Lynn Crawford recalls how Cass Corridor artists "introduced me not only to new ideas about seeing, reading and writing, but also to the global sensibility deep within Detroit's culture."
Novelist Lynn Crawford, who is on the board of the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, writes a thoughtful piece about the history of the hip art scene in Detroit, and the importance of remembering it.
Her nearly 2,000-word overview is in the latest issue of Art in America, a monthly magazine published since 1913:
Detroit's troubles (poverty, crime, and failing public schools) have been well publicized, but over the past decade, the media has turned its attention to new developments in the city, Crawford writes.
You often hear Detroit referred to as a blank slate, as a city undergoing a renaissance. In her essay "The Kidnapped Children of Detroit," activist, writer, and performer Marsha Music, who has deep roots in the city's arts community (her father was the pre-Motown record producer Joe Von Battle) writes of the recent influx of people: "It is hard for many black Detroiters to comprehend the sense of belonging, or even entitlement, that many whites feel."
She is disturbed by the newcomers' lack of curiosity about what happened before they arrived, about the history and the people. It is difficult to keep the details of the past alive, but each of us can tell the stories we remember.
Crawford, a native of Ann Arbor and Flint, who now lives in Metro Detroit, goes on to write:
Many stories about Detroit's creative community of the recent past will continue to be told. It is heartening to see young Detroiters using this history as source material.
The article, which runs nearly 2,000 words, is in the magazine's September issue.
The writer, a University of Michigan grad with a masters in social work from New York University, is no stranger to her subject.
Before moving permanently, I spent a few years here in the early 1980s. I waitressed at Alvin's, a music venue, bar, and restaurant located in Cass Corridor, which is near Wayne State University and a few blocks away from the Detroit Public Library and the DIA. The area was a hub of leftist activity in the 1960s and '70s. A bunch of artists known as the Cass Corridor group worked out of Convention Hall, a former car showroom on Cass Avenue, and made paintings and sculpture, often using scavenged street and industrial materials (wood, wire, pipes).
One day, Laura, a fellow Alvin's staffer, mentioned that her husband, saxophonist, poet, and composer Faruq Z. Bey (1942-2012), of the avant-garde jazz band Griot Galaxy, was going to be playing and speaking at the DIA. He was participating in "Lines," a program of afternoon classes and evening readings organized by poet and educator George Tysh. Bey read poems and played his saxophone during my first visit to a session, after which there was a conversation about John Coltrane, Julia Kristeva, and rhythm. It was magical.
There was an undercover, underground feeling to the meetings. In other classes we looked at work by Christian Boltanski and Howardena Pindell. We read Gayl Jones, Marguerite Duras, Ishmael Reed, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Karl Marx, and Jacques Lacan. The series, which hosted writers including Kathy Acker, Pedro Pietri, Richard Hell, Margaret Atwood and Ntozake Shange, introduced me not only to new ideas about seeing, reading and writing, but also to the global sensibility deep within Detroit's culture
The Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (MOCAD) re-created the radical vision of artist, poet, and activist Aaron Ibn Pori Pitts (b. 1941) in the 2012 Afrofuturist-inflected exhibition "Vision in a Cornfield." Pitts joined the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, started Black Graphics International (a local press) in 1969, and believed in art as ritualistic transformation. He founded the Ogun collective in the early '90s. Ogun (named after the Yoruba orisha, or spiritual emissary, of iron, hunting, politics, and war) was known for adorning abandoned cars with flowers, spray paint and found-object sculptures, treating the festooned autos as "urban monumentz."
The show itself was a collaboration between M. Saffell Gardner of Ogun, Cary Loren of the noise band Destroy All Monsters, and MOCAD deputy director Rebecca Mazzei, and was dedicated to Bey and artist Mike Kelley. It featured an installation of decorated cars as well as Pitts's collage paintings.
Crawford looks at the city's enriching tapestry: "People, human connections make a city, and history lives in stories passed along in circles of intersecting communities."
Read the full article here.
