The North American International Anti-Auto Show, an art exhibition timed around the show at the Cobo Center, opens Friday night with a black-tie preview at the Contemporary Art Institute of Detroit, writes Tamara Warren on the New York Times' Wheels blog.
Admission is $1 to the green carpet event, where anti-auto show girls will unveil some of the artwork from 14 artists highlighting alternative transportation-based themes.
“It’s not necessarily about one person and four wheels being bad,” the show’s curator, Christina de Roos of Spread Art, tells Warren. “It’s about the environmental consequences of the automobile and the things that come from a heavy car culture.”
The work explores the nuances of mobility. The artist One DR contributed a skateboard painted with flying saucers in outer space. Vito Valdez’s oil painting depicts a buffalo crossing a railroad track as a small dinosaur looms in the background. Mavis Farr uses crushed vintage metal mini cars for her necklaces. “It’s about the auto industry’s absentee parent relationship with Detroit, and also about the mining, manufacture, sales and eventual discarding and decay of metals and gemstones,” Ms. Farr wrote in her artist statement.
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