Session Title
How Detroit Built My Aesthetic
Start Date
4-10-2012 1:15 PM
End Date
4-10-2012 2:45 PM
Session Description
My upbringing in Detroit, Michigan has played a significant role in my creative process and work ethic. In my drawings, paintings and installation projects, the Detroit Aesthetic is always present. My work is a visual recording of my origins and the consequential layering of my life experiences. I use the Jeep Grand Cherokee (built in Detroit) as a theme and it bridges my exile to the Deep South with my childhood memories in a once glorious industrial giant.
Detroit is a unique city with a rich and complicated history that dominated the 20th century. Currently, the city is a platform of
conversations in 21stcentury urban design, urban renewal, sustainability, contemporary art and music. As a Detroit visual artist, I have lived several years outside the state of Michigan and I maintain a close connection with the city. I would like to hear from other studio artists, designers, scholars and educators with a tie to Detroit. How has Detroit developed, challenged, enhanced or expanded your aesthetic? How does the city manifest itself into your studio/scholarly processes? What role does the city play in your current creative practices?
Presenters:
Melissa Vandenberg
“Fight or Flight: A Detroiter’s Aesthetic”
Eastern Kentucky University
It wasn’t until I left Detroit that I understood I belonged to Detroit. I grew up in one of the many innocuous suburbs, followed by an undergraduate education downtown. Preceding my undergraduate experience, I spent most of my free time throughout high school petitioning friends to drive my camera and I into the city. However, Detroit made my family before it made me as an artist. The blue-collar work ethic established within the paternal side of the family still plays a role not just in my studio practice, but has informed the way I now teach.
Detroit maintains a steadfast diversity within the arts and has a prevailing aesthetic unlike any other rust belt giant. The simultaneously waxing and waning metropolis has informed my two and three-dimensional works through its industry, assembly lines, decay, artifacts, reclamation, appropriation, graffiti, ‘ruin’ porn and riots, followed by a mass exodus of people since 1943. Also noteworthy is the influence Motown, electronic music, Art Deco architecture, Zug Island and the old Train Station had on many of my generation. Detroit’s perpetual cycle of deterioration and renaissance is both optimistic and realistic. This multiplicity grounds my aesthetic and forms my central motivation as an artist.
Whitney L. Sage
“Intimate Distance: Negotiating the Urban/Suburban Divide”
Recent MFA Graduate/Independent Scholar
As a native of Farmington Hills, a suburb thirty minutes outside of Detroit, I have always had a peculiar relationship with the city. As a child I visited Detroit often for family outings to the DIA and Tiger Stadium. Hours later we would be driving on I-96 returning west. All of my early memories of Detroit are happy and warm, however they are seen through the rose-colored glass of wide cultural and geographic separation from the city. In this way, my artwork, which discusses Detroit’s past and present through literal representation, radiates nostalgia and expresses both a sense of intimacy as well as separation. These three characteristics are always present within my art, though sometimes unconsciously, regardless of the thematic content of any one specific piece. In my recent work images of Detroit buildings are intimately created through the use of hand-made, domestic processes like quilting and embroidering, though distant through the depiction of architectural exteriors that maintain space between the seer and the building itself. Detroit and identity are major themes within my art and as a result, my suburban relationship with the city serves as both content and an obstacle in my everyday artistic practice.
Deborah Sukenic
“Evidence”
Chicago Public Schools
The landscapes, architecture and environment of Detroit and its suburbs are the foundations for my earliest memories. My paintings examine the relationship between remembered experiences and what was observable. The contrast between the new suburbia of the 1960s-70s, the mysterious gritty city of Detroit, personified feelings of isolation, emptiness and searching that I had growing up. In my early paintings, I expressed this dynamic through images of anonymous, uninhabited interiors and exteriors.
Overtime, the content of my paintings have become more specific, revealing an identity unique to the Detroit area. This imagery includes homes, places and objects that are linked with specific moments of my life. The paintings are structured to emphasize the ever-changing and fleeting moments that memories embrace by forming differentiated compartments for each image. Overlapping varied collaged materials that act to deepen the boundaries and dualities inherent in memory enhance this. Therefore, my paintings not only reveal my personal stories, they also reflect the architecture, objects and landscapes of the Midwest. My paintings are the evidence of my history and Detroit is the vehicle for my narratives.
