Detroit Film Festival & Flint ART Project

Surprise from the streets: Art!

Detroit is like a big canvas

December 18, 2007

CREATION OF COLOR: With an artistic storefront, the artist known as Dabl attracts customers to his store, Dabl's African Bead Gallery, at Vinewood and Grand River. He sells thousands of African beads, some more than 300 years old, he says. (ERIC SEALS/DFP)

BY BILL McGRAW
FREE PRESS COLUMNIST

Shards of glass arranged randomly on a wooden utility pole. A jaunty human body carved out of a dead tree, wearing a tire as a hat. Ceramic benches in a vacant lot. The face of an elf painted on the base of a streetlight. Elaborate graffiti in countless places across the city.

Art is one of the last things outsiders associate with Detroit. But drive the streets and you quickly realize the city possesses an energetic, grassroots creative class that not only spreads color, whimsy and provocation across the landscape, but also serves as an engine of redevelopment.

True, not everyone considers all of it art, especially when it comes to graffiti.

And the underground nature of some of the work helps keep it off the radar of many people, even art lovers.

But it's evident that the city's far-flung artistic community extends many levels beyond the Detroit Institute of Arts, which reopened in November after a $158-million renovation.

Last year, the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (MOCAD) opened in an abandoned car dealership on Woodward Avenue and received praise from the New York Times for its "guerrilla architecture ... that accepts decay as fact."

This year, the Contemporary Art Institute of Detroit (CAID) expanded in a variety of directions from its 3-year-old home in an 1889 grocery store-turned-billiards-hall-turned auto-parts-outlet in a deserted area of Rosa Parks Boulevard.

While a number of local artists seek their fame by moving to the coasts or Chicago, those who have stayed say they are attracted to Detroit because of its ample workshop space, cheap rent, creative community and the city's laissez-faire attitude toward street art that allows a wider range of freedom of expression than would be tolerated in the more tightly regulated suburbs.

The artists

Mitch Cope, 34, is a Detroit artist and curator. He and wife Gina Reichert run a Hamtramck store, Design 99, that sells quirkily fabricated household items. Collaborating with two German artists, Cope has made benches out of Detroit's ubiquitous tree of heaven, also known as the ghetto palm and ailanthus tree.

"When we talk to artists from out-of-town, we mostly talk about opportunities that don't exist elsewhere," he said. "You can come to the city, take over land, do whatever you want."

Aaron Timlin, CAID's executive director, added: "There's a pioneering attitude. There are so many things artists can do in Detroit because it is so spread out. Throw up a sculpture on a vacant lot. Performance art. Detroit is a big empty canvas."

The spiritual godfather of the grassroots art scene is Tyree Guyton, whose internationally known installation around Heidelberg Street on the near East Side attracts visitors every day. Guyton's artwork deals with how abandonment affects a neighborhood -- and decay is central to the work of a number of artists.

In Detroit, there are people who draw attention to abandonment by painting gutted homes orange or attaching orange traffic cones to them. There is Larry Zelenski, who produces greeting cards with lovingly enhanced photos of abandoned houses. And there is Kevin Joy, who paints cartoons, Mayan-style hieroglyphics and other wacky images on abandoned houses and in the windows of vacant downtown buildings.

Flamboyant artwork was one aspect of the popular Theatre Bizarre, an annual underground Halloween carnival near the State Fairgrounds that this year featured goth, punk and rockabilly music, a burlesque show and a skin-piercing exhibition.

The graffiti was so interesting and extensive on bridge abutments in the below-grade rail line east of downtown, known as the Dequindre Cut, that city officials decided to preserve the images as they transform the area into a greenway and recreation path that will open next year.

In dozens of locations, countless anonymous metro Detroiters have fashioned artistic-looking street shrines of candles, stuffed animals, liquor bottles, photos and written tributes that memorialize the dead -- mostly the victims of gun violence.

Artists also contribute to the city's revival, though their improvements are usually small scale and rarely the subjects of news conferences.

In October, for instance, Zi Walls, a 29-year-old graphic artist and musician, and two partners, cleaned up an abandoned store on Michigan Avenue near Tiger Stadium and opened Communique, a space for video, film, music, poetry and other alternative media.

