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Museum Day: Detroit Institute of Art
Saturday, March 22, 2008
11:00am - 4:00pm
Registration Fee:
$8.00 (for Undergraduate students)
$12.00 (for Graduate Students, Faculty, and Staff)

Take this opportunity to explore the newly remodeled Detroit Institute of the Arts. With new exhibitions, permanent exhibits, and workshops you are sure to fully experience this museum!

Featuring the special exhibition Julie Mehretu: City Sitings

Julie Mehretu: City Sitings inaugurates the central special exhibition galleries, located just to the south of Rivera Court. Mehretu, born in Ethiopia and raised and educated in Michigan and Rhode Island, has been described as a truly global artist, whose large, abstract paintings explore the often unwieldy issues of mobility, social organization, political entanglement, and global competition. Most cities are built, dismantled, and rebuilt over time, yielding structures and spaces that reflect ongoing urban change. Mehretu’s paintings follow a similar course as she layers and, in her most recent works, erases information from her compositions, showing how each new level becomes a foundation for new iterations, stories, and identities.

Embedded in her abstract images, are elements taken from architectural blue prints, maps, sports arenas, and commercial logos. Five of the paintings in City Sitings were completed specifically for the exhibition. These new works demonstrate her fervent preoccupation with multiple, often conflicting, viewpoints.

Also featuring: Life's Pleasures: The Ashcan Artists' Brush with Leisure, 1895–1925

This exhibition brings together paintings depicting vibrant and diverse leisure activities experienced and observed by members of the Ashcan school. The Ashcan school artists, often associated with Robert Henri’s circle of artists, showed the lower levels of the socio-economic scale who lived and toiled in turn of the century New York. Henri encouraged his followers to capture the world as they found it, to absorb "the great ideas native to his country." Among the subjects they addressed were the multitude of leisure activities available to the people of varied social strata. Organized by the Detroit Institute of Arts.

And a special Drop-In Origami Workshop:

1-5pm: Make paper sculptures as you learn about this art of Japanese paper folding.

For more info: Detroit Institute of Arts