First organized in 1999, The Sounds of Christmas is a seasonal work presented during the month of December in a different city every year. The project consists of 1200 Christmas LPs made available to the public for consultation and to local DJs on scheduled events. The installation also comprises six videos, which document the album covers, while a video projector shows documentation of past performances at other venues.

During the one-week installation noted DJs create remixes of their own selection from Marclay's Christmas records. Part community project, part art installation, this work provides an impressive and exhaustive archive of Christmas music to DJs and turntablists for live performances which disturb the dismal and hackneyed holiday season soundscape.

The installation has appeared at the Tate Modern (London), Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporain (Geneva), Museum of Contemporary Art (Miami), DHC/ART Foundation for Contemporary Art (Montreal) and The New Museum of Contemporary Art/Media Z
Lounge (NYC).

Please return for more information and a schedule of performances.

Alexander Gutke
September 11 — December 27, 2009

The solo survey of the Swedish, Malmö-based artist Alexander Gutke (b. 1971) at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit will present a focused selection of the artist’s film-based and slide-based works, offering audiences a comprehensive introduction to Gutke’s work from 2000-2008.

Preoccupied with modes of reproduction, self-reflexivity, illusionism and cinema, the work of Alexander Gutke could be characterized by a kind of mystical materialism. His exploration of these concerns moves into a variegated and allegorical territory whose many terrains include space and the void, animation and illusion, and the micro and the macro. Gutke's meticulous and poetic sensibility is that of an unusual storyteller whose works narrate their own material conditions with a sublime economy.

The exhibition offers an opportunity to evaluate Gutke's contribution to neo-conceptualism. The persistence of his preoccupations, as well as the complexity and metaphorical potency of his work set him apart from the more directly citational practices of some of his peers. If Gutke adopts and expands upon strategies initially forged by historical predecessors, he does so to explore issues that are both personal and universal with a depth and richness matched only by his work's stark simplicity and hypnotic beauty.

Curated by Chris Sharp.
This exhibition is organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, with special thanks to Galerija Gregor Podnar, Berlin and Culturgest,Porto.

Ann Lislegaard: 2062
September 11 — December 27, 2009

Entitled with the date when the artist will be 100 years old, the exhibition provides a comprehensive look at Danish artist Ann Lislegaard’s (b. 1962) extended investigation of the science fiction genre. The show comprises six major installations along with other works that explore notions of time, space, and place. In her work the artist employs sound and light architecturally to reflect on and investigate how we perceive and move through the physical and the psychological environments that we inhabit.

Lislegaard’s trilogy of video works, accompanied by sound installations and several site-specific sculptural works, unite elements of recent art history with themes rooted in science fiction literature. Lislegaard reinterprets these varied sources to create experiences within imagined places that lie firmly outside of logic and the habitual.

Ann Lislegaard: 2062 is accompanied by a catalogue, published by the
Henry Art Gallery, which critically examines the works presented in the exhibition. The catalog is available in the MOCAD Store.

Curated by Elizabeth Brown, Chief Curator at Henry Art Gallery.
Ann Lislegaard: 2062 is organized by the Henry Art Gallery in Seattle and is generously supported by the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation, ArtsFund, the Mayor’s Office of Arts & Cultural Affairs, the Danish Arts Council Committee for International Visual Art, the American-Scandinavian Foundation, and the Scan?Design by Inger & Jens Bruun Foundation.

“It's a manifesto, a diary, a crumpled suicide note and a still-relevant love letter to the medium I adore."
— Art Spiegelman

In 1978, an alienated and ignored underground cartoonist named Art Spiegelman published Breakdowns. By producing this publication, Spiegelman, a respected but misunderstood fixture of the underground comix scene was attempting to break a long-standing social and cultural taboo by calling himself an artist and his medium an art form.

Breakdowns was instrumental in making comics culturally respectable, helping them to infiltrate mainstream libraries and universities. In Breakdowns Spiegelman explored and expanded comics, their boundaries and limitations, transforming a medium that was generally regarded as cheerful and banal into a site of artistic exploration, biographical testimony and a territory to exorcize personal demons.

The exhibition zooms in on a few excerpts from the now iconic book juxtaposed with film, drawings and mementos that highlight Art Spiegelman's personal history and some of his key influences; it also sheds light on the forces that helped him revolutionize his art form.

Spiegelman's interest in art, experimental films, and popular and underground culture (among other high and low sources) became his inspiration and tools to look incisively at and question the “stuff" of his own medium. This exhibition presents some of the unique, rich and multilayered sources that served as his springboard to embarking on a quest to forever rupture the illusion of time that the drawn boxes had imposed on the printed page until then.

