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Expanding the artistic direction of MOCAD, this exhibition amplifies our mission to be responsive to the current state of our world and present the best of contemporary art. (Detroit, MMI – March 3, 2025) – Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (MOCAD) proudly presents The Gun Violence Memorial Project, on view from May 2 to August 10, 2025. Centered in the Woodward Gallery, the project serves as a living monument to victims of gun violence. This traveling memorial invites visitors to learn more about gun violence while capturing and sharing the stories of fellow Americans who have lost loved ones to this crisis. The project debuted in Chicago, and previous iterations were presented in Washington, D.C., and Boston—now Detroit. “We are honored to host The Gun Violence Memorial Project at MOCAD” says the museum’s Co-Director and Artistic Director Jova Lynne. “This poignant installation aligns with MOCAD’s mission to present art that contextualizes, interprets, educates, and expands culture. Through this collaboration, we hope to create space for reflection, dialogue, and collective action in the fight against gun violence.” The exhibition will feature four houses, each built of 700 glass bricks, which represents the average number of lives taken due to gun violence each week in America as of 2019. Within the glass bricks are contributed remembrance objects from families who have lost a loved one due to gun violence. These objects range from baby shoes to graduation tassels, all representative of those lost from the families. The bricks are labeled displaying the name, year of birth, and year of death of the person being honored. Visible from every angle, the houses create space to honor, preserve, and reflect on individual memories of victims of gun violence and its impact on society. “We are energized to be working with MOCAD in their capacity as a community anchor and creative partner, with whose guidance and leadership we are confident the memorial will be transformative in Detroit.” says Jha D Amazi, Director of MASS Design’s Public Memory and Memorials Lab. Launched at the Architectural Biennial in Chicago in 2019, this is a collaborative project between MASS Design Group, Boston based architecture firm promoting justice and humanity, Songha & Company, where artist Hank Willis Thomas is Creative Director and Purpose Over Pain, a gun violence prevention organization based in Chicago. Hank Willis Thomas shares, “My family felt the effects of gun violence firsthand when my cousin, Songha Thomas Willis, was murdered during a robbery 25 years ago. My life was forever changed by this tragedy, as have been the lives of so many other Americans. The GVMP, which will now be hosted at Detroit’s MOCAD, is an ongoing and collaborative memorial to victims of gun violence. It is space for family members to remember and commemorate their loved ones, making their loss tangible through the sharing of objects and stories.” Activating MOCAD’s mission that centers art as a means to nurture social change and human understanding, The Gun Violence Memorial Project raises awareness, encourages conversation, and allows space for remembrance of those affected by gun violence. Gun violence greatly affects Detroiters, at a higher than average rate, nationally. Setting this work in Detroit, the series of social sculptures act as monuments, showing us how architecture can be responsive to our environments and what it means to have a living, breathing memorial, one that is contributed to over time instead of stagnant. It is a work that, without the participation of those affected by gun violence, would cease to exist. A key aspect of this initiative involves working with local organizations to invite Michiganders who have lost loved ones to gun violence to contribute to the memorial by sharing their stories and leaving a personal object in remembrance. MOCAD will host three public events for those who wish to contribute on March 29, April 5 and June 21, please visit our website or The Gun Violence Memorial Project to learn more. ABOUT MOCAD The Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (MOCAD) presents exhibitions and programs that explore the best of contemporary art, connecting Detroit and the global art world. MOCAD focuses on art as a means to nurture social change and human understanding, reflecting our community. We encourage innovative experimentation by artists, musicians, makers, cultural producers, and scholars to enrich all who participate and to educate visitors of all ages in the power of art. Whether from Detroit or worldwide, we welcome creative voices who can guide us to an equitable and inclusive future. We believe that art can change us, and it’s our responsibility to hold a space where challenge, acceptance, hope, and beauty can coincide. ABOUT MASS DESIGN GROUP MASS Design Group is an architecture and design collective that researches, builds, and advocates for architecture that promotes justice and human dignity. They have worked in over 20 countries, with 30 projects built or in construction. MASS brings inclusive design processes and invests in community empowerment, helping partners advance their mission through the built environment. Their project, the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama, was recently called “the single greatest work of American architecture of the twenty-first century.” ABOUT SONGHA & COMPANY Songha & Company, LLC (est. 2006) was founded in honor of Hank Willis Thomas’ cousin