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.

Carl Pope: Public Projects

Date: Thursday, October 11, 12:30 pm

Speaker: Carl Pope Jr.

Carl Pope, Jr. is a photographer and multi-media artist who first came to prominence in the 1990 exhibition “New Photography 6” curated by John Szarkowski at the Museum of Modern Art. His work has been shown across the US, including in the 1996 Whitney Museum show "Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary Art" and the 2000 Whitney Biennial. He is currently in the exhibition "Words Fail Me" at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit. Pope's work investigates social and economic networks, using public art projects to mine hidden histories and narratives from the grass roots and/or margins of culture. He has received grants from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation. His work is represented in many museum collections, including George Eastman House, the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Art, McDonaldization, and the Globalization of Nothing

Date: Thursday, October 4, 3:30 pm

Speaker: George Ritzer

George Ritzer is Distinguished University Professor at University of Maryland and one of America’s foremost sociologists. His areas of expertise include: social and organizational theory and methods, consumer society, globalization and the credit economy. His 1993 (5th edition, 2008) book The McDonaldization of Society is one of the most widely read social studies of the postwar era and has been translated into 17 languages. It is required reading for undergraduates and graduate students in many colleges and universities. Ritzer is also founding editor, along with Don Slater, of the Journal of Consumer Culture, published by Sage. He has authored or edited numerous textbooks and journal articles, including most recently the 11-volume Blackwell Encyclopedia of Sociology. Other notable books include The Globalization of Nothing and Enchanting a Disenchanted World: Revolutionizing the Means of Consumption. Ritzer earned his PhD in organizational behavior at Cornell. He also holds an MBA from University of Michigan and worked in personnel management at Ford Motor Company before entering academia.

2007-8 Critical Studies Theme Statement

Producing Culture: Creators and Creativity in the Contemporary World

Late modern society, particularly as it has evolved in the West since the 1970s, is said to be characterized by the decline of industrial production and the rise of an information-based consumer culture. Expanded intellectual property rights, an increasingly consolidated media, and a growing worldwide telecommunications network have exchanged a culture of production for the production of culture. Creative producers of all kinds—architects, artists, ceramists, designers, metalsmiths, weavers, etc.—each in their own way have important roles to play in making culture, locally and globally. This series brings together artists, critics, social scientists, historians, activists, and others who illuminate ways in which culture is produced, distributed, and consumed, and the place of creativity in that process. Among the questions to be posed: Who owns the productions of culture? How do individual creative producers integrate private practice into the public sphere? What is the relationship of culture to nature? What conceptual frameworks have historically governed the dichotomy between culture and nature and what effect have they had? What lessons can be learned from the distant and not-so-distant past of the role of culture in the rise and/or fall of particular civilizations?