Cityscape

Visiting New York's Big Detroit Art Show With A Lot Of Motor City Baggage

July 15, 2014, 8:34 AM

Photo: Bill Rauhauser

M.H. Miller, a New York writer, took his mother to the big Detroit art exhibition in New York and blends his family's Detroit history with impressions of the show in a long story for the Gallerist that touches on numerous local themes: Immigration, closing auto plants, crime and the suburbs.

Excerpts: 

When I tell someone my family is from Detroit, the person will respond by saying, “Oh, Detroit!” in one of two ways: the first is suspicious, as if I had said that I was just released from prison the day before; the second, now that Detroit has become a national buzzword for either hopelessness or high expectations, is the inauthentic enthusiasm reserved for the perennial stories in the national media about the city’s so-called “renaissance,” many of which focus on the small pocket of Corktown, a white enclave that is the site of the popular Slows Barbecue restaurant...

I’m too cynical about the art world and my upbringing to give “Another Look at Detroit,” a massive exhibition in Chelsea on view at two wealthy art galleries, Marlborough and Marianne Boesky, a fair assessment either way. The show errs on the side of positivity, censoring any images of urban blight, industrial waste or poverty, which is admirable if not entirely accurate. Todd Levin, a Detroiter and veteran of the New York art world, organized it. Ms. Boesky’s father is the banker Ivan Boesky, who was born in Detroit to a restaurateur and, after he was convicted in New York of insider trading in 1986, became the partial basis for Gordon Gekko in Wall Street. Instead of taking it on myself, I brought my mother with me to see what she thought of all this...

The cause of the riot of 1967 is more difficult to pin down, but it started with a beer bottle being thrown at a police officer at an after-hours club on 12th Street, the heart of the city’s black business district, and ended with over 40 reported deaths and a few thousand destroyed buildings. The tanks rolled down Dobel Street, and the Happy family all spent their nights that week in the living room, holding close the shotgun my Uncle Bob used for pheasant hunting, hoping no one would break down the front door. During the day, my mother—by this time a hormonal teenager—baked cookies and flirted with the troops. Not long after this, she would leave Detroit for the comparably bohemian setting of Ann Arbor—about a half an hour by car, west on I-94—but my grandparents would stay until 1987, the year of my birth, moving to a house on Fairmont and leaving only when a crazed drug addict—one of the new additions to the neighborhood that accompanied the arrival of crack cocaine—broke into the house late one night, and violently beat my grandfather while my grandmother watched. He got away with $30...

We’d drive past The Thinker perched in front of the Detroit Institute of Arts, where my father took me for the first time at the age of eight. My father, for whom Detroit was also exotic and otherworldly, even though (or, really, because) he spent his whole life before moving to New York within an hour of the city limits, coaxed me into listing some of the evil that would imminently be released from Chauncey Bradley Ives’ sculpture of Pandora, perpetually frozen in the moment prior to opening her pithos. Afterwards, we had the misfortune of seeing the gruesome site where one museum visitor mercilessly unloaded his bowels and smeared the mess all over the walls and floor of the men’s bathroom. The current trials of the DIA are by now well-documented, and from a distance I’ve watched with rising frustration while the museum fights to save the city-owned portion of its collection from the bankrupt city’s creditors, but I can only ever return to that day, asking my father, “What’s happening there?” as he solemnly shuffled me out of the restroom. It was my first time in a museum...

Previously on Deadline Detroit:

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

 


Read more:  Gallerist


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