Culture

Arking for a Friend

When a friend texted that her niece had signed up for open mic night at the Ark and invited me along, I said sure. Despite proofing the Observer’s listings for the event for nearly a decade, I had never checked it out, and I thought it could be an interesting way to spend a rainy spring evening.

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Featured Artists

Wandering the lines of booths that snake through downtown, the Ann Arbor Art Fair feels like a single vast event. But within it are three separate fairs, each with its own governing board, jury, and territory. And every year, each expresses itself with an original poster and merchandise created by one of its artists. This year is no exception, and all three artists, in their own ways, are exceptional.

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Target: The Arts

Without waiting for Congress to act, his appointees cancelled NEA grants that had already been approved—including $30,000 for the Ann Arbor Film Festival. The 2025 festival was in March, and “I had already submitted our final report and payment request,” says executive director Leslie Raymond. 

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Leon Makielski’s Midwest Perspective

An impressive selection of Makielski’s landscape work can now be seen at the Michigan Art Gallery in Pittsfield Twp. This exhibit and sale, lasting until May, shows sixty-one paintings, almost all of them landscapes, painted en plein air in Indiana, Illinois, and Michigan.

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17 Blocks

A Community High and U-M grad, Rothbart has worked as a ticket scalper and pizza delivery driver, created a magazine, and won an Emmy. This year, a Knight-Wallace journalism fellowship brought his family—wife Margaret Box and their kids, Desi, six, and Birdie, three—to a rented house on the Old West Side. And this month, he’s reuniting with his second family—the one featured in his documentary 17 Blocks—in an event at the Michigan Theater.

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The Michigan’s New Face

The best thing about Liberty St., one could argue, is the Michigan Theater. Along with hundreds of films every year, it hosts concerts, children’s theater, celebrity artists, and dozens of other major events. Its recreated historic sign is a landmark rivaled only by its sister theater a block away, the State. That streetscape—with the U-M’s Burton Tower rising in the background—inspired the Michigan Theater Foundation’s recent rebranding as Marquee Arts.

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La Raza: Arts and Media Collective, 1975–Today

At the height of El Movimiento—the Chicano/Latino labor and civil rights movement led by Dolores Huerta and Cesar Chavez—a group of mostly Mexican American U-M social work students founded Trabajadores de la Raza, intended to support underrepresented students and promote justice at the university. This group would evolve into the La Raza Arts and Media Collective, part of a vast network of grassroots organizations throughout the country. In UMMA’s glass-walled Stenn gallery, La Raza: Arts and Media Collective, 1975–Today celebrates its fiftieth anniversary.

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Event Review: Stargazing

The planetarium rotates three shows every month, but the Sky Tonight, which runs twice every Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, is always the “star” attraction. The presenter, usually a U-M science student, leads an exploration of the current night sky, gives tips on how to find the cardinal directions, constellations, and planets on your own, and winds up with a trippy full-speed-ahead jaunt through the stars that feels both like a roller coaster and a ride on a spaceship.

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Paper Cut

Advance Publications, owners of the Ann Arbor News and seven sister MLive papers, announced in October that it will shut down the Jersey Journal at the end of January, while also eliminating print editions of its flagship Star-Ledger and two other papers in New Jersey. Following the digital transition of four Advance-owned papers in Alabama and Mississippi in 2023, this move raises the possibility that print editions of the News and the rest of the MLive group could be next.

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The Birth of Cinema Guild

Cinema Guild cosponsored the Ann Arbor Film Festival from its start in 1963 and hosted guests like Frank Capra, Harold Lloyd, Andy Warhol, and the Velvet Underground. And it sometimes courted controversy with screenings of banned films like Flaming Creatures, which in 1967 led to the arrests of four Cinema Guild board members.

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Event Review: Creature Discomfort

The legend of the Mothman originated in Point Pleasant, West Virginia, where between November 1966 and December 1967, locals reported sightings of a winged humanoid creature with huge, glowing red eyes. While skeptics argued that the sightings could be attributed to sandhill cranes or large owls, the incidents led to widespread fear and speculation, some believing it to be an extraterrestrial or supernatural entity. After the Silver Bridge collapsed into the Ohio River in December 1967, killing 46 people, theories arose that the Mothman was an omen of impending disaster.

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8 Ball Movie Night at the Blind Pig

The shabby, welcoming confines of the Blind Pig, the beloved Ann Arbor dive bar and longtime music venue on First St., are also host to regular late-night gatherings celebrating the offbeat, idiosyncratic world of B movies.

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The Observer Observed

That’s the title of an exhibit on the second floor of the downtown library. Subtitled “45 Years of Pages from the Ann Arbor Observer,” it covers five large walls with reproductions of 500 pages published in the magazine between 1976 and 2022.

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Eli Lilly, Patron of the Arts

The pharmaceutical giant started with a single location in the Original Fair on North University in 2022. This year, it will be everywhere as the first-ever presenting sponsor of all three fairs.

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Cancer Gratitude

An Ann Arbor native, Joan Belgrave is a two-time Grammy-nominated singer-songwriter. Four years after her husband died, her life took another dramatic turn when a routine biopsy resulted in an especially dangerous diagnosis: “triple-negative” breast cancer.

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