and mentor, Songha Thomas Willis (1972-2000). An artist himself, Songha inspired Hank to pursue his own artistic language. Thomas honors his cousin’s mentorship and legacy through permanent and temporary artwork initiatives. Songha & Co, LLC is the principal entity responsible for realizing Thomas’ public artworks, social justice initiatives, and collaborative projects around the world. This includes The Embrace, in Boston, MA; and REACH, in O’Hare International Airport, Chicago, IL; The Writing on the Wall, and The Gun Violence Memorial Project, to name a few. Recent key partners include MASS Design, Incarceration Nations Network, Perkins & Will, and For Freedoms. ABOUT PURPOSE OVER PAIN Pamela Bosley and Annette Nance Holt, founders of the organization. Purpose Over Pain was formed in 2007 by several Chicago area parents whose children’s lives were taken by gun violence. They advocate for safer communities, strengthen families by providing crisis support to parents/guardians whose children have been victims of gun violence, and provide positive development activities for children and youth. For all press inquiries, please contact: Carolina Adams Sutton Communications [email protected]

(Detroit, MI – March 3, 2025) – Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (MOCAD), in partnership with The Kitchen, a New York City institution for experimental art and the avant-garde since 1971, proudly presents Code Switch: Distributing Blackness, Reprogramming Internet Art, on view from May 2 to August 10, 2025. Spanning multiple galleries, this interdisciplinary presentation highlights Black contemporary artists’ impact on new media and cultivation of technology in arts and culture. A shared presentation across MOCAD and The Kitchen, Code Switch celebrates the power of collaboration across institutions in a pivotal moment across the cultural landscape. Driven by its mission, MOCAD’s artistic vision emboldens its programs to be responsive to the state of the world and reflect the best of contemporary practice. The Museum’s 2025 artistic program is motivated by inquiries into how artists interpret collective histories. The Spring presentation of Code Switch brings together artists from across the globe to showcase the varying expressions of technology and the internet’s impact on contemporary art, honoring Black cultural legacies in the field of new media and time-based practices. Code Switch, initiated by The Kitchen, debuted as an archival presentation in partnership with the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem, and explored the periods pre-1960 and 1960–1990 through the visions of twenty-four artists and creative technologists. Drawing its title from André L. Brock’s groundbreaking text Distributed Blackness: African American Cybercultures (2020), this contemporary group exhibition explores the relationship between Black cultural production and the legacy of computation as a mode of machinic engagement and creative inspiration. Building on the historic archival exhibition presented in its first iteration in Fall 2024, Code Switch at MOCAD expands as a contemporary group exhibition celebrating Detroit as an integral meeting place where Black people have always been, and continue to be, pioneers in new media art and technologies. The city’s deep history with sound—where techno was invented and popularized—offers a framework for exploring the interconnectedness of Black people, bodies, and machines. “This is an exhibition that began with two questions: ‘What would the story of a networked Blackness, through and beyond the internet as we now know it, be if we told it as an avant-garde and experimental history?’ and ‘What would the art history of time-based media, new media, and digital technologies have looked like if it had included Black people into the canon from its inception?’” says Legacy Russell, Executive Director and Chief Curator of The Kitchen. Bringing together an intergenerational roster of over forty artists and counting, Code Switch unpacks the evolving relationship between body and machine, further shaped by the “age of the internet.” The exhibition spans a wide range of disciplines and materials, challenging and expanding the definition of “internet art.” In an era of accelerated mass communication, Black cultural production itself has been transformed, mutated, and modified through digital mediation. Surveying these shifts, Code Switch examines how artists and creative technologists disrupt the utopian promise of cyberspace as an equitable site of representation and liberation—interrogating its structures while also leveraging its generative force for inquiry and resistance. “Collaborating with The Kitchen to present Code Switch here in Detroit is a vital opportunity to explore the fluidity of identity, language, and culture in a city that has long been a center of creative technologies. At MOCAD, we are committed to presenting exhibitions that challenge perspectives and inspire new ways of thinking, and Code Switch embodies that mission by creating space for reflection, exchange, and innovation.” says MOCAD’s Co-Director/Artistic Director Jova Lynne. This exhibition presents a group of artists that each represent a unique approach to making and celebrates the diversity of Black culture that has defined new media and experimental art. The artist list includes: American Artist, manuel arturo abreu, Minne Atairu, Xenobia Bailey, Neta Bomani, Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, chukwumaa, Tony Cokes, Shawanda Corbett, Sofía Córdova, Taína