The project also resonates with the city’s contemporary landscape of surveillance. Detroit residents continue to encounter the visible presence of Project Green Light Detroit, a public-private initiative that installs bright green lights and live-streamed cameras at participating businesses connected to the Detroit Police Department’s Real-Time Crime Center. In this context, the green spectrum of night-vision imagery carries layered meanings—suggesting both the promise of safety and ongoing debates around surveillance, equity, and public space.

For Jova Lynne, Co-Director and Artistic Director of MOCAD, these associations situate the project within broader questions about observation and institutional authority. “The connection between community surveillance and museum surveillance lies in their shared function as systems of observation,” Lynne notes. “Both rely on technologies of watching to shape behavior and construct narratives about safety, visibility, and belonging.”

Loris Gréaud*Cortical:Smoke+Mirrors forms part of Gréaud’s ongoing CORTICAL cycle, developed with international partner institutions including the Petit Palais (Musée des Beaux-Arts de la Ville de Paris), the Musée d’Art et d’Histoire de Genève, and the Théâtre du Châtelet, with future presentations planned in Timișoara, Romania. Reflecting on the city that hosts the project, Gréaud notes: “Detroit has always fascinated me. I see it as a kind of kaleidoscope of potential lives… The city of Detroit is itself a history of art. And art is a chance.”

After nearly six years of sustained exchange, Loris Gréaud*Cortical:Smoke+Mirrors ultimately transforms MOCAD into a luminous nocturnal instrument—one that invites viewers to encounter the museum not simply as a container for art, but as an active presence within the urban landscape, where perception, projection, and myth circulate long after dark.

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 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 LORIS GRÉAUD
Since the early 2000s, Loris Gréaud has been following an atypical trajectory on the
international contemporary art scene. He produces unique environments whose narrative is fraught with paradoxes and its linearity often troubled by disruptive elements. Rumours, poetry, viruses, architecture and demolition, academism and self-negation are all regularly invoked in his work, which strives to bring together physical and mental spaces on a single surface.

Loris Gréaud’s projects have given rise to numerous solo exhibitions. In 2008, he was the first artist to take over the entire Palais de Tokyo with his CELLAR DOOR project, which was subsequently developed at the ICA London (UK), the La Conservera museum in Murcia (ES), the Kunsthalle Santkt Gallen (CH) and the Kunsthalle Wien (AT). He also had a double-exhibition at the Musée du Louvre and the Centre National d’Art Moderne Georges Pompidou in Paris (FR), with his internationally acclaimed project [I]. In 2015, he took over the entire space of the Dallas Contemporary (US) with his project The Unplayed Notes Museum. In 2016, he developed the Sculpt project specifically for LACMA in Los Angeles (US), his first solo exhibition on the west coast of the United States. In 2017, he set the 57th Venice Biennale alight with his project The Unplayed Notes Factory in Murano (IT). In 2019, the Tel Aviv Museum of Art (IL) hosted his exhibition Sculpt: Grumpy Bear, the Great Spinoff, the second stage of the project initiated at LACMA. The exhibition The Original, The Translation highlighted his publishing activities at the Bibliothèque Kandinsky/Centre Pompidou (FR). Subsequently, after acquiring the work MACHINE in 2018, the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris (FR) invited Loris Gréaud to design a specific exhibition, entitled GLORIUS READ. In February 2020, the artist inaugurated his perennial project The Underground Sculpture Park at the Casa Wabi Foundation (MX), as an extension of the architecture designed by Tadao Ando. More recently, Loris Gréaud’s body of work, The Multiplication Table of Obsession and Irresolution, recently joined the collections of the Centre National d’Art Moderne—Georges Pompidou (FR). Finally, in 2023, his ambitious exhibition Les Nuits Corticales, designed for the Petit Palais, City of Paris’ Museum of Fine Arts (FR), met with unprecedented success.

Loris Gréaud’s works can be found in numerous public collections, including: the Centre Pompidou (FR), the Los Angeles County Museum of Art—LACMA (US), the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris—MAM (FR), the François Pinault Collection (FR and IT), the Fondation Louis Vuitton (FR), the Israel Museum (IL), the Margulies Collection (US), the Goetz Collection (DE), Musée de l’Élysée (CH), the Rubell Family Collection (US), the Nam June Paik Art Center (KR), the Tel Aviv Museum of Art—TAMA (IL), the Hirshhorn Museum (US), the Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art—INHA (FR), the Hermitage Museum (RU).

ABOUT MIKE KELLEY FOUNDATION FOR THE ARTS
The Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts advances the artist’s spirit of critical thinking, risk taking, and provocation in the arts. Established by Kelley in 2007, the Foundation seeks to further Kelley’s philanthropic work through grants to arts organizations and artists for innovative projects that reflect his multifaceted artistic practice. The Foundation also preserves the artist’s legacy more broadly and fosters the understanding of his life and creative achievements through educational initiatives including exhibitions, educational events, publications and the preservation and care of the Foundation’s art collections and archives.

ABOUT MIKE KELLEY’S MOBILE HOMESTEAD
Mobile Homestead is a permanent artwork by the late artist Mike Kelley, located at MOCAD. The sculpture is a full-scale replica of the 1950s ranch-style home where Kelley grew up. It is the only work of public art ever made by Kelley and the first major installation of his work in his hometown. Following Kelley’s wishes, the ground floor rooms of the home are a community gallery and gathering space featuring exhibitions and programs created by and for a diverse public that reflect the cultural tastes and interests of the local community. The home’s white clapboard facade and front room can detach from the rest of the structure and travel as a trailer into communities throughout Detroit on missions in service of the public good.

ABOUT CHRISTO ET JEANNE-CLAUDE. PARIS!, CENTRE POMPIDOU, CURATED BY SOPHIE DUPLAIX
Christo and Jeanne-Claude met in Paris in 1958, where Christo, having fled Communist Bulgaria, developed a distinctive artistic language based on wrapping, accumulation, and the transformation of everyday and architectural forms. During his Paris years (1958–1964), Christo experimented with wrapped objects, textured surfaces, barrels, and temporary urban interventions, laying the foundations for later monumental projects. Although briefly associated with the New Realists, his work remained independent of that movement. The exhibition retraces this evolution and devotes particular attention to the Pont-Neuf project, developed between 1975 and 1985. After ten years of negotiations and extensive technical preparation, the installation was displayed for just two weeks, from 22 September to 6 October 1985. Like all their large-scale works, the project was entirely self-financed through the sale of preparatory drawings and collages, underscoring that, for Christo and Jeanne-Claude, the artwork encompassed both the process and its fleeting realization.


CONTACT
Carolina Adams
Sutton Communications
mocad@suttoncomms.com