A Sweeping Exhibit On Detroit Art Opens This Week In 2 New York Galleries

June 29, 2014, 8:20 AM

“Another Look at Detroit: Parts 1 and 2,”  opens Thursday and runs through Aug. 8 at the Marianne Boesky and Marlborough galleries in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan.

A joint project between Marianne Boesky Gallery and Marlborough Chelsea, "Another Look at Detroit" presents works and objects by over fifty artists, designers, and cultural contributors. The focus of the exhibition, according to a statement from the galleries, is the city of Detroit as a creative center, historically through to today. Spanning a period of 150 years, and taking place at both galleries’ Chelsea spaces, this exhibition is by no means a comprehensive survey. Rather, "Another Look at Detroit" intends to portray a vision as sprawling and complex as the biography of the city itself.

The exhibit takes place at a crucial turning point for a city that has had so many illusory turning points over the years, writes Randy Kennedy in the New York Times.

The city’s federal bankruptcy case heads to trial in mid-August, a reckoning that will give Detroit a fresh start but will also determine the fate of the Detroit Institute of Arts, whose collection, under siege by the city’s creditors, has become the symbolic heart of the battle between Detroit’s financial future and its cultural past.

The exhibition also points up the jarring disconnect of a city fighting for its art at the same time that it has become a mecca for young artists, drawn by cheap space and a kind of untamed urban flux that makes the art worlds of 1970s SoHo or Venice Beach seem like manicured estates by comparison. (When Patti Smith urged young artists to move to Detroit instead of New York in a 2010 commencement speech, many had beaten her to the punch, and more artists raised there are staying, instead of leaving for the East or West Coasts.)

Writing in The Guardian, Edward Hellmore says:

A new exhibition is making a clear bid to prove that Detroit is not some artistic backwater where ordinary institutional standards – which protect against the selling of art for anything other than the buying of more art – can be so easily over-ridden.

The exhibit is curated by Todd Levin, prominent New York art adviser and curator who was born in Detroit and worked as a teenager at the Dry Docks Engine Works along the Detroit River, washing down grease-caked machinery, Kennedy reports. "But on breaks, he would use the frayed city as an open art book, wandering to places like Mies van der Rohe’s Lafayette Park housing development and to Heidelberg Street , where the artist Tyree Guyton was beginning to reimagine urban blight as Surrealist assemblage."

"There's no single thing or style you can point to as Detroit art," Levin, 53, tell The Guardian. "It's a sprawling, complex and conflicted exhibition that articulates what the city was, how it developed and what that portends."

Boesky is the daughter of the disgraced financier Ivan Boesky. She also grew up in Detroit; her grandparents owned a beloved Detroit deli, Boesky’s. She told Kennedy: “We wanted a show that reflected a living city, not a dead city, and that if it had a message it might be ‘Don’t take what’s left.’ ”

The artists in the exhibit include:

Mary Ann Aitken / Keith Aoki / William James Bennett / Harry Bertoia / McArthur Binion / James Lee Byars / Nick Cave / James Chatelain / Liz Cohen / Destroy All Monsters / Robert Duncanson/Charles and Ray Eames/ John Egner/ The Henry Ford/ Cyprien Gaillard / Michael Glancy / Brenda Goodman / Jay Heikes / Marie T. Hermann / Scott Hocking / Percy Ives / Ray Johnson / Mike Kelley / Arthur Nevill Kirk / Hughie Lee-Smith / Kate Levant / Morton Levin / Arnold Livshenko / Al Loving / Michael C. Luchs / P. Scott Makela / Tony Matelli / Katherine McCoy / Michael McCoy / Allie McGhee / Charles McGee / Julie Mehretu/ Julius Garibaldi Melchers / Metroplex / Ann Mikolowski / Carl Milles / Wallace MacMahon Mitchell / Gordon Newton / Michele Oka Doner / Max Ortiz / Ellen Phelan / Pewabic Pottery / Bill Rauhauser / Scott Reeder / Jennifer Wynne Reeves / Richard Ritter / Diego Rivera / Eero Saarinen / Eliel Saarinen / Loja Saarinen / Dana Schutz / Zoltan Sepheshy / Robert Sestok / Jim Shaw / Shinola / Michael E. Smith / Mortimer Smith / Gilda Snowden / John Mix Stanley / Anna Sui / Graem Whyte / Robert Wilson 

Photo, above: Woodward Avenue by Bill Rauhauser

 


Read more:  The New York Times


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