Community Calendar

With an enormous range of genres and styles ranging from Bach to Beethoven, Pauline Viardot to Steve Reich, the repertoire for the piano is vast: 300 years and counting! Join musicologist Dr. Zaide Pixley, Kalamazoo College Professor Emerita, to explore some of the music to be heard at the 2026 Gilmore Festival and consider what it requires of the piano–and the pianist–to perform it well. The talk will be followed by a light reception.

Diego Rivera arrived in Detroit to undertake what would become the most defining mural cycle of his career. In just 11 months, he transformed the walls of the Detroit Institute of Arts into the extraordinary Detroit Industry Murals — a fresco series he later described as his “finest work.” Rivera completed this commission during the period he and his wife, Frida Kahlo, were living in the city, marking a significant chapter in both their lives.

How did the DIA secure one of the world’s most celebrated muralists? What made Detroit the setting for Rivera’s boldest artistic statement? And why do these murals continue to resonate as some of the most important public artworks in America?

In this richly illustrated Historical Speaker Series presentation, art historian Wendy Evans brings Rivera’s Detroit story to life — the industry, the artistry, and the lasting impact of a masterpiece created here in our city.

Join us Sunday, March 22nd from 1–2pm.
$5 for non-members, FREE for members.
Tickets: PackardProvingGrounds.org/Mar22-HSS-PPG

Diego Rivera arrived in Detroit to undertake what would become the most defining mural cycle of his career. In just 11 months, he transformed the walls of the Detroit Institute of Arts into the extraordinary Detroit Industry Murals — a fresco series he later described as his “finest work.” Rivera completed this commission during the period he and his wife, Frida Kahlo, were living in the city, marking a significant chapter in both their lives.

How did the DIA secure one of the world’s most celebrated muralists? What made Detroit the setting for Rivera’s boldest artistic statement? And why do these murals continue to resonate as some of the most important public artworks in America?

In this richly illustrated Historical Speaker Series presentation, art historian Wendy Evans brings Rivera’s Detroit story to life — the industry, the artistry, and the lasting impact of a masterpiece created here in our city.

Join us Sunday, March 22nd from 1–2pm.

$5 for non-members, FREE for members.

Tickets: PackardProvingGrounds.org/Mar22-HSS-PPG

Join Cranbrook Academy of Art at deSalle Auditorium for a free, public lecture with Noah Breuer on Wednesday, March 25, 2026, at 6pm. Please enter through the Cranbrook Academy of Art Library; Cranbrook Art Museum’s galleries close at 5pm.

In his lecture, “Republishing the Archive,” Breuer will discuss cultural legacy, authorship, the tension between appropriation and contemporary artistic production.

Noah Breuer is an American artist and Professor of Print Media at the University at Buffalo, SUNY. His practice occupies the intersection of traditional printmaking and 21st-century digital technology, utilizing this hybrid approach to examine themes of family identity, labor, and the Jewish diaspora.

Breuer’s current research focuses on the cultural legacy of early-20th-century Jewish-owned textile printing companies in Czech Bohemia. Through what he describes as a “reclamation project,” Breuer investigates his own family’s lost industrial history, resurrecting and reinterpreting archival designs to explore the tension between ancestral memory and contemporary artistic ownership.

Celebrate the pivotal moments of America's Bicentennial celebration through the eyes of President Gerald Ford, as recounted by Thomas DeFrank. As the only reporter still covering the White House today who also covered President Ford during the Bicentennial, DeFrank offers a unique, first-person perspective of America's 200th birthday commemoration.

Join us for personal stories from this celebrated journalist, who traveled with Ford during those momentous days and was privy to his thoughts, feelings, organizing principles and philosophy surrounding our country's historic July 4, 1976, milestone.

In Accommodating the Republic: Taverns in the Early United States, Kirsten Wood explores how Americans' use taverns in their pursuits of happiness helped flesh out the evolving meaning of citizenship in the young United States. In this talk, she looks at the years following the Revolutionary War, when Americans continued to use their neighborhood taverns as sites for gathering and political mobilization. The scope and significance of practices that had been so central to the revolutionary struggle shifted in the early republic, as Americans wrestled with the promise and problems of republican self-government. Although the mid-nineteenth-century temperance movement would soon frame tavern-going as the habit of dangerously shiftless men, in the republic's early decades, entrepreneurial, improvement-minded men—and some women!--went to taverns to raise capital, promote innovative businesses, practice genteel sociability, and put republican self-government into practice.

Piano Technician D Marie Jones will discuss the complex and fascinating process that goes into determining which of The Gilmore’s fleet of Steinway pianos is chosen for each performance and artist. Learn the specifics of how musical programming choices play one of the deep roles in pre-selection for the artists. The talk will be followed by a light reception.

Join us on April 11, 2026, at Cornerstone Theological Seminary for Cornerstone University’s 24th annual ESL Conference! Educators, ministry leaders, and volunteers are invited to explore how teaching English can be a powerful ministry of welcome, relationship, and gospel witness. This year’s theme highlights the role of language learning in building authentic community, fostering hospitality, and creating space for meaningful conversations that point to Christ. Together, we will consider practical strategies and relational approaches that equip us to serve our students not only as learners, but as neighbors and friends.

Read and discuss the gripping narrative nonfiction that tells the dramatic story of a remarkable young Texan pianist, Van Cliburn, who played his way through the wall of fear built by the Cold War, won the hearts of the American and Russian people, and eased tensions between two superpowers on the brink of nuclear war. The discussion will be followed by a light reception.

A true multihyphenate, Sean Hickey is an active composer and arranger, an instrumentalist, and a record label executive, currently serving as Managing Director of Pentatone Music, one of the world’s leading independent classical labels. In this public talk, MUSICIAN ENTREPRENEURSHIP AND THE TOOLS OF CULTURAL DIPLOMACY, he will share insights drawn from his 35 years on both sides of the business, exploring how today’s artists can navigate a fractured media landscape, the rise of Big Tech, and the ubiquity of AI while using the many tools available to best promote their work. Hickey will also discuss the idea of soft power—how music, in a fractured world, can and should offer escape, comfort, and motivation—and on the importance of centering culture as a tool of diplomacy on the world stage.