After being closed for months for renovation work, the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (MOCAD) is getting ready to reopen to the public.
MOCAD will kick off its 20th anniversary year on April 25 with three new exhibitions featuring works by notable Detroit-area artists. The museum says it is also marking the milestone by renaming its main building after its co-founder, the late Julie Reyes Taubman.
“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,” MOCAD co-director Marie Madison-Patton said in a statement.
Artists featured in the museum’s grand reopening exhibitions include Olayami Dabls, billed as “the first comprehensive museum retrospective of the visionary Detroit artist, storyteller, and cultural historian behind the MBAD African Bead Museum,” an outdoor art installation on the city’s west side. Titled Detroit Cosmologies, the exhibition covers 45 years of work including previously unseen paintings, collages, sculptures, and more.
This Side of the River features work by Carole Harris, a fiber artist who has worked in Detroit since her first solo show at the former Gallery 7 in 1977. And Retail Therapy is described as the first solo museum exhibition of Martha Mysko, co-head Cranbrook Academy of Art’s painting department, known for constructing assemblages made from materials acquired from around Detroit.
“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,” MOCAD co-director Jova Lynne said in a statement. “It’s a season that embodies our belief that art is inseparable from community reflection and care.”
Located at 4454 Woodward Ave., MOCAD closed in August for renovations that include infrastructure upgrades and a new public window display.
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