Critical Studies Program Evaluation

Now that the new term is underway, we'd like to get your feedback on the recent Critical Studies + Humanities Program, "Producing Culture: Creators and Creativity in the Contemporary World." Click on the hyperlink below to be directed to an online survey. The survey should take less than 10 minutes to complete and your responses will help us evaluate the success of this year's presentations plus provide valuable input for designing next year's program.

Click here to take the survey now. The survey was created with eSurveysPro.com, a free online survey software.

Extra/ordinary: Craft Culture and Contemporary Art

Date: Friday, December 14, 1:30 pm

Speaker: Maria Elena Buszek

Maria Elena Buszek is a critic, curator, and assistant professor of modern and contemporary art at the Kansas City Art Institute. She is the author of numerous catalog essays for exhibitions in museums and galleries both in the United States and abroad, and her writing has appeared in such journals as Art in America, Woman's Art Journal, TDR: The Journal of Performance Studies, Photography Quarterly, and Surface Design Journal. Her 2006 book, Pin-Up Grrrls: Feminism, Sexuality, Popular Culture, was nominated for the College Art Association Charles Rufus Morey Book Award. Buszek is also a regular contributor to the popular feminist culture magazine, Bust. In addition to feminist theory and aesthetics, she has written on popular visual culture and contemporary crafts. She is currently editing the anthology Extra/ordinary: Craft Culture and Contemporary Art, examining the evolving relationship and tensions between traditional definitions of "art" and "craft" in the art world today.

The Public Artist as New Town Crier

Date: Tuesday, November 27, 7:00 pm

Speaker: Tom Otterness

Tom Otterness is one of America's most prominent public artists. His sculptures adorn parks and other public places in New York—most notably Battery Park City and the 14th Street/8th Avenue subway station—and other cities around the world. He is also represented in many major public and private collections. He is a graduate of the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program and was a member of Collaborative Projects, Inc. (Colab). How creative producers can help foster conversation about important issues of common concern is an important element in his work. His style is cartoonish and cheerful on the surface yet marked by complexity and ambivalence upon further contemplation. His exhibition last year of public sculpture in Grand Rapids was his largest to date, with more than 40 works across two miles of the city's downtown area and at Frederik Meijer Gardens & Sculpture Park. His solo exhibition this fall inaugurates Marlborough Gallery's new space in Manhattan's Chelsea district.

Re: Designing Detroit: Theory and Practice

Date: Wednesday, November 14, 7:00 pm

Speakers: Constance C. Bodurow and Grace Lee Boggs in conversation

Constance C. Bodurow is an urbanist, a registered planner, a professor of architecture at Lawrence Technological University, and founding principal of Detroit-based Design Equity Urban Design + Planning. She holds a BFA cum laude in industrial design from Michigan State University and a dual master’s degree in architecture and city planning from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Bodurow's professional work has received national, state, and local awards from the the American Institute of Architects (AIA), the American Planning Association, and the National Waterfront Center, and her academic research has been published through the American Collegiate Schools of Archtiecture (ACSA). Professor Bodurow was recently appointed as one of five national Advisory Group members for the AIA Regional and Urban Design Committee, and is currently writing a series of articles on urban design, entitled “Design Matters,” for Metro Times.

Grace Lee Boggs is an activist, writer, and speaker whose more than sixty years of political involvement encompass the major US social movements of the last century: labor, civil rights, black power, Asian American, women's, and the environment. She received her PhD in philosophy from Bryn Mawr in 1940, and in the 1940s and 1950s collaborated with CLR James, legendary father of postcolonial studies. In 1992, with James Boggs, her spouse of 40 years, Shea Howell, and others, she founded Detroit Summer, a multicultural, intergenerational youth program to rebuild, redefine, and re-spirit Detroit from the ground up, which completed its fourteenth season in the summer of 2006. She was recently profiled by Bill Moyers on national public television and featured in the July 2007 issue of Harper’s magazine. At age 92, she continues to write a weekly column for the Michigan Citizen newspaper.

Design for the Other 90%: A Curator’s Perspective

Date: Friday, November 9, 2:00 pm

Speaker: Cynthia E. Smith

Cynthia E. Smith is the curator for the exhibition “Design for the Other 90%” at the Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, surveying the growing movement among designers to develop solutions for the more than five billion people across the globe not traditionally served by the professional design community. Most recently she completed a Master’s of Public Administration at the Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, integrating her work experience with her advocacy and activism on the issues of human rights and social justice. While at Harvard she co-authored The Politics of Genocide: US Rhetoric vs. Inaction in Darfur for the Kennedy School Review and joined a Graduate School of Design team to plan a new national park in response to the expanding sprawl north of Dallas. Trained as an industrial designer, for the past decade she planned and designed projects for cultural institutions, resulting in numerous award winning projects. A common thread in all of her work is work

The Cultural Logic of Early Environmentalism

Date: Friday, October 26, 1:00 pm

Speaker: Timothy Morton

Timothy Morton is professor of literature and the environment at University of California-Davis. His research interests include literature and the environment, theories of ecology, food studies, Romanticism, the eighteenth century, literary theory, and philosophy. His most recent book Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics (2007) argues that the chief stumbling block to environmental thinking is the image of nature itself, a residue of Romantic thinking in need of re-examination. Ecological writers propose a new worldview, but their very zeal to preserve the natural world leads them away from the "nature" they revere. Among Professor Morton’s books are: Shelley and the Revolution in Taste (2005), The Poetics of Spice (2005), a textbook on Frankenstein, an anthology of Romantic food writing, and The Cambridge Companion to Shelley (2006).

Art and Its Worlds; Art and Globalization

Date: Friday, October 19, 1:00 pm

Speaker: Robert Hobbs

Robert Hobbs holds the Rhoda Thalhimer Endowed Chair in art history at Virginia Commonwealth University and is a visiting professor at Yale. Recognized as both an academic and a museum curator, his work joins social history with literary criticism, aesthetics, and feminist and postcolonial theory. He has published widely and has curated dozens of exhibitions, many of which have been shown at important institutions in the US and abroad. His specific research areas span the twentieth- and twentieth-first centuries, and his publications include monographs on Milton Avery, Alice Aycock, Edward Hopper, Lee Krasner, Mark Lombardi, Robert Smithson, and Kara Walker. In addition to working on mainstream modern and post-modern artists, his published research includes in-depth studies of regional, self-taught, and Native American artists as well as investigations of contemporary and traditional craft media. Among the many exhibitions Hobbs has curated is "Mark Lombardi: Global Networks," which traveled the US and Canada recently.