Visit to Detroit

Blighted Home

American Flag painting on bodega's wall reflecting on Car

Cultural anthropology lured me to Detroit. My visit inspired by "ruin porn," photographic images of the deserted industrial landscape and my interest in the fading of The American Dream made Detroit fertile ground for a visual exploration. The blight in Detroit is the result of neglect and abandonment, not a natural disaster or flood triggered by crumbling infrastructure as was the case in New Orleans. As jobs in Detroit's automobile factories dried up, the city started its descent from bustling metropolis to industrial wasteland. Today Detroit is on the brink of financial collapse. Miles and miles of blighted neighborhoods overpower pockets of urban renewal that include hip restaurants, community gardens and an active art scene. 

Fischer Factory

 The Packard automative Plant has become a Mecca for graffiti artists and a tourist attraction. It is slated to be torn down in the summer of 2012. The natives, however, won't believe it until it happens; many blighted buildings have been set for demolition yet remain standing. Inside the sprawling compound where General Motors once spewed out cars is an environment in flux. The compound's structures are in various states of decay. Floor after floor in building after building, artwork covers the walls. Wind and the echoing voices of people exploring the ruins rustle through the empty spaces.

A bright spot in the landscape is the Heidelberg Project, a folk art installation that takes up two city blocks. Artist Tyree Guyton started the Project in 1986, using  homes, some habitable and some not, as his canvas. You come upon the Project as you're driving through East Detroit, a particularly tough part of the city. The brightly painted homes are a breath of fresh air, a sharp contrast to the nearby burnt-out structures and lots full of debris. The lots within the Project are hull of paintings on panels and playful sculptures, some made of stuffed animals. 

During my visit to Detroit I got a dose of local politics. People were talking about the fact that Detroit may become one of the first major American cities to be governed by an emergency manager, essentially privatizing all public services and taking away the citizens' vote in any decisions about the city's future. Emergency managers have been appointed in other Michigan cities, with unfavorable results. What happens in Detroit next will set a precedent for other American cities that have fallen on hard times. Will failing cities be on the action block for corporate takeover, or will they be given a chance to reinvent themselves, a longtime American tradition?

Check out my story and photo slide show on the Atlantic's website  
and set of photos on Flickr

Upstairs in Lee Plaza

Chase bank/ Blighted home

Plackard Plant

Occupy Detroit Protest against Bank of America

Upstairs inside the Placard Plant

Installation of Exhibition At AVA in New Hampshire and new publication

My exhibition with Ann McGarrell opened on May 30th and was well received. Ann and I will be on Vermont Public television. I will post a link to the TV spot once it is posted on Utube. The objects i rescued from homes slated for destruction in New Orleans last year, reverberated in the gallery once they were on packed and placed on pedestals complimenting my photos and Ann's Poem.Check out a book that combines photos and poetry from the exhibition Revenants: A New Orleans Reliquary. Post-Katrina Photographs by Julie Dermansky with Poems by Ann McGarrell at AVA Gallery and Art Center from May 30 - June 28, 2008. . The book is 9 by 7 inches, soft cover, 40 pages with 26 color plates. The book can be purchased directly from blurb's web site  at it costs 29.95. you can check out 15 sample pages.

In Revenants: A New Orleans Reliquary, Post-Katrina Photographs by Julie Dermansky with Poems by Ann McGarrell, the collaboration between a visual artist and a writer offers us an occasion to reflect on the tragedy of New Orleans on a personal and emotional level. Over a year after Hurricane Katrina struck, Dermansky began a series she continues to revisit today. The work in the book was shot between November 2006 and March 2008. Dermansky began documenting Katrina’s tragic aftermath block by block when she discovered that New Orleans has been left in a state of devastation and decay. Writer Ann McGarrell, a longtime observer of New Orleans’s pleasures and menaces, was inspired by Julie Dermansky’s work and set about crafting the poems that grew into this collaborative book and accompanying exhibition Ann McGarrell is a writer and translator whose poems and essays have appeared in American and British magazines since the 1960s. Her poetic collaboration with the painter Jack Beal, Flora, was published in 1990. In 2003, she was the recipient of a Bogliasco Fellowship in Literature, and her translation of Vittoria Ronchey’s The Face of Isis received the 1997 PEN/Renato Poggioli award for best translation from the Italian. She lives in Newbury, Vermont, with her husband, the painter James McGarrell, whose lifelong devotion to New Orleans and its music is, along with Julie Dermansky’s powerful photographs, one of the sources of her Revenants poems.