Detroit's Heidelberg Project

Yesterday I got a brief tour of Detroit, courtesy of an old friend who lives in Ann Arbor and teaches in Flint. The trip was too short for me to really wrap my mind around Detroit as a whole--I did notice how spread out it was, but I didn't always get a sense of what part of this was just a wider-scale city planning or a car-centered urban vision vs. Rust Belt depopulation. Until we went seeking Heidelberg Street. As soon as we turned off Jefferson Avenue and entered the neighborhood of McDougall-Hunt, I could see the Detroit I'd heard about: the abandoned and half-burnt houses, the many empty lots where houses used to be, no evidence of any grocery stores, and some evidence of urban gardening.

Then we reached The Heidelberg Project. Due to my longtime East Coast chauvinism no doubt, I had never heard of this amazing outsider-artist, two-block-wide "installation," although it has been around since 1986--growing, evolving, getting demolished by Detroit police, and growing back again like unstoppable knotweed. One Detroit resident, Tyree Guyton, grew up on Heidelberg Street and witnessed the 1968 riots, from which he says Detroit has never recovered. After he began cleaning up the debris in empty lots and abandoned houses on his block, he started to create art by decorating the empty houses with the trashed items he'd found. The result is colorful, beautiful, and critical, and seems to succeed in getting attention for the plight of the neighborhood and the city--and Detroit's efforts to rally around creative community engagement. While we walked around, we overheard one of the street's residents explaining the project to a visitor, and saw foreign tourists stopping to shoot pictures and wander among the houses, the sculptures, and the makeshift billboards. We met an artist, Lisa Marie Rodriguez, who is an artist-in-residence at the Heidelberg, studying at Wayne State U. She's been working on an entranceway to the block and has constructed a welcome sign, a sun dial, and a meditation garden. She knew all the neighborhood residents who passed by and told us that the community wants to see not only that they get attention, but that someone sticks around and cares about the continued progress of the neighborhood. She considers herself an artist in residence for the long run.

This project is best described in images; see more pictures here.

Detroit Arts On The 50/50 Split

Ann Gordon at Detroit Arts has great post and discussion on her blog about the 50/50 split. she has not only done the insane amount of work on her blog but is now experiencing first hand the amount of work it takes to run a gallery. Very few of the people criticize the "exploitive role of comercial galleries seem to want to try a hand at it themselves with their own time and money.

Blog Becomes Gallery In Detroit

The seems to be a little trend of people taking virtual identities from blogs into the real world. Ann Gordon, the 26 year old artist and art nut behind the great Detroit Arts blog will be trying her hand at curating and running a gallery for the summer. Needless to say she will likely a lot more known and connected in the scene there and likely has a pent up audience eager to see her shows as well as a lot awareness of local artists.

Ann's goal of mixing Detroit and non Detroit artists will also be helped by the following and support her blog has developed out of town. Ann will have some of her own work in my upcomming blogger show.

MOCAD --- In The New York Times

Detroit's new funky, raw and brutally honest museum of contemporary art got a nice article in the New York Times, which celebrates it's real deal aesthetic. MOCAD will gradually be upgrading and transforming the building over time.

"But the design springs from a profound rethinking of what constitutes urban revitalization. Designed by Andrew Zago, its intentionally raw aesthetic is conceived as an act of guerrilla architecture, one that accepts decay as fact rather than attempt to create a false vision of urban density. By embracing reality, it could succeed where large-scale development has so far failed.

Mr. Zago is uniquely positioned to grasp this context. Born in Detroit in 1958, he has vivid memories of the 1967 race riots that led the exodus of the white middle class. He remembers hearing white neighbors talk of fleeing to the suburbs as black families moved in. After departing with his family to a northern suburb, he saw the city decline to the point where it became a poster child of decay.

Only later, as a practicing architect in the 1990s, did he begin to see these decrepit neighborhoods as a legitimate landscape for architectural experimentation. “I didn’t want to romanticize it,” he said during a recent tour of Detroit, “but the city had a depth of character, a real substance and integrity. And while you want to do away with the problems, you don’t want to lose that quality.”

MOCAD update

For people following this thread-- Detroit has opened it's contemporary art museum. It seems totally raw and funky, which is honestly what interests me. anyway there are some shots from the opening on Detroit Arts and I would imagine that a lot more is on the way in terms of pictures.

Tales From The Art World: Art Advisors

I want to thank Ann @ Detroit Arts, for posting this NY Times Article. It opens a window into a part of the art world that few people see and confirms what most average people think; that art is an inside power game that they are not invited to play. Art advisors of various kinds have always existed- partly because, many people who have a lot of money are also not fully confident in thier judgements. In recent years and especially now that there is a hot art market ( Didn't you get the invite? ) the art advisor has come to the fore as the purveyor of access.

Here's some quotes from mega dealer David Zwirner:

"There are a lot of novice collectors out there who don’t realize that you can’t run through the door and make your first purchase,” Mr. Zwirner said. “You have to finesse your way to that. Primary market galleries like us often have three-year waiting lists. We’re very picky.”
This means that while advisers are selling the merits of a particular artist to their clients, they must also sell their clients to the gallery.
“I’ve definitely felt that there’s a certain hazing ritual in art buying,” said Lowell Pettit, an art adviser in Long Island City, Queens, who often works with first-time buyers and young collectors. “Galleries literally want your C.V. and that of your client” before they will part with their best inventory."

To a large extent, the situation in the major galleries right now is entirely fair and understandable. Markets are not always hot and galleries want to sell to collectors who supported them when times were tough, and also try to make sure that potential buyers are not just looking to buy and sell artist's work for a quick profit.

I don't have much else to say, other than that I know very little about this world. There have been some great comments on Detroit Arts.

Museum Of Contemporary Art Detroit

Speakingof Detroit; I have been trying to follow the cities long struggle to create a contemporary art museum. Detroit Arts has a great recent post on the subject which links to a long article. It now sure looks like it's now more than a wet dream-- the place will be known as MOCAD.
Detroit Arts, seems to have developed a srappy and dedicated following, judging from the active comments.

Here's the start of the article:

"A year ago, when word got out about seemingly legitimate plans for a new contemporary art institution in Detroit, the buzz was big in the creative community. Many were skeptical from the first word — people here are skeptical about "new" anything.
But in the ensuing months, the e-mails arrived, followed up by press releases. There were a few stories in local papers, and then the Web site launched. Weeks ago, colorful stickers and posters came in the mail. It still seems hard to believe, unless you've recently seen the space that's to be the home of the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit ( MOCAD) on the corner of Woodward Avenue and Garfield Street. You probably haven't noticed the unremarkable building, but it's been there since the 1930s, when it was an auto dealership. Located in Midtown, near the Cultural Center, the museum will be a short walk south from the Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit Public Library, Detroit Artists Market, and north from CPop Gallery and the Max M. Fisher Music Center, home of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra.

I have come across an impressive array of blogs and web projects in the Detroit area. Many of them are poignant efforts to document the lost memories of the city and also to develop a new virtual identity.

Visitor from Detroit

Seems like we had a visitor from Detroit, a few weeks ago and she left behind a nice little post on the current Mattress Factory show. A ways back she also did a nice post on one of our downtown gallery crawls. Judging by her great blog, Detroit seems to have a scrappy scene run by some folks who won't say die. Her post of course, mentions Pittsburgh's not so slight resemblence to San Francisco; which a lot of people here don't seem to see.