Detroit's Art & Design School

A few weeks back I pondered the potential of a question posed by visiting New Yorkers: What would an ideal creative education look like? Well, it may not look the same everywhere--something that all of us who teach something creative should pause more than once to consider. Renaissance draftsmanship or Bauhaus style workshops tend to be our studio models whether in NYC or Paris or Beijing. But can that really either be effective or even interesting? Flattening local knowledge and specificity in pursuit of idealized skills leads to atomization and an art world separated from everyday life, producing more producers of potential luxury or alienated avant-gardists. I propose a modest adaptation--rooted in local skills and vantage points, a creative education can be grounded in, well, the ground, without sacrificing ambition.

This is something that at first pass sounds like regionalism or provincialism, but, ultimately, I'd argue, augers more towards innovation fed by, but not limited by place. One thing I have learned from teaching art in Detroit public schools is that the distance between street and studio, home and class, lesson and use can be vast. Skills learned to cope in challenging neighborhoods may be at odds with a classroom, so let's not make everyone live bifurcated lives, but rather, let's see how we can leverage those skills.



Here's a start of the sure components of a Detroit city based creative arts-design and thinking curriculum with local influences:
Unit or Focus I (not in hierarchical order of any sort) might be


Words and Image
Look at the wealth of visual acuity tempered with graphic sophistication and chromatic vigor in the work of many of Detroit's sign painters (my examplar is the East Sider Bird.) With a good legion of skilled hands painting huge signs for everything from dry cleaners to party stores, the ubiquity of the painted word currently outstrips the printed vinyl banner world of easy graphic design enabled by Kinko's (no offense to the service bureau.) Fuse these skilled hands with the verbal dynamism of freestyle and composed rap and street cypher battles, and our visual/creative education has hands and mouths and ears engaged, dynamic and Detroit.



Next week: Unit II: Building, Joinery and Assembled Meaning

A creative education: Part II

In the last post, a creative education (see below) I wrote about what I saw as a missed opportunity to talk about ideas for a more creative art education in Detroit.

Following up on that opportunity, here are some models that are inspiring:

Trade School is in NYC and is based on a barter system. Know something? Teach something. Share something. The emphasis is on a social exchange of sharing skills.

From Trade School's values:

• Practical Skills (action over abstraction, enthusiasm over experts)
• Reciprocity (everyone has something to share: anyone can teach, everyone can 'afford' the barter because it includes labor)
• Rigor + Humility (unempowering and empowering work for all)
• Community Space (share food/tea, make furniture, you know the organizers because we are sitting in class with you)

How we work:

• Design for the community you are part of (it's easy to make bad decisions if they don't effect you) [at the end of school we met with all our students/teachers]
• Work in a Small Group (each person added to the group doubles the amount of time it takes to make a decision. ex: 6 people for Trade School, but really 3 people plus students/teachers

A creative education

Last week I was eager to attend the Detroit leg of a cross country expedition led by the Bruce High Quality Foundation and sponsored by Creative Time called Teach 4 Amerika. The premise was/is that art education tends to be limiting rather than expansive, and tends towards the prohibitively expensive. The Bruce High Quality folks have started a school in NY, and their cross country journey (in groovy bus, see image left by Jeffrey Bussmann) is aimed at asking questions around the US in search of ideas and dialogue for an alternate educational model that fosters creativity. Agree.

I had to leave after 2 hours--the conversation may have exploded after that, or it may have stayed mired where it was. Where it was was off track--we didn't get to talk about art education, and instead focused on micro-local issues of whose landlord as good (or evil) why the city makes it hard for artists. The conversation promised did not happen--and maybe what did happen points some fingers towards problems and solutions for creative education.

Effectively, the gathered were the privileged in many ways, who demographically reiterate the prevailing assumptions and media images of the image of the artist as white, well educated middle class---and in the general tenor of the group, they are misunderstood and their good efforts at starting up galleries and parties are not adequately encouraged by the City. The voices heard were products of art school dialogue and discourse, as were the guests. As such, there was little need for expansion, and the conversation became short hand. The few notes of discord left earlier--there were some great comments from educators at CCS and people who worked in other arenas, but as they left, so left that line of inquiry.

What would an ideal creative education in Detroit look like? How could it borrow and build from the assets of the city (and by assets I mean not only cultural institutions, but cultural questions about the role of art in society) and how could it foster art/work/life that is vital and responsive rather than circumscribed or doctrinaire? Stay tuned.

painted walls

It was an unbelievably beautiful afternoon in Detroit, and I had a chance to stroll a bit after picking up mangoes at HoneyBee Market on Bagley (these were for students to carve at Ceasar Chavez Academy--truly delicious edible works of art that attach themselves to many senses, more later on that.)

