Established with the generous support of alumna Penny W. Stamps, the Speaker Series brings respected emerging and established artists/designers from a broad spectrum of media to the School to conduct a public lecture and engage with students, faculty, and the larger University and Ann Arbor communities.

Called one of the most significant artists of his generation, Stamps graduate Mike Kelley was an iconoclast who introduced a distinctive Detroit sensibility to the international art world with his references to everything from Soupy Sales to the Vernor’s gnome. He was a founding member of Destroy All Monsters, a collective formed in Ann Arbor in 1974 with artists Jim Shaw, Niagara and Cary Loren. A major retrospective of his work opened at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam in 2012, at the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris in 2013 and will travel to MOMA PS1, NY and MOCA Los Angeles in 2014. Before his death in 2012, Kelley had begun work based on a life-sized replica of his childhood suburban Detroit home. The new ”˜homestead’ has been relocated to the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (MOCAD). Mary Clare Stevens, the Executive Director of the Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts, will speak and present videos documenting the homestead’s journey from downtown Detroit to Kelley’s former home in Westland, and back again.