Four Corners of Detroit: A City Remakes Itself One Person at a Time
by: Rebecca Mazzei | posted: Sep 1, 2009
NORTH
BUILDING CONNECTIONS
New to northeast Detroit and relatively recent to the United States, photographer Corine Vermeulen-Smith, who hails from the Netherlands, was looking to introduce herself to the neighborhood where her and husband, Zeb Smith, purchased a foreclosed home.
“It was like baking an apple pie and saying 'Hi, I'm your new neighbor.’ But I'm not great at baking pies, so I figured I should take portraits of people and give them a print instead.”
Inspired by the Walker Evans Depression-era photograph License Photo Studio, New York, 1934, Vermeulen-Smith decided to transform the house, suffering through its own depression era, into a temporary portrait studio.
She invited Femke Lutgerink, a member of Detroit Unreal Estate Agency, a group cataloging “significant sites of urban culture,” to help her on the project. Lutgerink, who is also from the Netherlands, conducted short interviews with people who came by to have their picture taken.
“Sometimes there would be three people waiting and while I was taking photos, Femke would write down their names and stories. It was really good to have her there with me. I don't think I could have done it alone.”
“The people who came in the studio were solicited via flyers and signs. The studio was open for five days; on some days it was busy, on other days it was much more quiet and we would just be waiting a lot, and go on the streets to see if we could find someone who would be interested. We did quite a bit of 'scouting.’ After the first two days the word started spreading. People who already had their portrait taken would come back with a friend or family member, and then they would return with someone else. In total, about 85 people came in. The next week, on Saturday, people could pick up their portraits. Not everyone came back, so this process is actually still going on, getting people their prints. I have most people's addresses so if they won't come pick up their portrait, I will drop them in their mailbox. But I'll give it a few more weeks, see if they come back.”
Vermeulen-Smith spent as much time as she could with each of the sitters, because the more time she had, the better the portrait turned out. “I like a portrait best when the sitter has lost awareness of the camera and is not posing anymore.” In the end, she considered the project a success, having met many more people in the neighborhood. “We greet each other on the street, talk for a bit, keep one another informed about what's going on.” Vermeulen-Smith says she wants to continue the project by setting up the studio in different areas of Detroit — a travelling photo studio — documenting diverse communities.
SOUTH
SHARING SPACE
“No tricky stuff here,” artist Mary Beth Carolan assured the beer-drinking crowd, shoving up the sleeves of her hazmat suit and beginning her dusk performance by slicing butter with a hand saw and setting a fire with her blow torch, at the new outdoor arts venue The Lot. A half hour later, major disaster averted, her audience enjoyed the fruits of her labor: fresh-herbed whole tilapia, curried sweet potato mash with honey glazed pears and coconut milk, romaine salad, and chocolate ganache angel food cake. It was a delicious meal made with an axe, chop saw, claw hammer, concrete chisel, spud bar, Sawzaw drill, press bench, leaf blower, and various other power tools.
The Lot is a plot of land measuring roughly 100 by 60 feet, situated in North Corktown, a neighborhood a few miles north of the Detroit River and the behemoth modern ruin Michigan Central Depot. A curatorial project by artist Kathy Leisen on city-owned property adjacent to her home, it is the most recent example of creativity asserting itself in the public realm. Across 140 square miles of city, visual artists are stepping outside the studio and allowing their work to evolve into a kind of social practice which has become so prevalent as to render “thinking outside the box” par for the course. Detroit is an artist’s playground, known locally as a great place for making art, if not selling it. Living is not merely cheap; it almost seems indulgent, at least for those who are able and willing to spend an exhaustive amount of time transforming abandoned mini-mansions, warehouses, or the odd overgrown field into an oasis to be enthusiastically shared with other like-minded people. Without naiveté, many artists split their time between personal grassroots endeavors and community projects.
Leisen was inspired to create The Lot after working at the Ox-Bow School of Art and Artist Residencies, a historic art school in Saugatuck — a small artistic community on the western edge of Michigan. On her blog, she writes, “The Lot offers a place for us to experiment and grow, hopefully into something imperfect, beautiful and wild.” Leisen strives to present exhibits and performances which pair local artists with those visiting from outside the community, such as a recent choreographed performance by the Captain Beefheart-esque artist and musician Jamie Easter, and New York’s Peter Dobill.
An specific understanding of Carolan’s performance was aided by artist and bricklayer Jerome Ferretti, narrating from the crowd while sipping a lavender-mint gin fizz poured from a PVC bucket by one of Carolan’s cape-clad assistants. “You see that right there?” Ferretti offered, “Now she’s grating cheese with a hand planer. HAND PLANER. H-A-N-D… ”
EAST
ACTING OUT
“She’s allergic to pets, but there were all these hipsters dancing,” says painter and former dancer Faina Lerman, as a way of explaining how her friend and creative collaborator, Bridget Michael, ended up on all fours (following a dog to its food bowl) a few nights ago at a party.
The pair has performed three times so far at the Yes Farm, a ramshackle venue run by a collective of artists on Detroit’s rural, depopulated eastside, where empty lots are occasionally interrupted by old homes, orchards, or gardens. A few blocks away from the Yes Farm, a party gathers on an acre of open land. Thousands of people join together every Sunday at what’s known as the Carpet Lounge to hear blues.
