MOCAD ANNOUNCES ITS SPRING/SUMMER 2023 EXHIBITIONS

APRIL 14 – SEPTEMBER 3, 2023

The Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (MOCAD) is pleased to announce the 2023 Spring/Summer season, which celebrates creatives whose practices provoke the liberation of one’s mind, body, and community. Each presenting artist’s practice fosters a collective global consciousness around contemporary justice issues.

MOCAD’s main campus building will host exhibitions by artists Liz Cohen, Sydney G. James, Devin Drake + Jennifer Harge, and Gina Osterloh. Their feminist approaches to portraiture, performance, and storytelling unite this diverse group of artists. Each of their practices situate stories of marginalized bodies, particularly women’s, as political sites of labor. Their work critiques imperialism and colonization while celebrating individual and community-based perseverance and survival.

In Mike Kelley’s Mobile Homestead, MOCAD has collaborated with the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum and the Michigan Justice Fund to present the exhibition Free Your Mind: Art and Incarceration in Michigan. This exhibition highlights work by former and currently incarcerated artists, poets, and storytellers. Their experiences invite us to consider art-making’s role in prisons as a liberating force. Free Your Mind aims to cultivate a better understanding of how incarcerated individuals’ growth is linked to our society’s broader health.

On the Mike Kelley’s Mobile Homestead lawn, Kennedy Yanko will premiere Tilted Lift, on view from March 17 through May 14, 2023. The exhibition features an outdoor sculpture commissioned for the Monumental Tour, a traveling exhibition series contributing objects to the public realm that tell a more honest and representative story of our shared history. This addition to the tour creates space for manifestations of Black culture that extend beyond resistance. Tilted Lift opens a dialogue on the politics of representation. This exhibitions is curated by Marsha Reid of Kindred Arts Cultural Equity Initiative.

MOCAD’s spring/summer 2023 exhibitions are made possible with generous lead support from Pensole Lewis HBCU, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, and the Michigan Justice Fund at the Community Foundation for Southeast Michigan. Additional support has been provided by the Kettering Family Foundation, and Linda and David Whitaker.

Learn more about MOCAD’s spring/summer exhibitions.