Cruz, A.M. Darke, Stephanie Dinkins, L. Franklin Gilliam, Cameron A. Granger, fields harrington, Auriea Harvey, Juliana Huxtable, E. Jane, Devin Kenny, Kalup Linzy, Pope.L, Nandi Loaf, Pastiche Lumumba, Julie Mehretu, Marilyn Nance, Mendi + Keith Obadike, Ayodamola Okunseinde, Sondra Perry, Howardena Pindell, Venusloc (Vanessa Reynolds), Tabita Rezaire, Cameron Rowland, Kahlil Robert Irving, RaFia Santana, Bogosi Sekhukhuni, Martine Syms, Wes Taylor, -{ john-henry }-[ thompson ], Muriel Tramis, Jack Whitten, and others to be announced. CREDITS Code Switch: Distributing Blackness, Reprogramming Internet Art is organized by Legacy Russell (Executive Director & Chief Curator) and Angelique Rosales Salgado (Curatorial Assistant)—with contributed research by Tsige Tafesse (2023-2024 Curatorial Fellow) and Kyla Gordon (2024-2025 Curatorial Fellow)—of The Kitchen; and by Jova Lynne (Co-Director and Artistic Director) and Isabella Nimmo (Associate Curator) of MOCAD. Exhibition design by Pacific. Visit mocadetroit.org/exhibitions to learn more and see the entire artist list. Code Switch is made possible through generous project-specific support from the Teiger Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Ford Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, as well as The Kitchen’s Board of Directors, Global Council, Leadership Fund, and the Director’s Council. ABOUT MOCAD The Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (MOCAD) presents exhibitions and programs that explore the best of contemporary art, connecting Detroit and the global art world. MOCAD focuses on art as a means to nurture social change and human understanding, reflecting our community. We encourage innovative experimentation by artists, musicians, makers, cultural producers, and scholars to enrich all who participate and to educate visitors of all ages in the power of art. Whether from Detroit or worldwide, we welcome creative voices who can guide us to an equitable and inclusive future. We believe that art can change us, and it’s our responsibility to hold a space where challenge, acceptance, hope, and beauty can coincide. ABOUT THE KITCHEN Founded in 1971 as an artist-driven collective, The Kitchen today reaffirms and expands upon its originating vision as a dynamic cultural institution that centers artists, prioritizes people, and puts process first. Programming in a kunsthalle model that brings together live performances, exhibition-making, and public programming under one roof, The Kitchen empowers its audiences and communities to think creatively and radically about what it means to shape a multivalent and sustainable future in art. The Kitchen seeks to cultivate and hold space for wild thought, risky play, and innovative and experimental making, encouraging artists and cultural workers alike to defy boundaries and sending them into the world to remake art history and catalyze creative change. For all press inquiries, please contact: Carolina Adams Sutton Communications [email protected]

Welcoming Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit’s co-directors, Mellon Foundation awards MOCAD with their first time, multi-year operating grant of $300,000 to support contemporary arts in Detroit (Detroit, Michigan – February 14, 2024) – At a pivotal moment, the Mellon Foundation supports the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (MOCAD)’s new and exciting future that truly reflects the best of contemporary art practices and community engagement. In MOCAD’s 17 year history, this grant marks the first funding support from the Mellon Foundation, through inspiring conversations with co-leaders, Jova Lynne, Artistic Director, and Marie Patton, Chief Operating Officer. MOCAD looks forward to a long and generative partnership with the Mellon Foundation. This multi-year grant will support a more sustainable and necessary organization-wide growth, increasing the capacity of the co-directors and museum staff. This work is instrumental in long-term success of the institution through reinforcing the internal systems and people that make our programs and community engagement meaningful. In 2023, MOCAD hosted more than 144 innovative public programs, launched the first exhibition season in our history featuring all womxn artists and storytellers, and forged new partnerships that thoughtfully engage our community–including a partnership with Michigan Justice Fund to highlight the creativity of formerly and currently incarcerated artists, pop-up exhibition with the Progressive Arts Studio Collective (PASC), which provides creative enrichment and career pathways to artists living with disabilities. “It is truly an honor for MOCAD to receive support from the Mellon Foundation. We are grateful to be amongst the powerful institutions that Mellon recognizes as committed to advancing the arts, fostering inclusivity, and enriching cultural dialogue. This support not only empowers MOCAD to expand our programming and outreach efforts but also reaffirms our mission to cultivate a dynamic and accessible space where communities converge and creativity thrives” says MOCADs Artistic Director, Jova Lynne. MOCAD proudly functions as a hub for exploring emerging ideas in the contemporary arts and presenting art at the forefront of contemporary culture. The Museum remains responsive to the cultural content of our time, fueling crucial dialogue, collaboration, and public engagement. With supporters such as the Mellon Foundation, the co-directors cement MOCAD as a springboard for creativity and intellectual exploration