Sasha Gusikhin founded NeuroArts Productions in response to a tragedy.

Luke Balstad was Gusikhin’s best friend, and a straight-A student at Harvard, but he also knew that he needed mental help assistance. Balstad was in therapy, was honest and open about his bipolar condition, and was attended to by a supportive network—but it still ended with him dying by suicide in 2022.

Balstad was being treated with medications—he tried at least 10—and therapy in the standardized modern way, but Gusikhin believes that let her friend slip through the cracks.

“No amount of checking in on Luke would have been able to save him," says Gusikhin, a University of Michigan senior double majoring in biopsychology, cognition, and neuroscience along with voice performance. "He had all of this care and yet there was all this impression with this one size fits all, this ‘let’s try this, and that, and that.' When we do that we are never attuned to: ‘What if this medication [causes a] toxic reaction to that person’s brain chemistry?’ It’s very dangerous, and it can cause very dangerous situations and even loss of life in this case.”

Gusikhin's NeuroArts Productions organizes multidisciplinary arts events to promote mental health education and reform.

La Raza Art and Media Collective, 1975 to Today, a new exhibit at the University of Michigan Museum of Art (UMMA), highlights creative Latinx students and faculty who have influenced the campus for decades but whose presence is too often overlooked.

The La Raza Art and Media Collective (RAMC) was a student group from 1975 to 1977, formed by Ana Cardona, Michael J. Garcia, Jesse Gonzales, Julio Perazza, George Vargas, S. Zaneta Kosiba Vargas, and Zaragosa Vargas. RAMC organized cultural gatherings and art exhibits, and between 1976-1977, the group also produced a journal of Latinx essays, poetry, and art.

RAMC grew out of the late '60s Latinx political movement. Allied with other student groups, RAMC advocated for Latinx and Chicanx students, combating discrimination and stereotypes while building community. But as La Raza members started to move on from college, the group disbanded and became memory-holed to a certain degree even as other Latinx groups emerged.

Amanda Krugliak remembers the first time she saw the work of artist Ericka Lopez.

“I was walking a gallery in Chinatown, in L.A., and I saw this work. It just had something undeniable about it,” said Krugliak, curator for the University of Michigan’s Institute for the Humanities Gallery, which is hosting Lopez's touch exhibit. “There’s something incredibly powerful immediately about it. It felt like the kind of work that doesn’t have a motive. There’s no other reason for the work, but the immediate human connection, or something material we respond to. There are a lot of contemporary artists who try to achieve this, and here was this artist that just felt so natural.”

Lopez's tactile textiles and colorful ceramics bristle with textures. She also happens to be blind. After finding out about Lopez’s story, Krugliak made inquiries about bringing the show to Ann Arbor.

Ann Arbor has celebrated its 200th anniversary throughout 2024 with numerous citywide events and initiatives. But a recent exhibit drills down to the first 50 years of the town's formation.

The Museum on Main is a two-story yellow-beige house just north of downtown, at the five-point intersection where Main and Kingsley Streets meet with the end of one-way Beakes Street.

The museum is hosting Ann Arbor's Story: The First 50 Years, a revealing look at the beginnings of European settlement in the area, through its first half-century of officially existing as a village, long before it became a city. Photographs, maps, and original documents provide a revealing and humanizing view of a past, which can seem so foreign to 21st-century America, making the exhibit worth the 15 minutes or so most people will take to go through it.

The Museum on Main's website explains the people, places, and things that comprise the exhibition:

Journalists are the white blood cells of democracy, and their ability to report news and share opinions without repercussions is one of the best measures of a free society's hardiness.

The right to employ comedy and satire freely is another solid assessment of a democracy's health, and the Clements Library's online and in-person exhibition An Ungentle Art: Pat Oliphant and the American Tradition of Political Satire is a compelling reminder of illustrative journalists using humor to make a point.

The University of Michigan exhibition—produced with the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library and Museum and loaned original art from the Wallace House Center for Journalists—ties into a multi-event program this semester on how the arts interact with presidential politics during this election year.

“I think using Clements Library materials to help people think about the democratic processes in the country, and how we have historically talked about elections is important,” says Paul Erickson, the director at Clements. 

If there is a timeliness prize for art gallery exhibitions, the latest offering from the Ann Arbor Arts Center (A2AC) is a shoo-in for a podium finish.

Weeks before the 2024 presidential election, A2AC's Obama: An Intimate Portrait displays some of the best photographs by Pete Souza, a veteran photographer who reached the pinnacle of his career by serving as President Barack Obama’s photographer.

After Obama left the White House, Souza sorted through approximately 1.9 million photos to select 300 from his eight-year tenure at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue for a 2017 book called Obama: An Intimate Portrait. He then selected 50 for a traveling show, which started making the rounds in 2019 thanks to Souza’s exhibition coordinator Hava Gurevich, an Ann Arbor artist.