The Ride It Sculpture Park is a poured-concrete structure erected this summer between a city alley and the traffic rocketing off the Davison Freeway west of Conant.
Ride It is the brainchild of artists Mitch Cope and Gina Reichert, Kresge fellows and 2012 ArtPrize winners, writes Michael Hodges in the Detroit News.
With money raised by auctioning artist-painted skateboards, $15,000 from the National Endowment for the Arts and $250,000 from the national nonprofit ArtPlace, the skateboard park is their latest effort to harness art to rebuild a distressed corner of Detroit.
"We live here and art is what we know," Cope told Hodges, "so we use that as a tool to improve the basic situation."
Their approach is the polar opposite of gentrification, which often seeks to displace original residents. Instead, Power House Productions, a nonprofit Reichert and Cope founded, aims to re-animate the neighborhood, fill up empty houses, and encourage residents to stay.
The skateboard park is just the first phase. Next summer, Cope said, they'll double its size with embedded sculpture by local artists and a green space. Eventually skateboarders will be able to zip down the alley and vault through an abandoned house they have acquired. Can a skate park really rescue a neighborhood on the skids?