Michael describes her and Lerman’s ensemble as a “science fiction dance company” tentatively called Tsarinas of the Plain. For their premiere, the duo painted on each other to initiate the performance, before transforming themselves into dancing machines. Lerman explains, “I had grandma’s [her nickname for her husband, artist Graem Whyte] wool underwear stocking-thing on.”
Their next performance coincided with an exhibit at Yes Farm called the Seed Show, which the women took literally. They found a giant piece of foam at Ross Coated Fabric, an industrial materials retailer, and constructed a pod with duct tape. Gymnast-sized Lerman fit inside the pod to portray the story of birth and the eventual murder of her creator.
Their latest piece was part of TV Show, an event featuring live music, art, videos and performances “in celebration of the analog disconnection.” Michael says the act was supposed to be a reverse Animal Planet, in which humans, dressed-up as animal refugees, stared at imagery projected onto a larger-than-life TV screen; but due to a computer crash it didn’t quite come off that way. Nine hours worth of recorded audio and video material were lost to a devastating white screen. Two out of the three shows they’ve worked on have suffered similarly.
“The night it crashed, Bridget told me ‘It’s just data! It’s just data!’” Lerman recalls. “So we chilled out. The next day we used what materials we had.” They reached a point of madness, however, recorded when Michael snapped a great in-progress photo of Lerman in her bra on her studio floor with a glue gun.
Having cut her teeth in New York City as a performance artist, Michael was confident enough to improvise, but Lerman was a bit more tentative, which she attributes to the deliberate technique she learned as a youth. “I’m moving away from formal lines. They are great but they hold you back, making you too conscious of your movement. Bridget has taught me how to transform my body. I tried painting the other day, and I couldn’t. I think my mind has flipped to the other side.”
WEST
BIG VISIONS
Traveling from the city’s east side to the west across Davison Freeway — the nation’s first modern freeway — drivers can’t help but spot the handiwork of Object Orange, a collective of anonymous artists who, last year, took it upon themselves to force the city’s hand in demolishing abandoned structures. The group tackled the buildings late at night and painted them Tigger-orange to alert commuters to the blight which Object Orange felt should no longer be ignored. Out of 14 or 15 that were painted, nine have been demolished. “If you want to feel like you’re really doing something,” one member said, “wake up at 4 am and paint a house.”
The artists of Object Orange are not the only ones using Detroit’s manmade environment as a canvas. Olyami Dabls is the owner of the African Bead Museum, located on Grand River Avenue at Vinewood, in a commercial-industrial area on the west side. Dabls bought a 17,000-square-foot building next door and boarded it up, as the city told him to. Except he did it with thousands of shards of mirrored glass and pieces of iron and wood. He calls it the N'kisi Iron House, and it shimmers like a giant bejeweled quilt hung across the landscape. Dabls likes to think of it as a protector, because an image of evil can’t penetrate the surface.
Many other artists are realizing their visions on an architectural scale in underserved communities, as well. The Brightmoor neighborhood on Detroit’s northwest side was developed as a “planned community” in the 1920’s to serve the Appalachian population migrating to Detroit for work in the auto factories. Through the decades, race and class tensions led to a suburban mass exodus, and slum rental housing, drug trade, and neglect took hold of the neighborhood. But Brightmoor is looking alive again. Artists Wiley McDowell and husband and wife team Gina Reichert and Mitch Cope received a grant from Community + Public Arts Detroit to join with local residents in designing and constructing a “talking fence.” The fence will stand near one of the oldest homes in Brightmoor — an abandoned residence that’s nearly all skin and bones — which Brightmoor’s Community High School superintendant Bart Eddy and the local youth are renovating and transforming into a community house. The fence will feature wind chimes sculpted from wood and metal, as well as imagery specific to the region. It will be lit with solar power, and leads to an archway through which sits a bench where new stories can be told and heard. Nearby, German artist Johannes Matthiessen sweats in the sun, teaching kids how to chisel brick for Spirit Park, a sculpture garden. Cope and Reichert are also turning a house in their own neighborhood (near Vermeulen-Smith’s place) into a “Power House,” a bio-powered artist’s residency. They purchased the foreclosed home for $1200 and are currently repairing it.
A friend of theirs, sculptor Scott Hocking, has been creating large-scale installations for about five years, including a pyramid made from 2,109 used tires which were illegally dumped in Detroit. He salvaged and trucked the tires to one of the city’s wealthiest suburbs, Bloomfield Hills, and arranged them on the lawn of a collector’s home. He also painstakingly assembled a ziggurat of bricks inside the vacant 536,000-square-foot Fisher Body 21, a manufacturing plant built in 1919, which has been closed for more than a decade. Hocking just returned from a trip to China, where he created Lao Zhu and the Flour Factory, an installation and photography project documenting the abandoned flour factory buildings near Suzhou Creek in Shanghai. Hocking built a masonry-block pyramid and bamboo hut inside a building slated for demolition within the year, thereby imbuing the buildi