On the backside of a small cluster of short buildings on Michigan Avenue, I found these painted walls (see above) which triggered all sorts of memories for me. One was of growing up in a New York City that, at the time, was covered in graffiti (I read recently an analysis of my neighborhood that suggested that neighborhood youths felt powerless and manifested their feelings against an environment that was hostile to them with corresponding hostility. )
The other was of a visit to an alley in Southwest Detroit a few years back that one of the students I currently teach mentioned to me just this past week. While the smell of all that aerosol is hard on the nostrils at times, these painted walls are pretty glorious--visual splendor that seems less hostile and far more welcoming and vibrant than I had remembered.

Redefining Dreamland

Redefining Dreamland by Side Porch productions does a very comprehensive job talking to a whole host of interesting people.
The film is visually quite impressive and gives good face time for a number of talking heads who have great things to say.

Robocop: Detroit's Statue of Liberty, or, Who Decides the Image of a City?

If you saw the movie, then you can skip ahead. If not, in brief, Robocop, made in 1987 around the time of other post-apocalyptic sorts of distopias (all the Mad Max movies, for instance) chronicled a lawless American city featuring the clearly recognizable features of everybody's favorite punching bag, Detroit, and, the title character, an armored law enforcement machine in human form (no C3PO, this humanoid robot had a moral center, but man was he fierce) sent to quell the denizens of the dark and scary city.

Flash forward to 2011, and a small group of irony-clad hipsters seizes upon the idea of a Robocop statue. They raise 50,000 dollars, quite rapidly, through the online micro giving platform, Kickstarter. Push back from Detroiters ranges from bemused to hostile--I'm with the more extreme end of the spectrum for a number of reasons.

It does make one think of numerous other instances where symbolic gifts from outsiders are met with a cool response. A prime example is August Bartholdi's Statue of Liberty, a gift from France to the United States that has come to symbolize the immigrant experience, liberty and a democratic ideal. But this warmth and positive brand image did not come easily. Bartholdi was largely unsuccessful on a cross country US fund raising effort, resorting instead to private contributions from his side of the Atlantic. The shared history and alliance between France and the US (from the resistance to the British and collaboration across the 1776 and 1789 US and French revolutions, parallel human rights doctrines and similar Constitutional rhetoric) did help smooth communication and ultimately the statue was constructed, shipped and set atop her plinth to great public adoration.

So why then, you ask, given this example, am I, lets say lukewarm, about this intended gift? Who asked? I mean, who asked for it? The image of the city of Detroit, as painted by outside media, as a lawless urban zone, is not without its points of truth. Ask anyone living on the lower East Side, or in Brightmor, or Del Ray, and they'll tell you a police officer is hard to come by, and that, yes, the environment can be harsh at times. All the more reason that detached irony and quick money to celebrate it is a less than appropriate response. The velocity at which the money raised is inversely proportional to the appropriateness of the gesture--and extends the legacy of patronage and paternalism that privileged segments of our society continue to use with abandon.

The other parallel I think of comes from Philadelphia. When I graduated from college, I had one of my first jobs working at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. I also worked as a doorman at a hotel to support myself while I worked at my job at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. On my first day, a tour bus pulled up to the front of the museum and disgorged its passengers who ran up the stairs to the front door. I could not believe what I was seeing--people so excited to visit the Museum that they ran. And then they stopped, turned to the city, pumped their fists like Sylvester Stallone in Rocky, and ran back down. A few years back, Sylvester Stallone had this likeness of himself cast in bronze. He offered this to the city, to place at the top of the steps of the Museum. His request was at first denied, later granted, as civic culture bowed to popular culture.


But by this point, Philadelphia did not need Rocky's brawn to save it. Detroit needs plenty of things--better schools, better transportation, services for the people who live and work there. These are the lives and images and faces and voices who should make an image of the city. That would be a fine use for the quick cash. For now, I am a big fan of Robert Graham's massive Joe Louis fist down by Hart Plaza.



For more, check the Facebook page for Detroit Does not Need a Robocop Statue:


http://preview.tinyurl.com/4gfbsga

If you're not a facebooker, this is a great piece from
Crain's Detroit Business

many cities

Over the past month I've been spending time in two distinctly different parts of the city. Brightmor in the northwest, and Southwest Detroit in, well, Southwest Detroit. In both places I have the great fortune to work with remarkable people associated with schools--in Brightmor the gentle utopian, Bart Eddy, at Detroit Community School (a charter school founded on Waldorf principles of holistic education) and in Southwest with Juan Martinez, principal of Ceasar Chavez Academy.

The image above is of the Hickey House, a homestead/garden I'll write more about in the next few months.

I'm trying to parse out an outline for how I'd like to attend to the realization my time working in these neighborhoods has afforded. In short, it is that the vastness of the City of Detroit, which I had previously described in geographic terms (139 square miles, NYC, Boston and San Francisco could fit within etc etc) has a vast social dimension.

More soon