Detroit City

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Detroit is and always has been a destination for people across the nation and around the world. Throughout the 20th century it held legendary status for its music scene, its architecture, and its troubled but also mythologized history. DETROIT CITY, a new initiative by the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, is a multiyear research, education, publishing, and exhibition program that investigates the city’s current artistic, political, cultural, and economic realities, and what Detroit now shares with cities and places elsewhere.

The program regards exhibitions and public programs not as the final outcomes of artistic or intellectual undertakings, but rather as starting points for ongoing research. Thus, instead of presenting a single exhibition or conference, DETROIT CITY examines the city over a period of a few years, engaging with its large variety of cultural production, in order to adequately represent its highly diverse voices.

Recently, Detroit has become a symbol of urban decay, dysfunctional city politics, racial segregation, poverty, and inner-city crime, all of which have been seen as the final stages in the evolution of postindustrial cities in the United States. While this desolate and harsh reality has created austerity in many respects, it has also created an unusually open playing field for creative freedom in which artists enjoy low rents and inexpensive real estate, not to mention numerous uninhabited spaces ready for creative development.

Unlike cities such as New York, Los Angeles, or Chicago, Detroit is perceived as a place shaped by genuine artistic concerns, cultural transgressions, and bohemian lifestyles, rather than commerce or the market. Within this climate, DETROIT CITY also interrogates the significance of location, and a location’s particular social, economic, and political realities, as factors influencing artistic production. What does “lives and works in Detroit” on an artist’s CV signal to an increasingly globalized art world? What currency does it hold and create?

DETROIT CITY is comprised of three concurrent series: Detroit Affinities (exhibition), Detroit Speaks (education), and Detroit Stages (performance).

Further exhibitions, conferences, talks, and publications will investigate the history of the American working class though the labor and union archive at Wayne State University and new art commissions; the development of other art scenes that have been similarly mythologized, such as those of Berlin, San Juan, Beirut, and Vancouver; the coevolution of art and music in cities such as Detroit or Berlin; as well as exhibitions featuring works by artists who were born, raised, or educated in Detroit who have since moved elsewhere and are now being invited to return.