Curated by Luis Croquer

LINKAGE
ARTISTS SELECT ARTISTS
May 29 - July 26, 2009

Art Spiegelman selects Gary Panter
Gary Panter selects Bob Zoell
Bob Zoell selects Roger Herman
Roger Herman selects Eli Langer
Eli Langer selects Michael Rashkow
Michael Rashkow selects Nancy De Holl
Nancy De Holl selects Jesse Chapman
Jesse Chapman selects Michael Delucia

Throughout the history of art, mentoring, influence, appropriation and personal relationships between artists have been crucial to the creation of artworks. Linkage, Artists Select Artists explores the broad and seemingly unrelated influences between a chain of nine artists originated by the creator of the graphic novel, Art Spiegelman.

Each of the artists in the exhibition suggested a fellow artist and also personally selected one or several works of art to represent them in the show, creating through this process a unique network that encompasses diverse generations, approaches, artistic practices and mediums.

The exhibition aims to highlight the strong, functional and enriching relationships, as well as the informal support structures that exist within the artistic community, raising the question not only of who an artist looks at and supports, but also whose work an artist thinks and dialogues with.

The artists in Linkage, Artists Select Artists are bound by friendships, common interests and explicit and/or subtle connections in the works they create, providing the unexpected juxtapositions, the freshness and the free-flowing narrative of exhibitions that are more often found outside institutional frameworks.

Linkage, Artists Select Artists is organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit.
The artworks included were personally selected by the artists in the exhibition. MOCAD is grateful to all those who made this exhibition possible, especially the artists, Art Spiegelman, Gary Panter, Bob Zoell, Roger Herman, Eli Langer, Michael Rashkow, Nancy de Holl, Jesse Chapman and Michael Delucia, whose work and commitment to the show have been crucial to see it realized. We also acknowledge Marsha Miro, Board President and Founding Director, Burt Aaron, the MOCAD Exhibitions and Programming Committee and Chris Byrne for contacting the artists and for the initial ideas that helped to shape this show. Thanks also to Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York, Alan Koppel Gallery, Chicago, Jason and Leslie Pickleman and the Harkey Family Collection for their generous loans to the exhibition.

JESPER JUST | WITH MIXED EMOTIONS
May 29 - July 26, 2009

This exhibition focuses on three works by Danish artist Jesper Just: The Lonely Villa, 2004, No Man Is an Island II, 2004, and A Vicious Undertow, 2007.

Just creates works that explore the interstitial spaces between the visual and sculptural fields, appropriating and reinventing conventions used as narrative devices in avant-garde, noir and mainstream cinema. His films often resist the narrative impulse and are constructed from fragments that usually connect traditional cinematic story lines. The process of linking inconsequential moments creates visual corridors and passages that seduce viewers with sensual and stylized imagery, and guide them into a labyrinthine experience that often contains an invisible but tangible, powerful and cryptic emotional charge.

The three works selected for this exhibition touch upon unresolved human relationships and interactions mostly between men and, in the case of A Vicious Undertow, a triangle composed of an older woman and a younger couple.

In all three films, Just uses popular music as a vehicle to move the viewer in unexpected directions, counteracting and avoiding the linearity and narrative aspect that music imposes in the traditional soundtrack.

The artist uses music, decontextualizing and sometimes transforming it to a point were it is barely recognizable. The juxtaposition of images and pop songs creates a non-hierarchical series of correspondences that at times seem familiar and, at others, impenetrable—engaging the viewer in an experience that is mental, emotional and physical.

Curated by Luis Croquer

Jesper Just | With Mixed Emotions is organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit.

BLACK IS, BLACK AIN'T
February 13 - May 3, 2009

Black Is, Black Ain’t examines the topic of race from a fresh perspective and in the context of a post-Civil Rights era, where discussions of race have shifted from a focus on inclusion and equality as expressed in the dreams of Martin Luther King Jr., to a concerted but open-ended effort to make race socially and politically irrelevant.

The exhibition features works by over 20 African-American and non-African-American artists who thoughtfully and provocatively touch and reflect on subjects such as race, gender, sexuality, representation and language. History and class also feature prominently, offering a unique opportunity to revisit and rethink these important topics of race through the eyes of exceptional contemporary artists.

Curated by Hamza Walker and organized by the Renaissance Society of Chicago.

Sponsorship for the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit’s 2009 exhibitions is provided in part by The Kresge Foundation, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc, and Masco Corporation
Foundation.

