Exhibition runs through Saturday, February 18th
Born in the boom years following World War II, the Corvette matured into a bona fide American icon. First and foremost, automobile designers are artists.
Automotive artwork, in large part, was never supposed to leave the studios they were designed in and were often destroyed. This scarcity makes the exhibition and catalog that much more remarkable and history.
Our exhibition catalog contains 120+ pages of these historic and rare sketches. Catalogs are full color and will be available in a very limited quantity. All proceeds of exhibition catalog sales to benefit the arts programs at the Scarab Club.
Purchased catalogs will be shipped domestically. International inquirers, please reach out to director@scarabclub.org.
Popularly known at the club as “sketch classes”, these non-instructional, drop-in opportunities for artists to draw and paint from live models welcome all artists. Drop in and join us! Materials: Bring a pad of drawing paper or stretched canvas and your favorite drawing and/or painting supplies.
Iyawo Afro-Cuban Dance Class Wednesdays October 18 & November 1, 8, 15, 29 7:00 - 9:30pm Free to the first 20 Scarab Club members who sign up! Drop in or take the full series.
Learn the basics of Afro-Cuban dance with master teacher & choreographer Lisa McCall of Iyawo Folkloric Dance Theater. Classes are based in movements and rhythms of the African Caribbean Diaspora and to celebrate the powerful trio of live musicians, song and dance. Ms. McCall's training is in the Katherine Dunham technique incorporated with principles from folkloric Afro-Cuban, Caribbean and Haitian dance. The experience is designed to be beneficial for all experience levels and is a wonderful tool for community building and spiritual healing through the benefits of dance.
Please bring water and a long skirt to practice in. More information (and traditional skirts available for purchase) here.
Thursday, November 9, 2017 6 pm | Cocktails 7 pm | Dinner 8 pm | Lecture
TRUTH AND BEAUTY: AMERICAN ART IN 1862 Lee Glazer, Curator of American ArtFreer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution
All art was modern once, and to underscore the point, this talk begins with the unexpected juxtaposition of two paintings from 1862: Cotopaxi by Frederic Edwin Church and Symphony in White, No. 1: The White Girl by James McNeill Whistler. Despite its South American subject, Cotopaxi was impossible to divorce from current events in the United States. Its first viewers saw its blood-red sky and seething volcano as references to the carnage of the Civil War and the atrocities of slavery. Yet its imagery, “throbbing with fire and tremulous with life,” as the New York Times put it, was also read as a “picture poem” expressing universal ideals of truth and beauty. The White Girl, meanwhile, seemed neither beautiful nor truthful to its early audiences.
In fact, it seemed barely legible. Conceived as a realist picture whose subject-- a model who has dropped her pose-- is hiding in plain sight, the painting was retroactively re-titled Symphony in White, No. 1, making it the ground zero of Whistler’s later aestheticist idea that art should speak for itself, as self-referential as a piece of pure music. In short, Cotopaxi and The White Girl would seem to have nothing in common but their date of 1862. Yet their chronological coincidence allows us to consider how each of these works ultimately achieved iconic status: Cotopaxi as an exemplar of American exceptionalism, The White Girl as a problematic prelude to modernist purity.
Bio:
Lee Glazer is the curator of American art at the Smithsonian’s Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery and is a specialist in Gilded Age painting and the arts of the Aesthetic movement. She has curated numerous exhibitions, including, most recently, Peacock Room REMIX: Darren Waterston’s Filthy Lucre, which received the Smithsonian Secretary’s Research Award in 2016. Dr. Glazer is the author of Charles Lang Freer: A Cosmopolitan Life and A Perfect Harmony: The American Collection in the Smithsonian’s Freer Gallery of Art and co-editor of East West Interchanges in American Art: A Long and Tumultuous Relationship and Palaces of Art: Whistler and the Art Worlds of Aestheticism. Her current research focuses on James McNeill Whistler’s watercolors, to be featured in an exhibition at the Freer in 2019.
Dinner MenuTossed green saladStandard entree: salmon with lemon caper, toasted rice pilaf, vegetable medley Vegetarian: roasted vegetable lasagne roll ups Lemon cake
Chamber Music at the Scarab Club continues its 20th season with Words and Music, at Grosse Pointe Unitarian Church on Sunday November 12, 2017 at 7:00 pm.
This delightful program showcases several newcomers to CMSC and presents two works strongly influenced by text, either poetry or prose. The Michigan-based trio Protea (flutist Dennis Carter, clarinetist Lisa Raschiatore and pianist Mariah Boucher) performs Valerie Coleman’s dynamic Portraits of Langston, based on the poetry of African American writer Langston Hughes and includes readings that describe his experiences in Paris and Harlem. Mezzo soprano Briana Elyse Hunter sings Letters to the Immortal Beloved by Canadian composer James Wright. Ms. Hunter may be a newcomer to CMSC but she has been seen and heard many times on stage with the Michigan Opera Theatre, most recently in the role of Giovanna in Rigoletto. She will perform Wright’s beautiful chamber art song cycle consisting of settings of excerpts from Beethoven’s passionate letters to his ‘Immortal Beloved’.
As always, each piece on the program will be introduced by one of the musicians and the concert will be followed by a delicious and friendly reception.
Tickets – $25 at the door, $20 in advance, $10 for students
For tickets and more info – (248) 474-8930 chambermusic@scarabclub.org www.scarabclub.org/chambermusic
Grosse Pointe Unitarian Church – 17150 Maumee Avenue, Grosse Pointe, MI 48230
Live at the Scarab Club: RJ Spangler and Friends Celebrate the music of Louis JordanSaturday, November 18 2-4pm
Louis Jordan (July 8, 1908 – February 4, 1975) was a pioneering American musician, songwriter and bandleader who was popular from the late 1930s to the early 1950s. Known as "The King of the Jukebox," he was highly popular with in the later years of the swing era.
$25 general admission // $20 students, seniors, SC members
This event is made possible by a grant from the Knight Foundation. http://www.knightfoundation.org/ http://scarabclub.org/
THE 104th BOAR’S HEAD DINNER
Saturday, December 9, 2017
Cocktails 6:30 pm Dinner 8:00 pm Dessert and Tom & Jerry’s 9:00 Beam signing 9:30
Members and guests $90.00 New members $75.00
The Scarab Club is supported in part by awards from the Kresge Foundation, Michigan Council for Arts and Cultural Affairs, Fred A. and Barbara M. Erb Family Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.