Michael STONE-RICHARDS is Executive Director of the DDD Detroit Independent Study Program in the Detroit Design District where he is also Director of Studies for the Program in Critical Studies + Art Writing. A graduate of the Courtauld Institute of Art (MA and PhD), where he studied Modern European Art and Critical Theory and wrote his doctorate on French and Czech Surrealism, Michael has previously served as Professor of Visual Studies + Critical Practice at the College for Creative Studies, Detroit; as Executive Director of Modern Ancient Brown Foundation created by the painter McArthur Binion; as Head of Critical Studies and Dean of Programs and Partnerships at Cranbrook Academy; and taught in Art History and Comparative Literature at Northwestern University, and was a Visiting Professor in English and Comparative Literature at Stonehill College. He has held Fellowships at the Centre canadien d’architecture in Montréal, the Alice Berlin Kaplan Center for the Humanities, Northwestern University, and at Cranbrook Academy of Art. He is the founding editor of the journal Detroit Research (recipient of a Knight Foundation grant) now hosted by the DDD Detroit ISP. He has published many essays on the poetry of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, J.H. Prynne, Paul Celan and the Negro Spiritual, as well as essays in critical theory, art writing, and the theory of the avant-garde, and he was an early translator of the French psycho-analyst Pierre Fédida into English. He has also co-curated an exhibition on Rei Kawakubo and Comme des garcons at MOCAD and is (finally) completing a long dialogical reflection on Surrealism and fashion. In Detroit, Michael has served on many boards and artist-run projects, such as the Program Committee of MOCAD, the Friends of Modern and Contemporary Art at the DIA, Signal-Return, and 53 North, a public sculpture project in Port Austin, Michigan, conceived by Jim Boyle.

Much of Michael’s current work bears on the role of art writing and experience in conditions of diminished attention - but he refuses the term “attentional economy” which he sees as only a synonym for fantasy. His research also bears on questions of attention and ethics, and issues in moral perfectionism, and new approaches to pedagogy in the contemporary art school facing crises on many fronts. Above all, Michael is concerned with exploring new models of transmission in the radically changing economic and cultural spaces of the twenty-first century art school, which, unlike the art school of the twentieth century, has no new vision supported by a grand social and cultural experiment like the GI Bill or President Truman’s Commission on Higher Education for American Democracy. 

His book Logics of Separation: Exile and Transcendence in Aesthetic Modernity appeared in 2011. He is currently completing two books: Life, State, Liberty: Three Essays on the Thought of Guy Debord, and Care of the City: Ruination, Abandonment, and Hospitality in Contemporary Practice (supported by a Warhol Grant, forthcoming Sternberg Press), an essay in the theory of social practice.  He recently completed Living Exposure, from David Hammons to Arthur Jafa: Essays in Art Writing.