A commission for UMMA’s Vertical Gallery

Curator: Jennifer Friess, Associate Curator of Photography

Andrea Carlson, Sky in the Morning Hours of "Binaakwiiwi-giizis 15, 1900", 2022, gouache on paper. Courtesy of the artist © Andrea Carlson
You are on Anishinaabe land

In Andrea Carlson Future Cache, a 40-foot-tall memorial wall towers over visitors, commemorating the Cheboiganing (Burt Lake) Band of Ottawa and Chippewa Indians who were violently burned from their land in Northern Michigan on October 15, 1900. Written across the walls above and around the memorial, a statement proclaims Anishinaabe rights to the land we stand on: “You are on Anishinaabe Land.”

Presented alongside are paintings of imagined decolonized landscapes and a symbolic cache of provisions. Future Cache implicitly asks those who have benefited from the legacies of colonization to consider where they stand and where to go from here and seeks to foster a sense of belonging for displaced Indigenous peoples fighting for restitution.

How do we remember on this campus? This is the central question asked in You’re Welcome, a dynamic three-part exhibition. The result of a multiyear collaboration with artist Cannupa Hanska Luger and nonprofit public art and history studio Monument Lab, You’re Welcome examines the foundational narratives of the land occupied by the University of Michigan and both national and global discourse on nationalism, land sovereignty, militarism, colonialism, and sites of memory.

The exhibition centers on GIFT, an experimental, time-based, commissioned work by Luger on the front facade of UMMA’s Alumni Memorial Hall which challenges institutional memory and the whitewashing of history. GIFT is accompanied by two indoor installations: Meat for the Beast (Irving Stenn, Jr. Family Gallery), which delves into Luger’s artistic practice and the relationship between museum collections and resource extraction; and Monument Lab: Public Classroom (Art Gym), which examines formal and informal modes of memory on the U-M campus and beyond.

You’re Welcome explores the relationship between the Museum’s historic building, the land it stands on, and a long history of colonial narratives deeply embedded in public structures. It supports critical dialogues about the responsibilities of public institutions as cultural history makers and stewards, and it is a key component of UMMA’s ongoing efforts to challenge its history and practices to create an institution more reflective of its community and honest in its explorations of art, culture, and society.

Presented in collaboration with Monument Lab
With support from the U-M Arts Initiative

Curators
Ozi Uduma, Assistant Curator of Global Contemporary Art at UMMA
Paul Farber, Director and Co-founder of Monument Lab

Natsu Oyobe, Curator of Asian

Trace the fascinating and sometimes troubling stories behind the world’s most desired ceramics Art. The technology and taste for blue and white porcelain originated in China in the fourteenth century, and quickly set off a worldwide craze that lasted five hundred years. Installed across four different galleries at UMMA, this exhibition explores that history and tracks the influence of blue and white ceramics across the globe.

Visitors will find Blue and White ceramics throughout four of UMMA’s galleries:

Chinese Gallery
First commissioned by Muslim merchants living in China, blue and white porcelain found its way to Southeast and East Asia, the Middle East, the eastern coast of the African continent, and then to Europe and North and South America. In the Chinese gallery, see a grand display of these highly coveted items. Many of them traveled from China to the Netherlands via Dutch East India Company ships, along with tea, silks, paintings, and other luxury items.

Korean Gallery
Chinese blue and white porcelains have been exported to Korea since the early 15th century. Korean kilns also produced regional porcelains with expensive cobalt imported from China. In the Korean gallery, see a magnificent dragon jar and scholarly implements used by social elites.

Japanese Gallery
Japanese blue and white porcelains rose to prominence as replacements of Chinese porcelains in the early 17th century, and continued to be popular exports in the European market. In the Japanese gallery, see porcelains in various forms and decorations that show mutual inspirations of the two global brands.

South and Southeast Asian Gallery
Thailand and Vietnam long produced their own local versions of expensive Chinese blue and white porcelains. In the South and Southeast Asian gallery, find fascinating examples of these copies using clay and glaze local to those regions. In addition, salvaged pots from a late 17th century shipwreck tell the story of the vibrant global market and fervent demand for blue and white ceramics.

This exhibition celebrates the new William C. Weese Collection of Chinese Ceramics and the endowment to establish the William C. Weese Program for Ceramic Arts at UMMA.

Confront the past and celebrate the creative voices of an untold chapter of American history

Hear Me Now: The Black Potters of Old Edgefield, South Carolina is a landmark exhibition of more than 60 objects representing the work of African American potters in the decades surrounding the Civil War.

It is a reckoning with the central role that enslaved and free Black potters played in the long-standing stoneware traditions of Edgefield, South Carolina. It is also an important story about the unrelenting power of artistic expression and creativity, even while under the brutal conditions of slavery—and about the joy, struggle, creative ambition, and lived experience of African Americans in the 19th-century American South.

The exhibition features many objects rarely seen outside of the South, bringing together monumental storage jars by the enslaved and literate potter and poet Dave, later recorded as David Drake (about 1800–about 1870), along with rare examples of the region’s utilitarian wares and powerful face vessels by potters once known but unrecorded.

The inclusion of several contemporary works from leading Black artists links the past to the present in Hear Me Now. Established figures like Theaster Gates and Simone Leigh, as well as younger, emerging artists like Adebunmi Gbadebo, and Woody De Othello have contributed to the exhibition. Working primarily in clay, these artists respond to the legacy of the Edgefield potters and consider the resonance of this history for audiences today.

Curators
Jason Young, Professor of History, University of Michigan; Adrienne Spinozzi, Associate Curator, American Wing, The Metropolitan Museum of Art; and Ethan Lasser, John Moors Cabot Chair, Art of the Americas, Museum of Fine Arts, BostonThrough Feb 2024

The capacity of the arts to challenge dominant regimes and ideologies, resist oppression, and envision pathways of change is at the center of the University of Michigan’s Fall 2023 Theme Semester: Arts & Resistance. A theme semester is a university-wide effort to engage with a subject of importance to learning across the disciplines and to public life and informed citizenship.

More than 100 classes are being taught this semester that engage with the theme, ranging from a political history of hula dance in American Culture to a class about carbon-climate interactions in the College of Engineering. All of the classes consider art’s potential to communicate with power and complexity about questions of justice.

In the Curriculum / Collection series, the guiding themes and questions of U-M courses take material form in installations of art curated from UMMA’s collection. For the Arts & Resistance theme semester, we asked fifteen faculty to choose artworks for their students to work with.

Their selections address histories of injustice and of social and political transformation. They invite us into questions of identity and representation within historical and present-day processes of exclusion and inclusion. They enable us to think about all the ways that art resists, from formal qualities like materials, color, and shape, to the identities of makers, subjects, and viewers. And they demonstrate the diverse and creative ways in which art can play a central role in learning across the disciplines.

David Choberka, Mellon Foundation Curator for University Learning and Programs / Curated in partnership with University Faculty
Presented as part of the Fall 2023 Theme Semester:
Natsu Oyobe, Curator of Asian