UPCOMING EVENTS / PAST EVENTS

MOCAD hosts musical, literary and artistic events throughout the year. Check back often or contact us at info@mocadetroit.org if you would like to be kept up to date on upcoming events.

All events are free and open to the public and take place at MOCAD unless otherwise indicated.

Follow MOCAD's upcoming events and announcements:

FAMILY DAY
It’s All Fun and Games... with Graem Whyte
Sunday, May 19, Noon to 4PM
Admission: Free
Sculpture sports? Sport sculptures? Fun and games! Join artist Graem Whyte to create sculptures to be used or played as games! His sculpture RecPod will be in the cafe for an all ages, all sizes tournament, with prizes awarded for various creative reasons. Participants will collaborate to create their own games and their own prizes using a variety of materials and constraints provided by the artist. Ace! Checkmate! FORE!

MUSIC
Michael Snow / CCMC
with Wolf Eyes and DJ Brad Hales
Tuesday, May 21, 8PM
Admission: $5 (free for MOCAD members and Media City attendees)
MOCAD and Windsor’s Media City Film Festival join together to present Michael Snow in concert. Snow is considered one of Canada’s most important living artists. A prolific painter, photographer, sculptor, jazz musician, and filmmaker, Snow’s art explores the possibilities inherent in different media and practices. His recorded output includes many jazz and improvisation records, with the Canadian Creative Music Collective (CCMC) among others. This event will see the vinyl reissue of CCMC Vol. 3 - one of the rarest of this collective’s 1970s releases. Snow will be joined in performance by CCMC members John Oswald and Al Mattes.

Michigan noisemakers Wolf Eyes open. This trio has grown beyond a band into a collective mutant ensemble, an art abstraction unit: musicians, printmakers, photographers and more, all sharing a primal vision of decoding the wilderness of the soul using their deep audio arsenals.

DJ Brad Hales of Magic City Soul Club plays music before, between, and after.

More info on Media City at mediacityfilmfestival.com

MUSIC + DANCE PERFORMANCE + DANCE PARTY
Chromatic Jackie with Magas plus Macho City and Disco/Secret DJs
Friday, May 24, 9PM
Admission: $5
Chromatic Jackie is a collaboration between a visual artist, a dancer, and a musician. Visual artist Dana Bell choreographs movements with CGI (computer graphics interface) software and pairs it with sound fragments provided by Sam Consiglio (formerly of Adult. and Tamion 12 Inch). The dancer Sari Nordman interprets digitally generated movements and modular, self-contained systems of choreography produced by software, synchronizing with an original sound piece written for this project.

With Magas: James Marlon Magas has been creating unconventional music since 1992, with avant rock bands Couch and Lake of Dracula, and since 1999 as the solo electronic artist Magas.

DEPE SPACE ARTIST TALK
Graem Whyte
Thursday, May 30, 7PM
Admission: Free
DEPE Space resident Graem Whyte discusses his RecPod project and the notion of play as art practice.

READING
Dana Ward and Marie Buck
Thursday, June 6, 7PM
Admission: Free
Dana Ward is the author of The Crisis of Infinite Worlds, just out from Futurepoem. Other books include This Can’t Be Life (Edge Books) & Some Other Deaths of Bas Jan Ader (Flowers & Cream, forthcoming). With Paul Coors, he co-edits Perfect Lovers Press in Cincinnati Ohio, where he lives with Sarah & Vivian. Ward will read from a work in progress called The Day That Love Began: An Aubade-Novel, and maybe even a piece of writing he hasn’t yet anticipated making, something brought on by the spring. Marie Buck is the author of Life & Style and a chapbook, “Amazing Weapons.” Recent work has appeared in West Wind Review, OMG!, Rethinking Marxism and online at Two Serious Ladies, and her work has been anthologized in Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing. She co-edits the small poetry zine Model Homes and lives in Detroit, where she teaches and dissertates. Buck will read poems from a manuscript in progress, “One Small Fold,” which explores the intersections of political abjection, collectivity, and sexuality.

