A few weeks ago, the Grand Rapids Art Museum opened a new and exciting new exhibition, Cities In Transition, a multidisciplinary exhibition complete with a summer’s worth of fresh programming involving film, archival imagery, factory plans and even a special field trip to Detroit to visit some of the most exciting art spaces, all the while doing so with an eager eye on how we learn to understand and approach urban environments within our state.
At our publication, we've spent a lot of time examining the changing urban landscape from Grand Rapids to Detroit, Michigan's largest city.
Detroit is a city that has received a lot of attention over the past couple years but under the skilled eye of urban photographer Andrew Moore, we get a chance to visit Detroit in a way that is unlike any other project the artist has created.
As we, as a nation, go through a transition in almost every area of our lives, no other North American city has been the harbinger of our inner angst over change.
And while a lot of photographers have taken images from cities like Detroit in the form of ruin porn, Detroit's buildings, neighborhoods and open spaces via Andrew Moore's large-scale photographs really ask us to give pause as he captures one chapter of this story. And again, if you land only at the ruin,s then you are missing the whole story that is being written daily in this city that was once referred to as the Paris of the Americas.
Moore has made a career since the 1980s when he left his Connecticut home to venture to New York where he began with a series of photos about the South Street Seaport project underway just a few steps from his residence.
Over the next 30 years, Moore would travel to places like Bosnia, New Orleans and even the Middle East in the hopes of capturing the different stages or dissections of a city -- a place always in some form of transition.
Barbara Tannenbaum, curator of photography at the Cleveland Museum of Art (while at the Akron Art Museum), organized the “Detroit Disassembled” show and addressed the GRAM’s patrons at the launch of Cities In Transition a few weeks ago.
Moore’s prints she shared at the time reminded us of artist Piranesi’s spectaularly huge 18th-century prints of the Roman ruins, as well as Caspar David Friedrich’s 19th-century oil paintings of crumbling churches.
“Artistically, they’re very important in the way that they combine the almost romantic sense of horror with beauty,” Tannenbaum said in a 2011 New York Times story on this collection. “That dissonance between the beauty and the sense of waste and destruction and decay leads you to really consider not just the situation of Detroit, but to put them in a larger context of the rise and fall of civilizations, the relationship between human endeavors to build and nature’s ability to overwhelm and overcome.”
Thursday’s appearance by Moore will be his only Michigan appearance. For fans of photography or Detroit, this collection, along with a chance to hear from the artist’s lips the story of its creation and meaning, is as rare as the moment we live in. It is here for the moment, and then it is gone. It is how we act in the transition of our time before us that makes all the difference and sometimes is our only chance to be a part of the story. Moore has captured one moment, but it is definitely not the end.
For many, as the GRAM has shown through the speaker series, Moore’s images are just one point in our time.
Moore will be signing copies of his book, Detroit Disassembled, at 6:30 p.m., then speaking in a cook auditorium at 7 p.m. The price of admission includes the a new multilevel gallery show, featuring a look at Grand Rapids’ history including our very own Maya Lin sculpture park, Rosa Parks Circle, which just celebrated 10 years. It is quite a moving exhibition that is sure to spark dialog and discussion all summer long.
Admission: $5. non-members / Free for members
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