Yvette Rock’s empathetic approach has had that effect on scores of people in the community through her many initiatives connected to art. “I started thinking about what it would mean for Yvette Rock to be a ‘live coal,'” she said. “What would it mean for me to be someone in the city of Detroit who helps set these things in motion, this artistic venture in motion, you know, like being a spark in the city, causing others to be excited about art?”

The late Mary Chase Perry Stratton founded Pewabic Pottery in 1903. Her legacy, like her influence, remains a force. She received a prestigious honorary Master of Arts degree in 1930, established the first ceramic arts studio at the University of Michigan during World War II, helped built its art museum’s collection and penned a ceramics text that is still in use by artists today, cementing her reputation as an innovator and, interestingly, as a teacher. 

Detroit artist Tylonn J. Sawyer will work with U-M students to create a mural to honor Samuel C. Watson, the first African American student admitted to the University of Michigan. 

The project, led by Detroit-based artist and U-M alumnus Doug Jones, will culminate in an exhibition titled “Connect the Dots: Collective Interpretations of the U-M Library Collections.” It opens Monday at the Hatcher Graduate Library, 913 South University Ave.

It is noteworthy when a world-renown cultural institution housing priceless art gives you a chance to display what you did over your summer vacation. That is what the Detroit Institute of Arts is doing for a group of Delray students as it honors their families, stories and creativity through their personal ofrendas.

UM-Dearborn professor emeritus Lars Bjorn is still an integral part of Detroit’s jazz scene today. As the president of the Southeast Michigan Jazz Association for over a dozen years, he continues to support and encourage jazz musicians throughout the state. “The jazz scene in Detroit is getting better. It has been up and down, primarily with the fortunes of the city, but it is coming back,” he says. “It’s still a vital jazz scene.” To see jazz in Detroit, Bjorn suggests the historic Cliff Bell’s jazz club.

Wayne S. Brown hears and feels Detroit like a musical composition, a songbook that tells his life story and that of the city through its crescendos and decrescendos, its mournful lamentations to its soaring arias. Brown, a University of Michigan alum who serves as president and CEO of Michigan Opera Theatre, knows Detroit as the place that enriched his childhood, gave him his love of performing music and his first job opportunity with the Detroit Symphony Orchestra. It now serves as his inspiration to bring opera off of the stage and out into a community ready to embrace it.

Daring Dances, a curatorial program created by Clare Croft, an associate professor of dance and American culture at the University of Michigan School of Music, Theatre & Dance, announces its first public events: three upcoming performances in Detroit and Ann Arbor.

Few who devote their lives to words or teaching expect fame or financial reward. But when The Kresge Foundation recently named Gloria House its 2019 Eminent Artist, the poet, activist and professor described the accolades as a kind of grace “falling out of the sky.”