An Origin Story: the Detroit Institute of Arts

 

I was born in Detroit.  

 

Although I left there almost fifty years ago and the house I was raised in has been out of the family for decades, I still think of the place as home.  As Neil Young said, of “a town in north Ontario:” “All my changes were there.”  In my case, not all, but many, the typical changes one might experience by the age of twenty-two.  When I go back to Detroit, at least once a year, it’s to see the people. But two places, sacri loci, my sacred places, call me back: Sacred Heart on the corner of Military and Michigan Avenue where I went to school and mass and the Detroit Institute of Arts where I experienced the wonder of art for the first time.  On this recent trip COVID dashed most of my plans, but I did make it to the DIA. 

Though I had tested negative for days I was tired and spent more than a few minutes sitting on a bench in the Great Hall, an enormous room, mostly empty, that leads to another great hall that houses Diego Rivera’s Detroit Industry Murals.  I’ve never seen the DIA overly crowded the way the Met and the Art Institute of Chicago always are.  This despite that admission is free for residents of three counties.  As I sat there I watched the families taking advantage of this great gift.

From my seat at the bench I see a young girl, six years old maybe, a waif who has escaped her parents and sister.  She is attired in a faded print dress over colorful, albeit dingy, tights.  She is skipping down the center of the hall.  Suddenly she stops and stares at the art high on the wall. She is literally transfixed, awestruck, the thing on the wall has stopped her in her tracks. 

            The thing on the wall looks like an enormous piece of fabric, textile, a kind of Golden Fleece. But actually it is composed of aluminum bottle tops and copper wire. It’s called “Amemo (Mask of Humankind)” and was made by a Ghanaian artist, El Anatsui.  Foe scale: if it were squared it would be about 25 feet by 25 feet.

            I am grateful to have observed this epiphanic moment.  Later I pointed the child out to my wife. Cute little ragamuffin, she said.

 

The first time I went to the DIA I was with John McInerney (with whom I would share a lifelong friendship.) I remember being stunned, my ragamuffin-in-awe moment, to see Frederic Church’s “Syria by the Sea,” an enormous painting of dramatic golden light and ruins. It’s still in the collection, but somewhat overwhelmed by another smaller, more famous, Church painting  “Cotopaxi,” which was added to the collection in 1976 five years after our first visit.  Cotopaxi is also full of light and fire, kind of portrait of the earth being born.  Aside: at some time in the last decade John made an attempt to climb Cotopaxi, turned back, as I recall, by altitude sickness.

 

A work I had never seen before was “Family Album (Blood Objects) Exhibit F: Shirt, 1993, Yoko Ono, American; bronze with blue and red patina, on hanger.” I should first state that I was never really a Beatles fan, and certainly not a Yoko Ono fan.   But inarguably Beatles’ music would be feature hugely in the soundtrack of my life. As with Kennedy’s assassination and the Challenger debacle, I remember clearly where I was when I heard the news that John Lennon had been murdered. 

This sculpture is a facsimile of the denim shirt Lennon was wearing when he was shot, complete with bullet holes and blood.  At first I thought it was the actual shirt, then I thought no, a kind of copy. I was stunned to realize it was made of bronze.  I would have sworn it was cloth.

Looking around for a potential witness and seeing none, I actually, furtively, touched it. Bronze.  It was like touching the hem of saint’s gown.  Incredible. 

 

Finally, I made my way to the Rivera room. If you’ve never seen this, I recommend a visit to Detroit for this sole purpose.  The murals, 27 of them, fill four walls of a large room, so that when you stand in the center it’s as if you have been absorbed into Rivera’s universe.  Rivera painted these in 1932–’33, financed controversially by Edsel Ford. It’s hard to summarize as its messages are many: a celebration of the worker, a critique of capitalism and the war machine, an alert to the poisoning of the environment. It contains multitudes, as Whitman would have had it.

A large part of my love for these murals has to do with the fact that I, like the factory workers Rivera portrayed, worked at “the Rouge,” or, more precisely, Ford’s Dearborn Stamping Plant, at the time the largest factory in the world. My job on the assembly line was similar to the one portrayed here:

 

I operated a spot-welding machine.  It was mind-numbingly repetitive and dangerous work. With every weld a stream of sparks, much like the ones Rivera painted, shot out from the weld points, once nearly blinding me and more than once lighting my hair afire. At the time I was not yet conscious of living inside the Riveraian universe, but when I look at the murals now they seem highly personal.  

With the money I made on the assembly line I travelled to Mexico City (the Rivera murals were not part of this decision-making process yet) where I gathered material for a book that I, for some unfounded reason, thought I would write and where I discovered Rivera in his homeland. I did not write that book. But decades later I would write a novel that was set in Mexico City in which the main character inspired by the Industry Murals is a student researcher studying Rivera’s works. The murals function as the occasion that launches the plot of the story.

 

On this visit I focus on the scene, high on the east wall, of an unborn infant in utero, being nourished by the earth. That’s me, I thought, I was born here.