I asked another committed Detroiter the question above.  Here’s her answer.

(NB You can watch video of Rebecca’s terrific lecture at DETROIT SPEAKS on the city’s alt-music history here. )

Rebecca Mazzei

Thanks for the question Steve. Its so complicated. Here is a quick response:

I find that New Yorkers’ perspectives, no matter how creative they may be, have been built around parameters of property, both intellectual and real. A widened sense of spiritual consciousness, which has its roots in the African-American community here, has shifted Detroiters’ parameters to the communal, as opposed to the personal. You shouldn’t just move here if you are interested in how your art may be better served by being in Detroit, or even in how the city may be better served by your presence. You should move here if you have a genuine inclination to redefine your understanding of what belongs to you, what is owed to you, what you deserve, what you need, what you want, what money can buy.

Rebecca Mazzei, along with composer Joel Peterson, runs TRINOSOPHES, a multi-arts venue on Gratiot Avenue in Detroit that contains a coffee shop, bookstore, performance space, exhibitions, and archives.  It hosts the Detroit Commissioning Project as well as the free, publicly-accessible storefront museum for the extensive music archive developed by musician and proprietor of the world-renowned Peoples Records, Brad Hales. The Michigan Audio Heritage Society Museum (MAHS)  features regularly changing exhibits that highlight Detroit and Michigan’s significant contributions to global musical culture.  

Photo of Leon Johnson’s limited edition book, Vestigial Enclaves and Sacral Enclosures, which includes a new commissioned poem by Bill Harris, almanac notes by Norman Douglas, photography by Leander Johnson, a commissioned composition by Joel Peterson (also performed live), six maps by Paul Bartow, and six new works by Johnson. Designed, typeset and printed by Megan O’Connell for Salt and Cedar. Handbound by Johnson.

Leon Johnson

dear steve / curious timing as i prepare for the grand project of re-enchantment as an artist, educator, and citizen / thank you for the invitation.

thoughts informed by the introduction to my book, vestigial enclaves and sacral enclosures, recently published in detroit at salt & cedar:

all aspirations, all claims of newness, innovation, and creative philanthropy ultimately arrive and settle on, and within, gorgeously varied and exhaustively tortured sites of contest, ancient and still alive – and here we have thriving secret, and in-clear-sight, multitudinous communities: no flight narratives, no ruin indulgences, no habituated lethargy, but the remarkable continuity of life itself, both human and non-human – the trumpeted claims of the media concerning the awaiting resources, space and license for young creatives will result in more of the temporal supremacy estates we now witness. if we plan on arriving here, we must also prepare to counter these boutique agonies. we must gradually claim participatory rights in a refrain situated between the demands of the past – for only what has disappeared will have called for us [and so much has disappeared in detroit, yes, the calls are deafening] – and the needs of the future – for only what needs-to-be-held awaits there [and so much needs to be clenched, embraced, and re-enchanted, yes]. to participate is to distribute – to prepare for the relational improvisation with, and to be in proximity to, countless milieu refrains, natal refrains, and the grand project of the refrain of the earth – all already here, and well underway, is the critical ask.

the territory is not primary in relation to the qualitative mark; it is the accretion of marks that makes the territory. i am not at all convinced that liberatory pedagogy, of any substance, will originate or transmit from the art-industrial complex of museums, art-schools, foundations, patrons, donors and sponsors. this system cannot teach. the potential of our collective, living efforts will not be realized in thinking and then again in the genesis of the thing, the event, the exhibition, the new department, the new curator, the new artist, etc but in the vivid and variegated processions between and within our many milieu refrains.

i hope to join a procession, what edith turner calls liminal communitas.

ha!

sending love from riopelle street. xoxoxo

Leon Johnson
Leon Johnson is an artist and writer.  He is a Kresge Fellow.  He, his partner, Megan O’Connell, and his sons Leander and Marlowe, run SALT AND CEDAR LETTERPRESS in Detroit. His book VESTIGIAL ENCLAVES / SACRAL ENCLOSURES: THE FOX CREEK BIOME is available in a limited edition through Salt and Cedar Letterpress.  He lives and works in Detroit, Michigan.

Detroit Skyline Tile, Pewabic Pottery, 4″x4″, created in the 1980s by staff artist David Ellison.

 

As part of its continuing decline as a newspaper, the NYTimes has been publishing articles about Detroit.  For the most part they have characterized the city as an empty, burned out husk waiting for “creatives” and “entrepreneurial leadership” to come and rescue it.  Between this call for a neoliberal land grab, and the flood of ruin porn images of the city, a NYTimes reader would be shocked to know that there are people living and working in the city – people who have no patience for the urban frontier language of capital, or the myth of the artist going to the wild to create.  The experience Detroit as a real inhabited place, not as Machu Picchu and not as inspiration for young Gauguins to write their version of Noa Noa. 