in Detroit. ABOUT THE ANDREW W. MELLON FOUNDATION The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation is the nation’s largest supporter of the arts and humanities. Since 1969, the Foundation has been guided by its core belief that the humanities and arts are essential to human understanding. The Foundation believes that the arts and humanities are where we express our complex humanity, and that everyone deserves the beauty, transcendence, and freedom that can be found there. Through our grants, we seek to build just communities enriched by meaning and empowered by critical thinking, where ideas and imagination can thrive. Learn more at mellon.org. General media Inquiries: [email protected] Tonya Bell, Director of Media and Public Relations, 212.500.2321, [email protected] Maggie Slowey, Media Relations Associate, 212.461.3798, [email protected] ABOUT MOCAD The Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (MOCAD) presents exhibitions and programs that explore the best of contemporary art, connecting Detroit and the global art world. MOCAD focuses on art as a means to nurture social change and human understanding, reflecting our community. We encourage innovative experimentation by artists, musicians, makers, cultural producers, and scholars to enrich all who participate and to educate visitors of all ages in the power of art. Whether from Detroit or worldwide, we welcome creative voices who can guide us to an equitable and inclusive future. We believe that art can change us, and it’s our responsibility to hold a space where challenge, acceptance, hope, and beauty can coincide. General media Inquiries: [email protected]

Season features major exhibitions by Olayami Dabls, Carole Harris and Martha Mysko, coinciding with the museum’s reopening following renovations DETROIT, MI — The Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (MOCAD) is pleased to share new details about its Spring 2026 exhibition season, inaugurating the museum’s 20th anniversary under the guiding theme A Practice of Multiplicity. Reopening with presentations of Detroit-based artists whose practices have profoundly shaped the city’s creative landscape—Olayami Dabls, Carole Harris, and Martha Mysko—the season reflects MOCAD’s enduring commitment to experimentation, civic consciousness, and the radically creative practices rooted in Detroit. On view beginning April 25, the Spring season opens a year-long arc of exhibitions and programs that foreground the artists, traditions, and intergenerational narratives that are inspired by the city’s creative landscape. This season will also welcome visitors back to the museum following a period of essential renovations, marking both the reopening of its galleries and the beginning of MOCAD’s milestone anniversary year. “As we celebrate MOCAD’s 20th anniversary, we are thrilled to welcome visitors back to the museum and to share a Spring season that reflects the depth, creativity, and resilience of Detroit’s artistic community,” said MOCAD Co-Director Marie Madison-Patton. In conjunction with this moment, MOCAD will also honor its founding legacy by renaming its main campus building in recognition of the late Julia Reyes Taubman, co-founder of the museum. This year uplifts MOCAD’s origin story while celebrating its impact on the contemporary arts. “This milestone is an opportunity to reflect on MOCAD’s history as a space of radical artmaking, experimentation, and civic engagement, and to look ahead to the possibilities that contemporary art opens for our city. It’s a season that embodies our belief that art is inseparable from community reflection and care,” said Jova Lynne, MOCAD Co-Director.

Olayami Dabls: Detroit Cosmologies is the first comprehensive museum retrospective of the visionary Detroit artist, storyteller, and cultural historian behind the MBAD African Bead Museum. Spanning forty-five years of practice, the exhibition brings together dozens of previously unseen works—including paintings, collages, sculptures, works on paper, and public art—that fuse African symbology, African American history, and Detroit’s industrial landscape into a language of resilience and collective memory. More than a survey, the presentation transforms MOCAD into a layered environment echoing Dabls’s celebrated community-based practice: monumental installations, such as his nkisi-inspired Iron Teaches Rocks How to Rust series, reinterpret discarded industrial materials—iron, glass, rock, and mirror—into forms of spiritual, historical, and cultural continuity.   Throughout his career, from works created during his tenure at The Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History to the immersive outdoor installations at MBAD, Dabls collapses boundaries between art, education, ritual, and community-building. Detroit Cosmologies reframes how museums can hold history and cultural memory, presenting Dabls as artist, archivist, and philosopher, and inviting visitors to experience Detroit itself as a cosmological, living landscape of memory, invention, and ongoing cultural renewal. Carole Harris: This Side of the River, offers a sweeping survey of the Detroit fiber artist whose quilting and textile work has transformed the field for more than five decades. Known for her improvisational compositions, layered surfaces, and rhythmic abstractions, Harris’s work reflects Detroit’s evolving cultural landscape. This exhibition traces Harris’s trajectory from her early years at Gallery 7 where she had her first solo exhibition in 1977, to her most recent explorations in