What does it mean to create a flourishing society? What does it mean to be American? What does it mean to be an artist in America, to produce artwork about the American condition?

These are a few of the questions posed to the audience in Hey, We Need to Talk!, an exhibit at the University of Michigan Museum of Art (UMMA). Curated by artist Philippa Pham Hughes, the current visiting artist for arts and civic engagement, the project requests that visitors participate in a dialogue about their views on topics such as: How do we build a sustainable future? How do we build meaningful connections in our communities? How do we overcome division?

Hughes has adorned the Eleanor Noyes Crumpacker Gallery with a custom decorative floral wallpaper. It is not just any floral wallpaper, but a composite of 50 individual flowers, representing each state flower. Not only that but it was designed by Ouizi (Louise Jones), an artist revered both internationally and locally for her large-scale floral murals, one of which can be found at 200 South Ashley Street. In a short essay, Hughes writes on the significance of the floral motif, noting their symbolic use throughout history in a variety of contexts, many of which included political revolution, making them “beautiful and powerful symbols of resistance, revolution, and resilience.”

A new art installation in Liberty Plaza intends to spark play and social interaction in Ann Arbor.

Oscillation relies on people’s movements to create different colors, sounds, and pitches when they interact with it. The installation features five crystal-shaped pieces and acts like a theremin—a musical instrument that you can play without touching it.

“The idea of a theremin interested us because of how it could be played with motion, and we had been wanting to think of a way to enlarge that interaction in the public space,” said Ryan Swanson, whose Brooklyn, New York-based design studio, The Urban Conga, created Oscillation.

“This work felt like the perfect opportunity to develop that interaction to become a public instrument for communal interaction.”

As part of that communal interaction, people will be able to experience Oscillation starting January 17.

The Ann Arbor Downtown Development Authority (DDA) is collaborating with The Urban Conga and its touring partner Creos to bring the installation to the city through March 16.

The Monday Mix is an occasional roundup of compilations, live recordings, videos, podcasts, and more by Washtenaw County-associated artists, DJs, radio stations, and record labels.

This edition features an interview with Kerrytown Concert House's Artistic & Executive Director Monica Swartout-Bebow on Michigan Creates; a chat with Ann Arbor cellist Thor Sigurdson on Music Un-Tuxed; two short promo videos for Ann Arbor Art Center's 2024 public art projects; Blue LLama concert live streams; and the numerous arts documentaries created for the Ann Arbor 200 birthday celebration.

If you're an Ann Arbor District Library cardholder, you receive a weekly email newsletter listing news, upcoming events, and a slew of recommendations from the catalog. Those recs are also available at aadl.org/reviews, and we're always happy to make suggestions for books, audiobooks, streamable content in the catalog, DVDs, board games, tools, etc. if you visit us at the branches.

But our 2024 Staff Picks allow the AADL crew to go beyond the library catalog—and the calendar year.

We don't limit our year in review to things that came out in 2024 or that can be checked out from AADL; the staff comments on whatever favorite media and events they experienced this year, no matter when or where they originated. Maybe a favorite album of 2024 came out in 1973, or the best book someone read this year is so old that it's out of copyright. It's all good, and it all counts.

Here are the categories of AADL's 2024 Staff Picks:

In April 2023, Michelle Hinojosa presented her thesis exhibition at the University of Michigan's Stamps Gallery. The exhibition, Lime Green Is the Taco Stand, was inaugurated with a poetry event, "Poetry by the Light of the Quilts," where Hinojosa read a series of poems on immigration and the collective feeling of loss that comes with this experience.

Hinojosa returns to Stamps a year later with a new creation, Logcabins. This time, we encounter her work outside the gallery as her log cabin quilts wrap the two columns of the gallery building.

The two colorful quilted columns help the gallery signal its existence amidst the dreary concrete landscape. Hinojosa’s striking quilts use color combinations that play with shades of yellow, green, pink, blue, and orange to create patterns of tesselations. Developed around the unit of a pink square, the blues and yellows of the respective quilts can be seen as stepped borders surrounding the squares to make a larger square motif. However, on closer inspection, a corner of the motif breaks away from this neat enclosure to connect it to the other blocks on the quilt, forming a sense of continuity unique to tessellated patterns.

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.

An empowering quote from Bell Hooks is printed in a black serif typeface on a brown handbill-size poster card.

The statement from the late author reads, “If we give our children sound self-love, they will be able to deal with whatever life puts before them.”

That motivational proclamation is one of numerous type-driven messages hand-printed on 3,000 vibrant 8-inch-by-6-inch poster cards by Amos Paul Kennedy Jr.

The Detroit printmaker’s renowned letterpress work is featured as part of Random Thoughts on Poster Cards, an exhibit running at Eastern Michigan University through December 14.

“People give me quotes, I read things, and then I just compile a list. And depending on the mood I’m in, I print what I want to,” said Kennedy alongside fellow letterpress printer Gerald Schulze during the exhibit’s November 7 opening reception at EMU’s University Gallery.

“It’s just a matter of someone telling me something, and I’ll say, ‘Oh yeah, that would make a good poster,’ or I’ll read something and think, ‘That would make a good card,’ and then I just print them.”

Silver Linings: Celebrating the  Spelman Art Collection at the University of Michigan Museum of Art (UMMA) is an eclectic collection of 40 works of sculptures, lithographs, photographs, paintings, and a gelatin silver print. The media includes acrylic, ink, pastels, graphite, crayon, oils, metals, wood, glass, and even 24-carat gold. 

Styles and subjects vary, too. 

What unifies this exhibition is that all of the work represents Black artists and expresses feelings or thoughts about Black culture or life. 

“The exhibition came to be through decades and decades and decades of Spelman College’s commitment to collecting art by Black artists,” says Liz Andrews, Ph.D., director of the Spelman College Museum of Fine Art.  Andrews says the immediate reasons for putting together a touring exhibit, the museum’s first, are less significant than Spelman’s groundbreaking efforts over the years in prioritizing art by and about women of the African diaspora. 

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.