Billed as “photographs of the Asian American diaspora in the Midwest,” Strange You Never Knew is an anthropological study as much as an artistic one.
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.
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 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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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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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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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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This year’s winter show from the Encore Musical Theatre Company is Annie, the classic 1976 musical by Thomas Meehan, Charles Strouse, and Martin Charnin based on the comic strip about a gutsy redheaded orphan who escapes from her orphanage during the Great Depression.
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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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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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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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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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“I spy: the Land Title Building at 106 N. Fourth Ave. designed by Albert J. Rousseau,” writes Kate Pasola.
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We asked four artists in this year’s Ann Arbor Art Fair why they do it, and what brought them here.
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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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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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It was July of last year, and she had to finish What Springs Forth for a Zoom reading. It would be her first chance to hear her play—about “middle-aged friends who head for what they think will be a spa retreat and wind up battling [the elements], each other, and their inner demons”—read aloud.
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The ancient Egyptian and Greek symbol of a snake eating its tail, Ouroboros, is also the inspiration for the three-part art installation by U-M Stamps Roman J. Witt artist-in-residence Machine Dazzle (né Matthew Flower). The resident artist works jointly with students and faculty to create a work of art: Ouroboros, a room-sized “snake” that hangs from the ceiling at UMMA’s Irving Stenn Jr. Family Gallery.
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Marschall Runge didn’t realize how many physicians wanted to write fiction until he signed up for a “Writing for Doctors” workshop—and found 300 others in attendance.
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These days, Charlene Kaye only gets back to Ann Arbor on tour, but she launched her music career playing open mics as a U-M English major in the late aughts.
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