Show any current labor union membership card for free admission to Cranbrook Art Museum on Saturday, February 10.
In celebration of the hardworking members of our community, Cranbrook Art Museum will offer free admission to all union members on Saturday, February 10, from 11am – 5pm. This includes admission to the performance and conversation between Huey Mnemonic and Ash Arder, two artists who consider the labor movement and its history to be an important force in their practice.
Both union members of the United Auto Workers, Arder’s late parents met and fell in love at the Fisher Body Flint Plant No.1, famously the location of the Fisher Sit-Down Strikes that resulted in General Motors recognition of the UAW in 1937. Arder focuses on the assembly line not only as a site of industrial production but also one of community-building and human connection. This video projection includes multiple manipulations of a singular archival photograph of the artist’s own baby shower in another General Motors factory.
Arder examines the cyclical nature of birth and death, not only through human reproduction, but also through the rise and fall of interconnected communities as well as the creation and then discarding of mechanical products. The meaning of what is flesh becomes slippery and subverted as the factory also acts like a womb, assembling automobiles as well as producing abstract, interpersonal connections.
Image caption: Ash Arder, “INT. HOME(S) — ESTABLISHING — 1987 — HIGH NOON,” 2023. Photo by PD Rearick.
Tagged: ash arder, free
