Entrance to the Community Arts Center

The entrance to the Community Arts Center, within which the Art Department Gallery is located.

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Art Department Gallery (Wayne State University)

5400 Gullen Mall
Community Arts Building, Room 150
Detroit MI 48202

Wayne State University has two art gal­leries. The Art Department Gallery is mainly to show the work of WSU students and fac­ul­ty. The Mas­ter of Fine Arts (MFA) shows are usually duo shows, while the un­der­grad show is once a year and is often a crowd­ed group show.

There is also a show for the art education stu­dents (this one tends to get shorted on re­sources because it's managed by the uni­ver­si­ty's College of Ed­u­ca­tion rather than the Col­lege for Fine, Per­form­ing and Com­mu­ni­ca­tion Arts), as well as shows for com­mu­ni­ty col­lege instructors and stu­dents, and for high school students.

The nearby Elaine L. Jacob Gallery shares staff with the Art Department Gallery, hence open­ings are staggered so as to not occur in the same week. Openings are almost always on Fri­days, from 5:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m. Fall and winter hours are on Tuesdays through Thursdays, from 10:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. and on Fridays from 10:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m. Summer gallery hours are on Tuesdays through Fridays, from noon to 5:00 p.m., same as the Jacob Gallery. Gallery hours were changed for the 2019/2020 school year, but then the pandemic pretty much upended everything, so now, as of May 2022, I am not sure what the hours are.

Current exhibition

Upcoming exhibitions

The rest of the 2024 — 2025 schedule has not been announced yet.

Past exhibitions

A painting by Nakia Camp

Courbet's Light, a painting by Nakia Camp that was exhibited in 2016.

This listing might be missing exhibits from 2020 and 2021. Not sure if the WSU galleries were closed for most of those two years.

A complete and comprehensive list would go back all the way to 1956.

The gallery in relation to the rest of the campus

A pet peeve of the gallery's staffers is the moniker "Community Arts Gallery". It is true that the gallery is in the school's Community Arts Center, and it is also true that it is across the hallway from the Community Arts Auditorium. It might also be true that the gallery was actually called "Community Arts Gallery" at one point. But there is no evidence of that on any WSU webpage maintained by the Art Department. Webpages maintained by other departments or colleges, or by the student newspaper, that's a different story; on those, the "Community Arts Gallery" name lives on.

As for those who come to the gallery, they are faced with two actual, practical problems: one is parking, the other is that some shows (especially those in the summer) are barely promoted. By the time you find out about a particular show, it may be too late to deal with the parking issues.

External links

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