So I got in touch with a variety of Detroiters: some lifers, some late comers, some artists, some in public health, some in media, and some in finance.  To a person they knew about the NYTimes articles and the discussion around their city.  From time to time, I will publish their replies to my inquiries about Detroit.

I asked them, “What would you tell an artist who wants to move to Detroit?”

James Keith LaCroix

Hey, Steve. Great to hear from you. I’d love to offer you a thoughtful, well-written response. This isn’t it — but I will send one soon.

As I’m sure you know, Detroit has piqued the artistic interests of the world for decades from artists and art of the arts and craft movement like those of the Pewabic Pottery and early Cranbrook through Motown, the MC5 and the poetry and social activism of John Sinclair, Techno, to the experimental language poetry of what I’ll call the “Cass Corridor scene” and beyond to this day. Detroit is as much an empty frontier as this country was pre-Columbus — and any assumptions that it is have at least a whiff of arrogant neocolonialism to them. Our empty frontier is peopled with motley artists, musicians, and writers more or less making art for art’s sake without much other commercial interest than buying the materials for their work and working, eating, and living indoors.

One of my best friends here, James Hart, III, curates poetry readings here — and exports readings to culture starved burgs like New York City, Los Angeles, and San Francisco where avant-garde Detroit artists seem to be as hip as jazz artist were in Europe and later Japan. To paraphrase the notorious bandit in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, “Change from outsiders? We don’t need no stink in’ change from outsiders.” Detroit isn’t a cultureless bum shaking a cup for their outside change. Perhaps our cup doesn’t runneth over, but their are artists and groups who fill it with treasures in drops, trickles and even a steady flow.

If an artist wants to move to Detroit, they should ask themselves why. Most of the good , cheap real estate has been bought and space in the hipper areas like Woodbridge is selling for hundreds of thousands of dollars — if you can still find a property. Our score of scenes and circles find themselves in competition for our small audience. The only reason for an artist to come here is that they love or have fallen in love with the city. I know a few of these people, some from Europe, and they’re here because this is the only place that they can make the work they want to make. They’re not art missionaries who’ve come to give the natives culture or venture adventurists looking to get in on some burned-out, abandoned ground floor. They’re people who love Detroit like others love NYC or San Francisco. I’ll let you know about out restless natives. There’s a tribe of them.

James Keith LaCroix  is a musician, poet, and an emergency medical technician.  He lives in Detroit, Michigan.

Detroit Institute of the Arts, Detroit Industry Frescoes by Diego Rivera

I just got back from Detroit.

I’m not going to talk about my memories or my personal sense of loss.  I will save that for my loved ones.  I will save it for people who will not judge me for my sadness, my anger, my sense of displacement and loss.  I will save it for Detroiters, who are still committed to and love that city.

I will talk about art.  And the art in Detroit is what shaped me to be an artist and actually affirmed my sense of humanity.

There is a lot of art in Detroit in a lot of different forms.

There is the Detroit Institute of the Arts that is a jewel in the center of the city.  There has been much talk about the selling off of the treasures of this museum to cover the cost of Detroit’s bankruptcy.  I just want people to know what is available there, in a public museum so beloved that people willingly raised their own taxes to keep it open.

There is the vibrant and exciting graffiti culture that is both under and above ground.

There is the Museum of Contemporary Art of Detroit (MOCAD),  which hosts the Mike Kelley Mobile Homestead and boasts murals paying tribute to Sean Griffin aka NEKST

There is also the Heidelberg Project which has the distinction of being the largest tourist attraction in Detroit right now.  A lot of people love this work and the vision of Tyree Guyton.  Lots of people from artists, to urban planners, to Race Traitor magazine have talked about the importance of this artistic intervention in maligned public space.  It is something to experience.

I struggle greatly with this project and the other art projects that use the abandoned houses of the city as sites for a certain kind of art.  To my eye, all of this work traffics in the aesthetic of trash.  It accompanies the fetish for disaster porn that encourages people to photograph the spaces of Detroit as if they are uninhabited ruins of a past civilization-Detroit as Machu Pichu.  Because I grew up here, it is hard to see this as a garden of creativity. A lot of graffiti artists (some of them quite famous) have done this sort of thing with houses in Detroit and Hamtramck.  I saw a lot of them and I wondered what the people in the neighborhoods thought of them.  I wondered if these artists would go home to their own communities and make sculptures of trash and debris in their own front yards.  I wondered if this was the kind of public art that the people of Detroit deserved in their neighborhoods.