OPENING NIGHT
(in)Habitation
Friday, June 7 (runs 6/7 to 7/28)
EXHIBITION: 7 to 10PM
MUSICAL PERFORMANCE: 10PM

MUSIC: Illy Mack
Admission: $5 (free for members)
Illy Mack is a minimalist soul-pop duo (singer-keyboardist-guitarist Jennifer David and bassist-drummer Steve Kendzorski) whose charm is born of raw emotion and the ability to translate it into a song and a stage show. David, a lifelong pianist with a dynamic balladeer’s voice, sings and plays keyboards set upon an ironing board, with a guitar and saxophone strapped to her back. Kendzorski slaps the bass from a stool where he bangs the snare and kick drums with each foot. For the songs, David delivers melodies and wordplay to her would-be bro Kendzorski, and they take it from there.

MUSIC + FILM
Duane Pitre and Bridges
Thursday, June 13, 8PM
Admission: $7 (free for members)
Duane Pitre is an American avant-garde composer, performer, and sound artist. His work often focuses on the interaction between electronic sound and acoustic instrumentation, chaos and discipline, as well as site-specificity. The composer frequently utilizes alternate tuning schemes that focus on microtonality, enabling him to explore unaccustomed intervallic relationships. He has created works for various instrumentation configurations such as string orchestra, his own bowed harmonic-guitar ensemble, string/wind ensembles, and solo works (for himself). Following Pitre’s solo performance will be a screening of video artist Bradford Willingham’s Bridges, a video accompaniment to Pitre’s album of the same name. Also, Pitre will have his Feel Free sound installation running in the MOCAD Café all day.

FAMILY DAY
HOMEwork with Senghor Reid
Sunday, June 16, Noon to 4PM
Admission: Free
What makes a house a home? How is that different from a fort or a clubhouse? A home is a place of residence or refuge that ideally fulfils needs such as safety and shelter for its inhabitants—but what more would it be if kids were in charge? Detroit artist Senghor Reid leads a workshop in which participants collectively create a dream home combining architectural elements used throughout the world. Draw! Dream! Assemble!

ARTIST TALK + LIVE EVENT
What Can You Do? with Brenda Hutchinson
Thursday, June 20, 7PM
Admission: Free
Brenda Hutchinson is a composer and sound artist whose work is based on the cultivation of openness in her own life and in those she works with, encouraging participants to experiment with sound, share stories and make music. Join Brenda Hutchinson as she shares her work through both an artist talk and a special in-house What Can You Do? event, culminating with highlights from the evening shared by Hutchinson. What Can You Do? is her ongoing, socially engaged project in which she builds teams to learn from and share skills with unwitting passersby and MOCAD visitors alike.

MUSIC
Allied Media Conference Music Showcase
Saturday, June 22, 8PM
Admission: $10 (free for registered AMC participants)
The 2013 Allied Media Conference Music Showcase continues the conference’s tradition of vivacious variety with another genre-blending lineup, including hip-hop from Bahamadia, Detroit techno from Kyle Hall, synth-pop from Lovers, the global dance sounds of the Anthology of Booty DJ Collective, hip-hop from DJ Dez Andrés, plus a few surprises. Hosted by Stevie Soul. More info at alliedmedia.org

VIDEO + MUSIC
Katabasis by Cooper Holoweski
Friday, June 28, 8PM
Admission: Free
Detroit-born, Brooklyn-based artist Cooper Holoweski’s video work has been praised by Art in America as “infinitely watchable.” His Katabasis is a 40-minute video landscape with live sound accompaniment that moves the viewer though an elaborately constructed virtual junkyard to explore the themes of death, limbo, and rebirth. In various world mythologies “Katabasis” refers to a trip to the underworld. The journey of Odysseus through Hades and the death and resurrection of Lazarus are classic examples of Katabasis. Together with the live performance of an evolving musical score, it creates multi-sensory experiences that exemplify the tense liminal space of Katabasis. The score is a collage of improvised instrumentation, field recordings, and audio loops that form a densely layered soundscape for each movement.