Artists also have taken their galleries and work spaces to a variety of old buildings that might otherwise sit empty.

Among those outposts are the Pioneer Building, a former factory on East Grand Boulevard; the 4731 Gallery, a four-story brick building on Grand River and 15th, and, perhaps most notably, the Russell Industrial Center, an immense complex of seven buildings at Russell and Clay.

FROM FACTORY TO ART HOUSE: Christian Unverzagt, 36, a designer from Detroit, shows off a party space in November at the Russell Industrial Center, where he has a studio. The complex, at 1604 Clay St. in Detroit, is one of several old industrial buildings that artists have taken over to use as their galleries and work spaces. (SUSAN TUSA/DFP)

The art factory

With its dingy brick, uneven windows, bulky water tower and the rambling vastness, the six- and seven-story Russell Industrial Center looks like a throwback to Detroit's smokestack past. Passing it on the Chrysler Freeway north of East Grand Boulevard, you might not even be sure whether it's occupied.

But when you pull into its inner parking lot, you realize this is no ordinary old factory.

First indication: There are a lot of people walking around and considerable vehicle traffic.

Second indication: Walking through the hallways, you see bright lights and fat red elephant sculptures amid the sawing, hammering and eclectic music.

Third indication: The "no parking" signs are fastened to metal that is bent into whimsical humanlike shapes.

Chris Bell made the figurines.

By day, he is a mechanic for the Detroit Department of Transportation. After hours, Bell calls himself the "man of steel," and works on the third floor of Building No. 2, soldering and welding spare parts and sheet metal into the shapes of animals, people and things.

He's an artist, and the Russell is his home.

"This place is like a sanctuary," he said. "This is my family. I'm among like-minded people. There is nothing but positiveness."

The Russell is home to 120 tenants, about 80 of whom are artists, said Eric Novack, the center's leasing agent who writes novels in his spare time.

The tenants are attracted by an authentic industrial design of thick concrete and mammoth elevators, plus rents that run about $550 a month for 1,000 square feet -- considerably cheaper than in much of suburbia. The artists and others occupy about 650,000 of the Russell's 2.2 million square feet.

"You can do whatever you want as long as it's legal," Novack said. "We have two rules: Respect the community and respect the building."

The tenants are a diverse group with specialties like photography, music, painting, interior design, architecture, metal work, glassblowing, graphic design, cabinetry, clothes manufacturing, candle-making, posters and a company -- Sensitile Systems -- that makes acrylic material that reconfigures shadows and light.

The Salt-Mine Studio offers what it says is the only fine-arts foundry in the city. The Detroit Industrial Projects is a modest-size gallery that undergoes a total transformation for each show.

Designed by renowned architect Albert Kahn in the World War I era, the Russell was a busy manufacturing center of auto parts and bomber wings during Detroit's heyday. Home to some 130 print companies in the 1970s, it experienced financial problems in the 1990s, and Dennis Kefallinos, who owns Nikki's Pizza and other ventures, bought the complex in 2003.

Spreading the word

In September, the Russell held a one-day People's Art Festival that attracted more than 150 visual artists, performance artists, filmmakers and musicians from inside the building and beyond.

Novack said the fair was so successful plans are in the works for next year's event. He says the complex also will add a year-round screening area for videos and films.

The Russell event joins two other summer festivals in central Detroit -- Dally in the Alley south of Wayne State University and the Fourth Street Fair north of campus -- that are offbeat and focused on music and art.

"People from out of state say, 'There's nothing going on in Detroit,' " said Mark Arminski, who rents space in the Russell and is a well-known designer of posters for rock bands. "I tell them, 'Come here for a summer. Go to galleries and festivals. Even clubs. A lot of clubs are hanging art these days.' "

Said Jeannette Strezinski of the Detroit Industrial Projects: "If you're in the suburbs and you're only paying attention to the big galleries, you're kind of going to miss a lot."

Contact BILL McGRAW at 313-223-4781 or bmcgraw@freepress.com.