Across from Pierce Lake in Chelsea, tucked down a short road off Old U.S. Highway 12, is an art gallery that's known primarily to the people who live right next to it.

But the high-quality exhibitions it stages six times a year deserve the same sort of audiences that attend more forward-facing public galleries and museums in Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti.

Gallery 100, located inside the Silver Maples of Chelsea retirement community, just opened its final exhibition of the year: Colorful Explorations, which runs from November 5 to January 5, and "invites visitors to experience the power of color, form, and imagination, offering a chance to engage with art that inspires reflection, emotion, and connection." It features works by artists Gwyn McKay, Chris Huang, Susan Clinthorne, Ashley Menth, Bill Knudstrup, Keto Green, and Lulu Fall.

Led by Silver Maples resident Lois DeLeon and Winn Nichols, the retirement community's director of life enrichment, Gallery 100 highlights Michigan artists. It started as a simple idea in 2009 by Glen Paulsen, former president of the Cranbrook Academy of Art, who lived at Silver Maples until his passing in 2012. DeLeon took the idea and ran with it, bringing on Nichols in 2021.

Since then, the dynamic duo has built up Gallery 100's social media presence and marketing, acquired small grants to improve the unassuming space—a long hallway—and continued to book forward-looking exhibits, including hosting the Prison Creative Arts Project twice.

With Colorful Explorations now open, we caught up with Nichols to discuss Gallery 100, one of the more uniquely located third-space galleries in Washtenaw County.

The best portrait photographers get to know their subjects and capture not just their images but also their auras.

Joseph Ferraro does that, too, but for bugs.

Closer: A look at the tiny world around us exhibition at Matthaei Botanical Gardens showcases Ferraro's macro photographs of his favorite subjects, highlighting the immense natural beauty of the many small things all around us.

"To me, the little things matter," Ferraro writes in his artist's statement for Closer:

Jaye Schlesinger is the newest member of the artist-owned and operated WSG Gallery, but the Ann Arbor painter has long been a mainstay in the local creative community.

She holds two degrees from the University of Michigan—an MFA in painting (1976) and one in medical illustration (1988)—and has had numerous appearances in group exhibitions as well as 14 solo shows of her work.

Schlesinger's new spotlight show at WSG Gallery, Points of View, continues her trend of identifying a theme and exploring it from numerous angles—for instance, Possession, her 2017 exhibit at U-M's Institute for the Humanities gallery, focused on paintings of household objects.

Windows are the primary theme for the gouache paintings in Points of View, which Schlesinger explains in her artist statement:

Ann Arbor painter Hava Gurevich loves the water, but she's surrounded by terra firma.

“My work is very aquatic and botanical, but it’s been more botanical in the last few years because I’m not close to any body of water that has life in it,” Gurevich told Pulp in 2022 in a profile about her exhibition Inspired by Nature: 20 Years of Art at the University of Michigan’s Matthaei Botanical Gardens.

There are plenty of botanical works in Gurevich's Organic Fiction: Nature Inspired Abstract Paintings, her new exhibition at the Ann Arbor Art Center (A2AC), but her aquatic-inspired paintings are present, too. Not just in the main exhibit but also in A2AC's Aquarium Gallery, the large window that faces Ashley Street, just around the corner from the art space's main entrance on East Liberty Road.

Fans of the spooky season have an annual event they look forward to—and we're not (just) talking about Halloween.

The Holy Bones Festival in Ypsilanti is a shivering mix of art, performance, and vibes, with the focus being on the ghoulish and gothic with a PG-13 bent. There are also related seasonal artisan markets throughout the year, all with a similar macabre spirit: Pushing Up Daisies in the spring, Krampus in July, etc.

Ypsi visual artist Holly Bones started The Holy Bones Festival in 2019, but she had to switch things up for the 2025 edition and other seasonal markets, as stated on the fest's Facebook events page:

This year has been one of immense change for our team, marked by both life changes and the loss of loved ones. We're taking a step back from our big festival to host a series of artisan markets for the rest of 2025. It’s our way of focusing on the artists and community that started it all, and it's also a chance to spend more intentional time with all of you before we dive into 2026!

The Holy Bones Artisan Market was always the centerpiece of the Holy Bones Festival, but now it has the full spotlight, with more than 70 creators displaying their wares at the Ypsilanti Freighthouse on Sunday, October 19, 1-9 pm.

Scaling back gave Bones and her self-described "skeleton crew" a chance to reset and plan for a big 2026, all while continuing to celebrate the local artistic community, especially those creators who might not fit in with typical seasonal markets.

"My hope is that attendees for this market, and any local market, continue to support real human creativity in our communities," Bones said via email. "By supporting local artists instead of corporations, you are bringing someone's dream to life in real time."