CURATOR + ARTIST TALK
(in)Habitation
Saturday, June 29, 1PM
Admission: Free
Curator Greg Tom and a selection of participating artists give a tour of the (in)Habitation exhibition, and take part in an informal discussion following.

MUSIC
Concert of Colors Afterparty with the Cambodian Space Project and DJs Twin Spin
Saturday, July 6, 9PM
Admission: Free
The Cambodian Space Project is a remarkable group that not only covers and preserves songs from the golden age of ‘60s Cambodian pop, but also writes their own dazzlingly original Khmer psychedelic rock. The stratospheric rise of the Cambodian Space Project has caught by surprise those witnessing the spectacle of this cosmic cross-culture rock band as it blasts across the dusty highways of Cambodia. In Cambodia, the CSP has landed like an unexpected meteor and has made an immediate impact on enthusiastic local audiences with its festival-like live shows. To date, the CSP has performed in venues ranging from chic city clubs to rural villages, schools and orphanages, even an elephant’s 50th birthday party. For the musicians, The Cambodian Space Project is a troupe bonded not only by the diversity of its members’ backgrounds but by an artistic vision to bridge cultures while exploring new musical frontiers. DJs Twin Spin play world psychedelic classics and obscurities all night.

MUSIC
Wire
Tuesday, July 9, 8PM Admission: $18 in advance
Since their formation in London in 1976, the members of Wire have maintained and advanced a musical project which treats the creative potential of a rock band as a fluid, amorphous medium. As removed from self-conscious intellectualism as they are from the inherent conservatism of much rock music, Wire employs their unique, endlessly restless, and risk-taking creativity to question every aspect of songwriting, recording and performance. They delight and disturb in equal measure, troubleshooting the circuitry of perfect pop, or patrolling the limits of focused experimentalism. Colin Newman, Graham Lewis, and Robert Grey continue to work on new material, regularly confounding expectations.

MUSIC
Julia Holter with Jessica Pratt
Thursday, July 18, 8PM Admission: $7 (free for MOCAD members)
Julia Holter’s music reflects the conventions of her classical training, but it is also uncannily poppy. Holter’s approach to crafting songs centers around what she describes as “open ear decisions: what seemed to sound best for that moment.” This blindness to reference unintentionally steers her work along the experimental pop spectrum most commonly associated with New York’s Downtown music micro-universe of the ‘80s, specifically the works of Laurie Anderson and Arthur Russell. Her songs are written instinctively, and treated with an off-kilter fastidiousness, working an orchestral variety from minimal instrumentation.

FAMILY DAY
What Can You Do? with Brenda Hutchinson
Sunday, July 21, 12 Noon to 4PM
Admission: Free
Do you know any songs, jokes, tricks, or words of wisdom? Can you count in perfect time without looking at a clock? What are your secret talents? This special Family Day with Brenda Hutchinson creates a safe and fun place to share with and learn from old and new friends.

The Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit is a non-profit, tax-exempt organization supported through invaluable contributions from individuals and members. The Richard and Jane Manoogian Foundation provides leading support for the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit since 2006. General operating support for MOCAD is generously provided by Fred A. and Barbara M. Erb Family Foundation, General Motors Foundation, The Kresge Foundation, Masco Corporation Foundation and The Taubman Foundation. Additional funding for programming and educational initiatives is provided by Edith S. Briskin/Shirley K. Schlafer Foundation. Valuable in-kind support is provided by Dykema. Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit is also supported, in part, by The Andy Warhol Foundation For the Arts, Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, Leveraging Investments in Creativity in partnership with the Ford Foundation, and ArtPlace, a collaboration of top national foundations, the National Endowment for the Arts and various federal agencies to accelerate creative placemaking across the U.S.