Published on occasion of the exhibitions "Meditations in an Emergency" at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, October 28, 2006 through April 29, 2007.

Meditations in an Emergency

Kara Walker

Tabaimo

Mark Bradford

Christopher Fachini

Barry McGee

Roxy Paine

Paul Pfeiffer

Jonathan Pylypchuk

Nari Ward

Museum of Contemporary Art, Detroit

Rei Kawakubo (born 1942) established Comme des Garçons in Tokyo in 1973 and quickly consolidated her stature as one of the three major Japanese designers alongside Issey Miyake and Yohji Yamamoto. Kawakubo's conceptions stem from her background in fine arts and literature rather than from any formal design training. Her fabrication methods, and her collaborations with artists such as the late, great Merce Cunningham, are explored in this survey of her work. ReFusing Fashion presents over 40 key garments, costumes from Kawakubo's Cunningham collaboration, photographs, runway footage and ephemera.

Rei Kawakubo: ReFusing Fashion (MUSEUM OF CONTE)

Arts & Photography

Koda, Harold

Lavin, Sylvia

Graphic Design

Sonic Rebellion: Music as Resistance is inspired by the vital history of music in Detroit and the legacy of the 1967 Detroit Rebellion. It connects Detroit's musical and political histories with a wide range of artworks, music ephemera and artifacts to offer a listening space for the rebellion's reverberations. This historic event is related to more recent social movements, from Occupy to Black Lives Matter, illustrating threads between past protests and the unresolved racial politics in the United States today. One major thread is the role of music as a catalyst for social change and empowerment. Artists include Andrea Bowers, Tim Davis, Emory Douglas, Juliana Huxtable, Rashid Johnson, Glenn Ligon, Leni Sinclair and Mickalene Thomas.

Sonic Rebellion: Music as Resistance: Detroit 1967–2017

Collections, Catalogs & Exhibitions

Please note: The spine of this volume is specially treated with black ink to evoke the industrial character of its subject. Over the past six years, documentary photographer and architectural historian Julia Reyes Taubman has taken more than 30,000 photographs across the sprawled terrain of Detroit, ambitiously mapping out a comprehensive survey of a major American city. Photographing on the ground, in the buildings and by air and water, Reyes Taubman believes that when buildings and landscape are manipulated by nature and time they become more visually compelling than almost any architectural intervention. Reyes Taubman is not pessimistic, however: “It is not a disgrace but a privilege and an obligation to listen to the stories only ruins can tell,” she writes in regard to this project. “They tell us a lot about who we were, what we once valued most, and perhaps where we may be going.” As Reyes Taubman scrutinizes this 138-square-mile metropolis in transition, she pays particular attention to the scale and the solidity of the buildings that characterized the former “Motor City” at the height of its industrial wealth and power. More than a photographic saturation job of a single city, Detroit: 138 Square Miles provides contextual perspective in an extended caption section in which Reyes Taubman collaborated with University of Michigan professors Robert Fishman and Michael McCulloch to emphasize the social imperatives driving her documentation. An essay by native Detroiter and bestselling author Elmore Leonard addresses the social and cultural significance of the post-industrial condition of this metropolis.

Julia Reyes Taubman: Detroit: 138 Square Miles

Individual Artists

Post-Industrial Complex

Unknown, Author

Titled after James Lee Byars' famous proclamation, Triple Candie's I Cancel All My Works at Death posits that Byars and his work are better misremembered than reexperienced. Triple Candie is a fugitive institution operated by two art historians that produces exhibitions "about art but devoid of it" that are realized without the involvement of artists. This book includes documentation of the exhibition as well as two recollections (by the artist's teenage sweetheart and a late-life acquaintance), essays on creative reconstruction and Byars' relationship to Detroit, a conversation between Triple Candie and a lawyer on the legal ramifications of artistic cancelation, and an assortment of quotes by Radiohead, Ivor Cutler and others that have nothing and everything to do with Byars and this show. The book is available in two different dust jackets.

I Cancel All My Works at Death: A Project by Triple Candie on James Lee Byars

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Books by Museum of Contemporary Art, Detroit