I REPEAT MYSELF WHEN UNDER STRESS
February 13 - May 03, 2009

I Repeat Myself When Under Stress examines the ways that contemporary artists compulsively duplicate visual, narrative and formal elements in their work. Repetition and reproduction have been recurrent themes in artistic practice since 1945—as a means of embracing medium hybridity and as a stylistic device—revealing both the compulsions of consumption and the psychological constraints artists face in climates of economic and political uncertainty.

In the exhibition, Ceal Floyer, known for her extremely precise and subtle interventions in exhibition spaces, presents already existing works. Hans Schabus has created a site-specific installation on a simultaneously micro- and mega-scale, and Tris Vonna-Michell has expanded a work created in response to his encounters with the social history and revolutionary potential of the City of Detroit.

The artists, both individually and collectively, reflect and focus on repetition, a concept that acquires special significance in the context of Detroit—the city where the assembly line was invented. Once a great symbol of modernity and automatization, this industrial process relied on an inherent linearity and repetitiveness that over time has, without significant adaptations, become virtually obsolete, particularly in an increasingly interconnected world.

Curated by Trevor Smith, Curator of Contemporary Art, Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Massachusetts, and Thomas Trummer, Project Manager for the Visual Arts at Siemens Arts Program, Munich, I Repeat Myself When Under Stress is presented in collaboration with the Siemens Arts Program.

BUSINESS AS USUAL
Curated by Jacob Proctor, Associate Curator of Modern & Contemporary Art, University of Michigan Museum of Art
September 12 - December 28, 2008

Business as Usual explores the complex intersection of art and commerce over the past decade. Both individually and collectively, the artists featured in the exhibition — Bernadette Corporation, Guyton\Walker, Josephine Meckseper, Carey Young, and Sislej Xhafa — explore the role and function of art in a culture increasingly dominated by the dictates of the market, both artistic and otherwise.

Business as Usual is curated by Jacob Proctor. Jacob Proctor is Associate Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the University of Michigan Museum of Art (UMMA), which will reopen to the public in Spring 2009 following a $41.9 million expansion and renovation project. Proctor is founding curator of UMMA Projects, a new series of exhibitions and publications focusing on emerging artists. Upcoming UMMA Projects include Walead Beshty, Lisa Anne Auerbach, Heather Rowe, Cory Arcangel, and Simon Dybbroe Moller, among others. Proctor is also currently organizing the first North American retrospective of seminal conceptual artist (and Michigan native) Douglas Huebler, who passed away in 1997.

Prior to joining UMMA in late 2007, Proctor spent three years at the Harvard University Art Museums while pursuing his PhD in History of Art and Architecture. His most recent exhibition, Multiple Strategies: Beuys, Maciunas, Fluxus, was presented to critical acclaim in early 2007 at Harvard’s Busch-Reisinger Museum. Between Object and Event, a volume of essays drawn from a symposium Proctor organized in conjunction with the exhibition, is forthcoming.

Read insights on MOCAD’s new neon sign: (Business as Usual artist)Sislej Xhafa’s Nothing Will Be Alright here.

BECOMING: PHOTOGRAPHS FROM THE WEDGE COLLECTION
Curated by Kenneth Montague
September 12 - December 28, 2008

Becoming: Photographs from the Wedge Collection examines ways in which personal and cultural identity are created, challenged, or affirmed. Through portraiture, these works by artists from Canada, the United States, Africa and throughout the Diaspora, trace the evolving politics of representation. Whether documentation of an era or reflections on family histories, the images provide insights into the changing roles of the artist and subject. This exhibition includes historical and contemporary photography, and is curated by Kenneth Montague, Director of Wedge Curatorial Projects in Toronto. Continue for more images...

BROADCAST
Curated by Irene Hofmann and co-organized by iCI, New York, and the Contemporary Museum, Baltimore
September 12 - December 28, 2008

Broadcast explores ways in which artists since the late 1960s have engaged, critiqued, and inserted themselves into official channels of broadcast television and radio.

Curated by Irene Hofmann, executive director of the Contemporary Museum in Baltimore, Broadcast features thirteen works from the early 1970s to the present by an international group of artists, including single-channel monitor-based videos, video-projection works, photography, installations, and interactive broadcasting projects.

