I have been thinking about the 1969 riots in my native Detroit ever since Liz and I finalized the latest bi-monthly theme for the art card group, Abandonment and Reclamation. Back then, I was a junior at Southfield High School in Michigan, and it seemed that Detroit was never the same after the riots. Six months later when I went to a Detroit Pistons basketball game at Cobo Arena, there were so few people downtown at the game that Piston management offered free tickets to everyone who brought their ticket stubs the following week.
Here is my collage card titled “Detroit – A Prototype of Abandonment and Reclamation”, which I mailed to another member in the group. Somehow the theme struck a nerve with me this time, perhaps because of Detroit’s much publicized plight, its financial woes, together with the relatively recent Ferguson case in Missouri that resulted in more destruction.
The art card includes these two photos of the largest plant in the world, the Ford Rouge River Plant, so you can see the before and after. The Ford plant has risen from the dead like a phoenix from the ashes, and now offers popular tours to the public.
In between the two plant photos, you can see houses from the Heidelberg Project, which was started in a devastated area on Detroit’s east side. The homes were given over to communities of artists to restore and decorate using recycled material, resulting in a new tourist destination and with the ultimate goal over time being a viable arts center for the city. Here is the Dotty House, perhaps the most well-known structure since it’s showcased by the Heidelberg Project.
The right side of the card shows a rainbow of shards that are pieces that Mike Kelly recovered from the riverbeds of the Detroit and Rouge Rivers. I took some photos at Kelly’s 2013 MOMA show, as did my daughter Laura (aka my webmaster) which I used in the collage. The shattered pieces are central to the Kelly installation that partially inspired this card called the John Glenn Memorial Detroit River Reclamation Project (Including the Local Culture Pictorial Guide, 1968–1972, Wayne/Westland Eagle. 2001.
This shot shows much of the installation, which filled a large room dominated by the huge figure covered in more shattered shards.
I thought this was a rather haunting portrait of Detroit made from found bottles and jars, which is situated on the river – here a river of crushed porcelain (hence the name detroit which means strait in French). The collection of glassware presents a hauntingly fragile vision of a city in decay (I’m thinking New York City in the Pixar movie Wall-e).
Both the Heidelberg Project and the Ford Rouge River Plant tour (which gets rave reviews) are on my list of sites to see this upcoming year when I visit my mother – and the Detroit Institute of Arts, of course.
Let’s keep our fingers crossed that these two glimmers of hope represent a turning point in the history of Detroit, and open a new chapter now for this city that has finally emerged from bankruptcy – with the Detroit Institute of Arts still in tact. May 2015 be a much better year for my hometown.
In that spirit, I wish all of you a happy, healthy – and even more creative – New Year!
