Kate Sutton came to town recently for New York-based Artforum to cover Culture Lab Detroit, a three-day festival celebrating the city’s creative output. Visiting a variety of the city's offerings, she got an earful. And an eyeful.
Before this trip, I had never heard anyone use the word “blight” in conversation, but over the course of four days last week, I heard it repeatedly, as if locals were on implicit damage control, determined to set the terms for how the city’s admittedly dramatic history gets told. After all, these are people used to dealing with tourists who just want to see the derelict train station [Full disclosure: I really wanted to see the derelict train station.]* Now, however, another kind of backlash is looming against terms like “creative place-making.”
“Cass Avenue is starting to look like Royal Oak,” gallery owner George N’Namdi declared later. He was mid-debate with curator Ingrid LaFleur over whether or not the city’s recent transformation fell under the rubric of “gentrification” or “colonization.” N’Namdi’s own complex—the N’Namdi Center for Contemporary Art, replete with a gallery space, conference facilities, a gift shop, library/wine bar, and a killer vegetarian restaurant—is impressively settled a few blocks from the Cass Corridor. “There’s not gentrification in terms of physical displacement, but there is a psychological gentrification we should be concerned about. These new developments are rendering the local population powerless, symbolically,” N’Namdi argued.
“The real problem is, when we show the blight in Detroit, it’s always in an African American context. When we talk about change, however, it’s only about 10 percent African American. Just look at all these visualizations of what the city is supposed to look like in the future. They might just be projections, but everyone is white.” LaFleur concurred. “We understand that change is going to happen, but we have an opportunity to curate our city and we’re not taking it.”
*Sutton eventually saw the train station.