Artists in this exhibition include:
Dara Birnbaum
Chris Burden
Gregory Green
Doug Hall, Chip Lord and Jody Procter
Christian Jankowski
Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle
neuroTransmitter
Antonio Muntadas
Nam June Paik
TVTV (Top Value Television)
Siebren Versteeg

Broadcast is co-organized by iCI, (Independent Curators International), New York, and the Contemporary Museum, Baltimore, and circulated by iCI. Continue reading...

considering DETROIT
AND considering ARCHITECTURE: SUSTAINABLE DESIGNS FROM DETROIT
May 10 - July 27, 2008

considering Detroit and considering Architecture open at 7 pm May 10 and runs through July 27.

considering Detroit is the first in a projected series that will explore contemporary art somehow linked to the Detroit area, and document this recent artistic activity. considering Detroit will include five visual artists, one poet, and a collective. They are:

Ellen Cantor
Maurice Greenia Jr. (Maugre)
Jim Gustafson
Allie McGhee
Heather McGill
Gordon Newton
artist collective TIME STEREO

In conjunction with MOCAD's considering DETROIT show, considering Architecture: Sustainable Designs from Detroit will also be on view. This show will include the designs, architecture and products of several local area architecture firms and highlight their projects that include "green" or sustainable design practices. Continue reading...

ReFUSING FASHION: REI KAWAKUBO
February 8 - April 20, 2008

One of the most elusive fashion designers in the world, Rei Kawakubo of Japan, is known for remaking the forms of clothes. Her sweaters full of holes, jackets with only one sleeve and dresses that are part dress and part pants are unique, yet always wearable. She says she wants to "design clothes that have never yet existed." Her innovative fashion, unique methods of fabrication and collaborations with artists working in many different fields including the great modern choreographer Merce Cunningham, will be explored in a unique installation of her work at MOCAD. The exhibition will include over 40 key garments, costumes from and film of the Cunningham performance, photographs, runway footage and ephemera. Continue reading...

HOLY HIP-HOP!
NEW PAINTINGS BY ALEX MELAMID
February 8 - April 20, 2008

Click to see exhibition catalogue.

Icons from the world of hip-hop music will be the subject of an extraordinary exhibition of portraits by Russian-born American painter Alexander Melamid, the outspoken artist who once had his work dismantled and bulldozed by the Soviet government. Holy Hip-Hop! New Paintings by Alex Melamid will be on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit from February 8 through April 20, 2008. Holy Hip-Hop! marks the first-ever solo show for Melamid, who is world-famous for his collaborative partnership with fellow Russian-born artist Vitaly Komar. A fully-illustrated catalogue will accompany the exhibition. Continue reading...

WORDS FAIL ME
Curated by Matthew Higgs
September 16, 2007 - January 20, 2008
Opens September 15 at 7pm

Matthew Higgs curates the Fall 2007 show at MOCAD. Artists in the show will include: Lisa Anne Auerbach, Tauba Auerbach, Anne-Lise Coste, Martin Creed, Sam Durant, Peter Fischli, Ryan Gander, Siobhan Liddell, Jonathan Monk, Philippe Parreno, Jack Pierson, Carl Pope, Kay Rosen, Ron Terada, Rirkrit Tiravanija, David Weiss and Jennifer West.

Continue reading...

STUFF: INTERNATIONAL CONTEMPORARY ART FROM THE COLLECTION OF BURT AARON
May 12 - July 29, 2007

The Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit is proud to present STUFF: International Contemporary Art from the Collection of Burt Aaron. Featuring over 100 works of art by over 75 artists, this show brings rarely seen work from a private collection to the public eye.

Continue reading...

SHRINKING CITIES
In collaboration with Cranbrook Art Museum
February 3 - April 1, 2007

Shrinking Cities, a project by Germany's Federal Cultural Foundation, the Kulturstiftung des Bundes, explores a form of urban development that has become a global phenomenon. Starting in 2002, local teams were commissioned in Detroit (USA), Manchester/Liverpool (Britain), Ivanovo (Russia), and Halle/Leipzig (Germany) to investigate and document processes of urban shrinking. In more than fifty exhibition contributions, artists, architects, filmmakers, journalists, culture experts, and sociologists reveal and illuminate the changing realities of these cities. Continue reading...

MEDITATIONS IN AN EMERGENCY
Curated by Klaus Kertess
October 28, 2006 - April 22, 2007

Click to see exhibition catalogue.

We seem to be residing in a world in which nature has frequently come to be referred to as a terrorist; and terrorism has come to be thought of as natural. Tornadic conditions prevail spiritually, mentally, and physically. Now directly, now obliquely, now with humor, never preaching, the artists included in the opening exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art - Detroit, explore this dark moment. Continue reading...