Barely more than 700,000 people actually live here—in an area of 140 square miles. A 1967 race riot accelerated white flight to the suburbs, where the city’s wealth still is, and thanks to the mortgage crisis and record unemployment, the exodus—no longer confined to one race—isn’t over. Most commuters travel on freeways that slice through neighborhoods they never see from the road. Local streets are as unpopulated at midday as they are at night, when a single footstep can sound like a thunderclap. Detroit is eerie—and it’s up for grabs, which is one reason artists see the Motor City as the Promised Land.
The city’s storied past and almost grotesque beauty give them deep reserves of both subject and material. During my visit in July, one artist, Gregory Holm, staged a free concert at a 19th-century firehouse that featured members of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra and a propane-fueled glass-pipe organ he designed. In a blighted neighborhood on the city’s West Side, I found artist Mitch Cope, 38, turning a detached garage covered with gang graffiti into a community art space. Funded by a foundation grant, he replaced the door with colored Plexiglas and built a solar-lighted rail fence around the whole thing. “The gangs must like me,” Cope said. They drive by every day but leave him alone.
Another artist working in virtual obscurity but on a larger scale is Olayami Dabls, 62. He owns the African Bead Museum, a marvelous gallery and shop he opened 26 years ago that now sits on a desolate corner in western Detroit. Out back, stretching across an expanse of overgrown lots, Dabls has created an elaborate theater of junk sculpture and abstract painting—a visual poem that functions as a forceful and witty metaphor for racial oppression. In one area, large craggy stones sit upright on old school-desk chairs facing a round stone with a rusty pipe embedded in it. “That’s Iron Teaching Rock How to Rust,” he said. “People are rocks that tell stories.”
At the Heidelberg Project—the one with the stuffed animals—I met with Tyree Guyton, 56, Dabls’s celebrated rival in Detroit. This 25-year-old outdoor museum of jaw-dropping assemblage has grown into a vibrant educational program and an attraction that draws 275,000 visitors a year. On another abandoned property, a five-minute drive away, Guyton had a new project in progress—Street Folk II—a snaking river of 10,000 mismatched and painted shoes he gathered to represent all the people who have had to walk away from their homes. “I want to shake up the art world,” Guyton said. “Sometimes the world shakes you up,” he added a moment later. “That’s a good thing, too. We need both the good and the bad—it’s all beautiful.”