The opposite of this was the work of Bleeding Heart Design. Rebecca Bucky Willis was good enough to show me some of her community-based projects housed in her neighborhood of Lindale Gardens.  Their “WE NEED” project was a moment where design and community came together in a way that brought real tears of hope and joy to my eyes.  The simplest gesture, asking people what they need, allowed BHD use participatory design to transform an abandoned site into a place where people could express what they needed.

BHD projects are community responsive and participatory.  They inspire action and collaboration and reclamation of public space.

These are the kinds of things that I want people to know about Detroit.  That people are working.  People are working hard to be good citizens and make their homes better.  Not as entertainment for others but for themselves and their communities.

There will be more.  I have a show at MOCAD in May and I’ll be visiting more and more.  There will be a lot more information coming from the D.

Vincent van Gogh,

The permanent collection at the Detroit Institute of the Arts has an enormous influence on me. Like most kids in Detroit, I first went there on a school trip. (This was back when education included things like art and culture.) I was spellbound by the building itself. I stood on the stairs with my mouth hanging open, reading the text carved into the facade. I was completely shocked when I found out that we were going to go inside such a place. I didn’t know you could go inside such places. After that trip I was hooked on the place. I was 10 years old. Every chance I could, I would take the three busses (including the Cross-town) to go and wander through the enormous beaux-arts building. I never tired of it.

When I would go back to Detroit to visit my mother, one of the first questions she would ask me was “When do you want to go to the museum?”

So much of that collection is etched into my memory but two things really formed and continue to shape the way I make paintings today. One is the Main Courtyard, which contains the Industry frescoes of Diego Rivera. The other is van Gogh’s 1887 Self-Portrait. The former is important to be because it is such a total statement about a people and a place, right down to the cells that make up the rock strata of Michigan. The latter is important to me for much more.

The first time I saw the van Gogh I think I was about 12 years old. I lied and told my mother I was going to the library, which was about 4 blocks from our house. I took the busses (waiting almost 35 minutes for the Cross-town) and got to the Museum about shortly after it opened. It felt like I had the entire building to myself.

I should say that my favorite painting at the time was William-Adolphe Bouguereau’s The Nut Gatherers (Les Noisettes), (1882).

It looked so real to me back then. The silky carpet of grass on which the little girls lay while they fed their pet squirrel was almost seamlessly photographic. There was a delicate haze over all the forms. It really looked as if the girls would move if I turned my back and I thought that was the mark of quality in a painting. Moreover, the subject and setting was so removed from my life and my situation at the time that it was like a window into some better, safer world. I had received a monograph on Norman Rockwell a few months before and I though Bougereau made Rockwell look like a scrub.

On my way to the section where the Bougereau was, I got side tracked into the “Impressionist/Post impressionist” room. In the center of the installation was the van Gogh. It was on a thin pedestal and in a Plexiglas vitrine, like jewelry. I heard myself gasp when I saw it and in a fundamental way, I felt like it saw me. Not just in the way “the eyes follow you around the room,” I felt like the painting was inhabited. Not that there was paint on canvas, but there was a man’s head in a Plexiglas box in the museum, and that it had acknowledged me when I came into the room. When I walked over to it, I realized it was a painting. I could not believe for quite a few minutes that it was but the little label said “van Gogh, Vincent, Dutch, active in France, Self Portrait with Straw Hat, oil on canvas, 1887.” It felt then, as it does to this day, that there is so much more than oil on that canvas. I began to cry.

Over time, I have tried to assign the effect of the picture to van Gogh’s mastery of complementary color as a device to create the illusion of plastic space. The yellow in that straw hat, for example, is modulated from white to yellow to orange to blue to purple and back to white. The color is applied in strokes, which separate as color only to merge as form. I also attributed it to the way it is installed and being very young when I saw it. This is all well and good and perhaps true, but it doesn’t really explain my tears and why they still well up in the presence of the painting.

The only conclusion I can come to that the picture carries the trace of him. It is a self-portrait so it contains van Gogh’s likeness, but it also contains a record of his touch. The surface is covered with those touches and there must be hundreds of thousands of them. There is a devotional quality to touching anything that many times and to me that touching is a record of tenacity of the maker. So when I stand in front of the painting and look at those marks, I have the record of the experience of standing where he must have stood when he was painting it. And I can feel myself making that picture, making those marks one after the other after the other. With that self-portrait, I feel van Gogh brought me into the world of painting and showed me how it was done. No tricks, no gimmicks, just the power of color next to color. And that facial expression, which was so arresting when I was a child, seems to say to me still, “I see. I know.”

Across time and territory, a Dutchman living in France at the dawn of the machine age reached out to a little black boy in 70’s Detroit and delivered a message. Not the hopeful, bucolic escape of a Bougereau, but the ability to make sense of the insanity of the world, and the safety that can come from the courage of the gaze.

I left the museum that day and never saw the Bougereau. My mom put me on punishment me for 2 weeks for lying about going to the library.