Powering Through Detroit’s Many –isms

CHICAGO — This morning at a café in a gentrified neighborhood of Chicago, I sat reading Facebook on my iPhone and came across yet another story relating to Detroit, the city frequently cited for its riches-to-poverty story. This one was posted on the blog of Rania K. Halek, and outlines the story of young Renisha McBride, a 19-year-old black woman who was shot dead in the predominantly white suburb of Dearborn Heights. It was 2:30am on a Saturday morning, and she had just gotten into a car accident. Her cell phone was dead, so she knocked on a stranger’s door to ask for help. She posed no threat, and her death is a horrific, fear-based and completely outrageous and senseless act of violence.

This crime now has Detroit attached to it, and with it comes the added stigma of what happens to a once-thriving city whose dreams have been deferred, decimated and is currently in the process of being rebuilt. What is Detroit like, and why has it become one of the sensitive points of national American media? In part two of a two-part conversation with Gina Reichert of Power House Productions, an artist-run nonprofit that works to develop and implement neighborhood stabilization strategies in Detroit, we go further into taking down the knee-jerk Detroitisms and what it is like to be part of the long-term process of regrowth.

Alicia Eler: How do you deal with the Detroit?

Gina Reichert: It can wear on you … there’s a love hate relationship with it, but I think that’s how it’s been for every city I’ve lived in. I felt that way in NYC — there’s a trade off. In Detroit it’s a different set of trade-offs. Yes there is crime, poverty and you see it. . . that exists in every city, but it might not be in a neighborhood where you live. It reminds me more of New Orleans — usually a street or a block away from each other. You make a choice about whether you can walk down that street or not. Here you can’t get away from it unless you move to the suburbs. I have neighbors who are definitely living in poverty; there are people who live simply, and that’s because they’re saving for college.

Detroit is not a consumer-based culture, as a city. There’s something else that drives people here — family, land, art, music. The consumer culture is definitely in the suburbs, whereas in New York City it’s all kind of on top of each other. It’s easier to not spend money here. The biggest reason that I made a conscious decision to stay here is because of what you get if you stay. You get different kind of opportunities. You might not get a high paying office job, but what I do have is time and space to figure things out for myself. To me it’s this weird luxury. We have bills — the mortgage and lots of other stuff like car insurance. But that’s not what drives our decisions. We’ve been self-employed for eight years because we don’t have these economic pressures that I would have if I was trying to live a similar lifestyle in NYC. The biggest trade-off is time, space and opportunity — which you get if you live here and make certain decisions.

AE: How did you make this work for you, in Detroit?

GR: Mitch and I quit our day jobs and started doing our own work. Started working together as Design99, and then we quickly realized we didn’t want to be the only people int his area doing this. The families and residents in this neighborhood, so we thought let’s start finding friends who are interested in doing similar things and started soliciting our friends to move to the neighborhood. What can we do — quality of life issues and creativity, trying to create a live/work environment. That’s when we started the non-profit Power House Productions. We have the Ride It Sculpture Park, community performing arts center Playhouse, Skate House, Squash House, and a group of artists tied directly through them. So that’s how it came to be.

We didn’t want to do it alone, partly for our own sanity and the longevity of the work — it’s a hard existence if you’re testing out what do you do there. Things get more stable every time someone initiates a new project — helping do work that we want to initiate and get them involved. We don’t have any input into this — then we find out about something that happened down the street that opened up other people and other networks.

AE: So what’s it like when high-brow NYC art world types show up to the Ride It Sculpture Park that you’ve been working on, which we talked about in the other interview? There’s this clash of people in the neighborhood and those coming in from outside of the city.

GR: People who come to the park as a destination spot would cross paths with people who come to the park as their own backyard. [I saw these] meaningful moments between people who would not otherwise meet or cross paths. There are kids from the suburbs and kids from the city going to do the same thing, and learning from each other.

[I also saw these] weird social interactions. There’s Anne Pasternak from Creative Time, and someone from the Warhol Foundation — these high-brow NY art people come through the neighborhood. We’re on the art route. It’s always weird to see these art people out on the street … we like it when that happens, and we like when people engage the neighbors. We want them to have that convo with the neighbors about what they think.

Last spring we had a fundraiser called Good Wood, which was hosted by Chiipss Skate Shop, both at their Hamtramck storefront location and online. We asked people from Juxtapoz and other places, we put together a list of 100 artists and we gave everyone a blank skate deck and asked them to customize it. Matthew Barney made one deck as well.

AE: Do you see this project moving toward an art district? 

GR: No, not in a traditional way — not locating projects too close to one anther. There’s this neighborhood integration; if there’s a project house or two on a block, and the rest is residential, that is partly so there is never a boundary between where it starts and stops. [In that way], people really never feel like they are inside or outside. [We are thinking about] resources and impact; if there’s a block that seems it could go either way it could easily get worse, we could find a vulnerable property in that neighborhood, and activate it with a project or cultural space. That goes a long way to stabilize the block. It moves away the negative. It is a conscious strategy to not try to not ever feel like you are entering or leaving an arts district — it ismore about a mesh network and critical mass. It is about being more strategic.

To read part one of the conversation, check out “A Skate Park as Neighborhood Stabilization in Detroit.”