How Detroit Built My Aesthetic
My upbringing in Detroit, Michigan has played a significant role in my creative process and work ethic. In my drawings, paintings and installation projects, the Detroit Aesthetic is always present. My work is a visual recording of my origins and the consequential layering of my life experiences. I use the Jeep Grand Cherokee (built in Detroit) as a theme and it bridges my exile to the Deep South with my childhood memories in a once glorious industrial giant.
Detroit is a unique city with a rich and complicated history that dominated the 20th century. Currently, the city is a platform of
conversations in 21stcentury urban design, urban renewal, sustainability, contemporary art and music. As a Detroit visual artist, I have lived several years outside the state of Michigan and I maintain a close connection with the city. I would like to hear from other studio artists, designers, scholars and educators with a tie to Detroit. How has Detroit developed, challenged, enhanced or expanded your aesthetic? How does the city manifest itself into your studio/scholarly processes? What role does the city play in your current creative practices?
Presenters:
Melissa Vandenberg
“Fight or Flight: A Detroiter’s Aesthetic”
Eastern Kentucky University
It wasn’t until I left Detroit that I understood I belonged to Detroit. I grew up in one of the many innocuous suburbs, followed by an undergraduate education downtown. Preceding my undergraduate experience, I spent most of my free time throughout high school petitioning friends to drive my camera and I into the city. However, Detroit made my family before it made me as an artist. The blue-collar work ethic established within the paternal side of the family still plays a role not just in my studio practice, but has informed the way I now teach.
Detroit maintains a steadfast diversity within the arts and has a prevailing aesthetic unlike any other rust belt giant. The simultaneously waxing and waning metropolis has informed my two and three-dimensional works through its industry, assembly lines, decay, artifacts, reclamation, appropriation, graffiti, ‘ruin’ porn and riots, followed by a mass exodus of people since 1943. Also noteworthy is the influence Motown, electronic music, Art Deco architecture, Zug Island and the old Train Station had on many of my generation. Detroit’s perpetual cycle of deterioration and renaissance is both optimistic and realistic. This multiplicity grounds my aesthetic and forms my central motivation as an artist.
Whitney L. Sage
“Intimate Distance: Negotiating the Urban/Suburban Divide”
Recent MFA Graduate/Independent Scholar
As a native of Farmington Hills, a suburb thirty minutes outside of Detroit, I have always had a peculiar relationship with the city. As a child I visited Detroit often for family outings to the DIA and Tiger Stadium. Hours later we would be driving on I-96 returning west. All of my early memories of Detroit are happy and warm, however they are seen through the rose-colored glass of wide cultural and geographic separation from the city. In this way, my artwork, which discusses Detroit’s past and present through literal representation, radiates nostalgia and expresses both a sense of intimacy as well as separation. These three characteristics are always present within my art, though sometimes unconsciously, regardless of the thematic content of any one specific piece. In my recent work images of Detroit buildings are intimately created through the use of hand-made, domestic processes like quilting and embroidering, though distant through the depiction of architectural exteriors that maintain space between the seer and the building itself. Detroit and identity are major themes within my art and as a result, my suburban relationship with the city serves as both content and an obstacle in my everyday artistic practice.
Deborah Sukenic
“Evidence”
Chicago Public Schools
The landscapes, architecture and environment of Detroit and its suburbs are the foundations for my earliest memories. My paintings examine the relationship between remembered experiences and what was observable. The contrast between the new suburbia of the 1960s-70s, the mysterious gritty city of Detroit, personified feelings of isolation, emptiness and searching that I had growing up. In my early paintings, I expressed this dynamic through images of anonymous, uninhabited interiors and exteriors.
Overtime, the content of my paintings have become more specific, revealing an identity unique to the Detroit area. This imagery includes homes, places and objects that are linked with specific moments of my life. The paintings are structured to emphasize the ever-changing and fleeting moments that memories embrace by forming differentiated compartments for each image. Overlapping varied collaged materials that act to deepen the boundaries and dualities inherent in memory enhance this. Therefore, my paintings not only reveal my personal stories, they also reflect the architecture, objects and landscapes of the Midwest. My paintings are the evidence of my history and Detroit is the vehicle for my narratives.
Related Paper(s)
Sage, Whitney L. Intimate Distance: Negotiating the Urban/Suburban Divide (http://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/macaa2012scholarship/4).