series.
The interactive installation attempts to bring not only the documentation of ritual to the viewer, but the act of ritual as well, by inviting participants to perform the rite of removing a brick salvaged from the late Brewster-Douglass housing project. Arranged in the form of one of the iconic Douglass Towers, a sculpture of bricks initiates a series of videos when touched. The participant-activated videos present a display of seven rituals performed at the Douglass Towers during their demolition, as well as the demolition itself. The installation lasts as long as there are bricks remaining.