Metrotimes

May 23-29, 2001

 

Drowning MONA

 

Evidencing a reverse spin on the lemming-like “manifest destiny” which compels so many metro residents and businesses to push father away from the city (to the point where places like Howell and Flint become suburbs of Detroit), gallery owners have packed up their canvases and swum upstream.  They’re trundling southbound on I-75, and setting up shop in various locales in and around the core of downtown.  The latest (but by no means last) entry in the downtown gallery gold rush is the Museum of New Art (dubbed MONA), making the move from downtown Pontiac to the spacious second floor of the historic book building.  The Book has an easily recognizable profile on the Detroit skyline due to a number of revenue-generating communication dishes affixed to its upper echelons.  The MONA space is around 10,000 square feet of wide-open, far-reaching territory, with floor-to-ceiling windows running a long block of Washington Boulevard.

            Given the slightly unfinished edgy feeling, and the capacious loftlike setting, one could almost picture this as an art-snoid filled SoHo gallery show.  Except when you look out the window at the abandoned buildings nearby and the rather nonexistent activity on the street below, and you remember, “oh, right Detroit.”  The opening on Saturday night featured a silent auction of works of works donated form artists across the globe, including 15 New York artists rounded up by graffiti specialist John “Crash” Matos.

            According to those involved, approximately three-fourths of the 200 works were sold, generated around $30,000 for the MONA.  The MONA, as local provocateurs will recall, is headed up by director Jef Bourgeau, the First Amendment poster child who once had his Detroit Institute of Arts exhibit squelched by fresh-on-the-job DIA Director Graham W.J. Beale, eliciting howls of censorship in the process.  But that’s so last millennium, so let’s just bury the hatchets, as well as the naked bathtub deities, and move forward.

            The MONA is a contemporary art space.  The DIA has been giving that relatively short shrift for some time, and it would no doubt behoove Beale and company to link up with Bourgeau, while in the process helping to rejuvenate the downtown “necklace” district of Detroit.  Spotted wandering the MONA was architect Michael Poris, Detroit cultural-affairs czarina Marilyn Wheaton, CPOP gallery’s Mary Harrison and Tom Thewes Jr., former 2 South gallery curator Billy Hunter, celebrated photographer Balthazar Korab and former chief curator at the DIA Jan van der March, also a MONA board member.  In fact, I suspect that the majority of the people in attendance were MoNA board members, judging by the number of nametags floating about.  Music was provided by DJ/Majestic Café bartender/friend-of-urban-green-space Emily O’Reilly as well as assorted Immigrant Suns.  All in all, the MONA is a much-needed infusion of culture in the downtown Detroit environs, particularly on Washington Boulevard, which hasn’t seen this much excitement since they put up that ugly, rarely functioning, Erector set water contraption (get it?…drowning MONA? Oh, that’s rich).