Arts & Culture

  1. Blindfolded Rubik’s Cube world champion sets the score (on violin)

    For many, the colorful 3×3 Rubik’s Cube was an infuriating, and largely impossible, puzzle to solve. But for one U-M student, the cube opened doors to international travel, a Guinness World Records entry, and multiple world championship titles.

  2. Bruno Martelli and Ruth Gibson bring extended-reality tech to U-M

    The London-based team, specializing in extended-reality technology, will be the new 2023 artists in residency at the Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, in partnership with the U-M Arts Initiative.

  3. Keep the light alive: The glimmer of cautious optimism

    To memorialize students who died in service during World War II, U-M officials sought input from such global luminaries as Winston Churchill and Orson Welles. But in the end, a new generation of students created a different kind of tribute — one that could ‘actually do something.’

  4. Life in plastic, not so fantastic

    Visitors to this interactive Ann Arbor exhibit by Brooklyn-based artist and environmental activist Robin Frohardt will immerse in a 6,000-square-foot supermarket in which every banana, every frozen pizza, every sushi roll, and every box of cereal is made of single-use plastic. (Gets a person thinking.) Show runs through Feb. 5.

  5. Oh yes, he’s a great pretender

    Don’t call him a ghostwriter. Shape-shifting biographer James Dale, BA ’70, prefers ‘co-author,’ as he pens the life stories of athlete Cal Ripken Jr., sports agent Ron Shapiro, and political activist Elijah Cummings, to name just a few.

  6. It was a wonderful life

    After a dazzling turn with Jimmy Stewart in what would become an iconic holiday classic, Virginia Patton stepped out of the Hollywood spotlight. She traded the film industry for an illustrious life in Ann Arbor.

  7. Librarian combines loves of comics, games

    David Carter is one of the lucky ones: As U-M’s video game archivist for the Computer and Video Game Archive and comics librarian, he has combined his two childhood loves into a fulfilling career.

  8. Remembering Janice Bluestein Longone

    Culinary historian and adjunct curator Janice Bluestein Longone passed away in August 2022 at the age of 89. She was the principal donor and driving force behind the formation of the Janice Bluestein Longone Culinary Archive, which supports numerous courses at U-M.

  9. Composing the nation’s future

    ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ is not an antique fixed in time, but a living allegory that inspires us to realize democracy’s potential, says historian/musicologist Mark Clague. The song’s enduring resilience mirrors the nation’s experience, he says.