We conversed with Bones about the 2025 Holy Bones Festival and what she has planned for 2026.

A new “live media festival” in Ypsilanti aims to expand the conversation on what media is, with live experimental works in audio, video, projection, and expanded cinema that goes beyond traditional film.

Those attending the first Media Live Ypsi live performance festival on October 10 and 11 can expect everything from Bring Your Own Beamer projection art displays to a half dozen “durational artists” each delivering their own three-hour sets of storytelling and other nonlinear performances that could incorporate audience participation.

It’s all intended to shake up how people perceive the “live” performance, Media Live Ypsi co-organizer Abhishek Narula said, while emphasizing the need to be present to truly experience the media being displayed.

"I think a lot of art today is experienced online—on Instagram, on YouTube, and all that,” said Narula. “It's hard to sort of document; it's hard to capture these things. We really want to have that experience for the people that are in Ann Arbor and Ypsi and to bring people together. I think post-pandemic, people have been interacting online, and we still sort of live most of our worlds online. So, we're trying to break that a little bit by providing the live experiences where you sort of have to be there.”

Stacey L. Kirby was the Stamp School's 2025 Roman J. Witt Artist-in-Residence, spending 12 weeks on the University of Michigan campus between January and March to meet with students, staff, and faculty to gather information that informs her new interactive, immersive installation, The Bureau of Personal Belonging.

The site-specific work is activated by viewer participation, with the intention of fostering conversations about engagement and empowerment, collective and personal identities, and the power of art to build respect and solidarity among participants.

Kirby’s exhibition "transforms bureaucracy's everyday rituals into unexpected moments of civic connection. Through forms, gestures, and scripted interactions, visitors can sit down, engage, and reflect on identity, community, and belonging," states a Stamps Gallery post on Instagram.

Another Stamps post explains:

The first Remnants exhibit was staged on October 17, 2023, at Marjorie Mae Del-Radio's Ypsilanti house. The woman affectionately known as "Big Marjorie" was not physically present in her longtime home at 824 Jefferson Street, but her spirit filled the abode—once covered in family photographs, now mostly empty.

Del-Radio died April 12, 2023, at age 90, and her house was cleared out for its sale.

Takeisha Jefferson and Tywree Bailey, both Ypsi-born artists, wanted to honor their grandma and the house that was a family hub, so they did the one-day Remnants exhibit as a creative memorial for friends and family.

"So many family members spoke of how grandma’s house looked like a gallery because of all the photographs she displayed of family members," Jefferson wrote in a Facebook message. "Well, tomorrow it will be a gallery."

Jefferson and Bailey decorated the home with their own photographs and paintings, and also filled a room with Grandma Del-Radio's colorful muumuus, which floated in the space like joyful ghosts.

Even though Remnants was an impromptu event, first cousins Jefferson and Bailey knew they wanted to have a second edition of the exhibit in a traditional gallery.

Remnants II, which runs through September 26 at Ypsilanti's 22 North, doesn't feature any muumuus. But it is brimming with love and pride for their family's history, which stretches deep into Ypsilanti's past. There are photos of and correspondence from Del-Radio's grandfather, William Campbell, who worked as a janitor and porter for Ypsi's Freighthouse, from 1927 to 1936, as well as other images of other family members.

The core of the show belongs to Jefferson and Bailey's artwork, sometimes with assistance from other family members, such as Takeisha's daughter, Tylear Jefferson, also a visual artist.

A roundup of recent Washtenaw County arts and culture stories from local media outlets Life in Michigan, WEMU, Concentrate, Current, Ann Arbor Observer, WCBN, The Sun New Times, The Saline Post, and Ann Arbor City Lifestyle. 

The in-person Disability Pride art exhibition at Disability Network Washtenaw Monroe Livingston (DNWML) has its roots in the virtual world of 2020.

"I had recently become our arts manager," said Claire Moore, "and we were looking for ways to expand creative opportunities for our blossoming arts program. What began as a virtual art class in March 2020 has become a robust arts program with visual, performance, dance, and writing arts, as well as teaching opportunities for disabled artists. ... As our reputation for centering the arts has grown, so has our reach for the Disability Pride art exhibition."

The Disability Network is "run by people with disabilities for people with disabilities," as stated on its website, offering peer support, training, advocacy, and much more, but it's also become a creative hub, with the Disability Pride exhibit as a centerpiece.

"I truly believe offering a consistent, no-cost art exhibition for disabled artists, during Disability Pride month, is something so necessary—and completely aligns with our mission as an organization," Moore said.

The third edition of the Disability Pride exhibition, in DNWML's Gallery Be, is titled In This Together: Joy & Interdependence in Disability Culture. Moore put out a call for works by asking "artists to emphasize the jubilance and support they experience as members of the disability community."