deconstruction, color, and spatial complexity. Archival materials related to Gallery 7 and to Detroit’s Black artistic networks of the 1970s–1990s will contextualize Harris’s contributions within a broader regional lineage that continues to shape contemporary art in the city. The season also presents the first solo museum exhibition of Martha Mysko. Co-Head of the Painting Department at Cranbrook Academy of Art, Mysko’s immersive installations and assemblages, built from salvaged, secondhand, and thrifted materials collected across Detroit, engage with domesticity, memory, and transformation. Martha Mysko: Retail Therapy will offer an expansive view of Mysko’s practice and introduce a series of new, site-responsive installations that examine the emotional and cultural residues embedded within everyday materials, illuminating Detroit as a landscape of both resourcefulness and reinvention. To stay informed about the current Mobile Homestead exhibition, Mary Ann Monforton: Heart Land, and reopening plans, please visit mocadetroit.org or follow MOCAD on social media @mocadetroit. ABOUT OLAYAMI DABLS Olayami Dabls (b. 1948, Canton, MS) is the founder and curator of the MBAD African Bead Museum and Dabls African Bead Gallery in Detroit, Michigan. He established the museum to return art to its original purpose in African culture: not for entertainment or profit, but as a tool for emotional and cultural healing. Located at the intersection of Grand River and West Grand Boulevard, the museum and its surrounding installations invite visitors to explore the deep connections between material, memory, and identity. Dabls’s practice, grounded in education and community engagement, reflects his belief that art can help restore balance and understanding. His murals across Detroit extend this vision, including a piece in Eastern Market depicting African women during enslavement and colonization, and another at Grand River and Warren that uses symbolic materials and imagery of snakes; ancient symbols of transformation and resilience. In the 1970s, Dabls worked at the Afro-American Museum (now the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History), where he began questioning why African art and symbols were often viewed with fear. Confronting this legacy of colonization, he devoted himself to studying African material culture, ultimately founding MBAD in 1994 as a space to share art through an African-centered lens of history, spirit, and healing. ABOUT CAROLE HARRIS Carole Harris (b. 1943, Detroit, MI) received a BFA from Wayne State University (Detroit, MI). Harris has exhibited across the United States, in Michigan, and internationally, including the Detroit Institute of Arts (Detroit, MI); Museum of African American History (Detroit, MI); The River Gallery (Chattanooga, TN); National Afro-American Museum and Cultural Center (Wilberforce, OH); and Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts (Montgomery, AL). Harris’ work has been published in numerous books, and her work has been reviewed by several newspapers and magazines. Carole Harris’ work was included in The Sum of Many Parts: 25 Quiltmakers in 21st Century America, which toured China in 2012, where she was a guest lecturer. In 2017 her work was included in Footworks at the Biennale Internationale Design Saint-Etienne in France. Her work has received numerous awards and has been exhibited and published extensively, including a two-person exhibition Repetition, Rhythm, and Vocab with artist Allie McGhee at the Detroit Institute of Arts (DIA) in 2018, a solo exhibition at the NCRC Rotunda Gallery at the University of Michigan in 2017, and a solo exhibition at The Dennos Museum Center in 2019. Her work was included in the exhibition Landlord Colors: On Art, Economy, and Materiality at the Cranbrook Art Museum in 2019. In 2015 Carole Harris was awarded a Kresge Foundation Visual Arts Fellowship. ABOUT MARTHA MYSKO Martha Mysko (b. 1982, Baltimore, MD) is an artist whose color-saturated works explore consumerism, class, taste, value, and material culture through the language of painting. She received her MFA in Painting from Cranbrook Academy of Art (2011), where she is currently Artist in Residence and co-Head of the Painting Department. Mysko has presented solo exhibitions at Belle Isle Viewing Room, Wasserman Projects, Marc Straus Gallery, Good Weather Gallery, and Sadie Halie Projects, among others. Her work has been featured in Nylon Magazine and Artforum, and included in numerous group exhibitions at institutions and galleries such as the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, Cranbrook Art Museum, Library Street Collective, Reyes Finn Gallery, and the Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art. ABOUT MOCAD The Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (MOCAD) presents exhibitions and programs that explore the best of contemporary art, connecting Detroit and the global art world. MOCAD focuses on art as a means to nurture social change and human understanding, reflecting our community. We encourage innovative experimentation by artists, musicians, makers, cultural producers, and scholars to enrich all who participate and to educate visitors of all ages in the power of art. Whether from Detroit or worldwide, we welcome creative voices who can guide us to an equitable and inclusive future. We believe that art can change us, and it’s our responsibility to hold a space where challenge, acceptance, hope, and beauty can coincide. CONTACT Carolina Adams Sutton Communications [email protected]