I joined art dealer Monica Bowman, 34, for dinner with her husband, Dick Goody, 55, director of the Oakland University Art Gallery in suburban Detroit. The Butcher’s Daughter, Bowman’s small gallery in nearby Ferndale, is thriving with the support of just a few collectors. She brought along Sabrina Nelson, 44, an artist who works as an admissions officer for the College for Creative Studies (CCS), and Sabrina’s 24-year-old son Mario Moore, now a first-year graduate student in painting at Yale.
After dinner, Nelson and Moore took me to the Burton School, one of many large buildings that would be vacant if they weren’t rented to artists for studio use. “It’s our swag,” Nelson said. “Artists here get the best swag.” We met three friends of Moore’s who were working on a documentary about the Brewster-Douglass housing projects, the childhood home of Diana Ross. Long abandoned, the four remaining brick towers are yet another spectral presence in the empty landscape.
“It’s all about reinvention now,” said Oren Goldenberg, the film’s director. Like many artists here, he returned to the city from the suburbs in 2007. With him was Sterling Toles, the composer building the film’s sound track from a mixture of angry rap and more delicate sounds. “I think of Detroit as illumination training school,” he said, pointing to a bumper sticker in the room that read fuck cool cities. “It was so dark. Here, you become the light.”
Case in point: Levon Millross, 30, another homegrown artist. When he’s not working as a hairstylist, he tends to dress in costume—wearable sculptures he makes out of whatever materials are at hand. One night he showed up for a party at the artist-run North End Studios in a hilarious headdress: a black and white amalgam of 45-rpm records, wire hangers, black and silver chains, shells, metal mesh, and long houndstooth-patterned vinyl dreads. His friend Amanda Gordon, 30, was decked out in another of his ingenious creations: a cape of fringed Mylar strips draped from a puffy shawl collar wrapped around the kind of large plastic duct tubes you might see on an industrial vacuum cleaner.
Tate Osten, 52, is a Russian-born transplant from New York and a former professional art adviser who recently opened Kunsthalle Detroit, a nonprofit exhibition space for video art and what she calls “light-based sculpture,” located in a failed bank on a deserted intersection in one of Detroit’s roughest neighborhoods. Using $120,000 of her savings, along with contributions from a handful of business partners and family members, she managed to get the place together for a show by such name artists as William Kentridge, Bill Viola, and Jesper Just. In the weeks after the opening in June, though, thieves stole computers and video equipment, and others sprayed graffiti on the freshly painted facade. When I got there, a smiling drunk who identified himself as Nelson Mandela was stretched out on the front stoop. “I don’t know why, but I have no fear here,” Osten told me. “I’m on a mission, that’s all.” For her, that involves making the grassroots art scene more international in scope. “I have to admit, I’m challenged by the provinciality here,” she said.
