Business as Usual

Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit

September 12 - December 28, 2008

Business as Usual explores the complex intersection of art and commerce over the past decade. Both individually and collectively, the artists featured in the exhibition — Bernadette Corporation, Guyton\Walker, Josephine Meckseper, Carey Young, and Sislej Xhafa — explore the role and function of art in a culture increasingly dominated by the dictates of the market, both artistic and otherwise.

Business as Usual is curated by Jacob Proctor. Jacob Proctor is Associate Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the University of Michigan Museum of Art (UMMA), which will reopen to the public in Spring 2009 following a $41.9 million expansion and renovation project. Proctor is founding curator of UMMA Projects, a new series of exhibitions and publications focusing on emerging artists. Upcoming UMMA Projects include Walead Beshty, Lisa Anne Auerbach, Heather Rowe, Cory Arcangel, and Simon Dybbroe Moller, among others. Proctor is also currently organizing the first North American retrospective of seminal conceptual artist (and Michigan native) Douglas Huebler, who passed away in 1997.

Prior to joining UMMA in late 2007, Proctor spent three years at the Harvard University Art Museums while pursuing his PhD in History of Art and Architecture. His most recent exhibition, Multiple Strategies: Beuys, Maciunas, Fluxus, was presented to critical acclaim in early 2007 at Harvard’s Busch-Reisinger Museum. Between Object and Event, a volume of essays drawn from a symposium Proctor organized in conjunction with the exhibition, is forthcoming.