Cass Corridor Artists. Oral History Project

Transcription

1 MIRO, INTERVIEW 1 Cass Corridor Artists Oral History Project Interviewee: Marsha Miro Interviewer: Hilary Maurin Date of Interview: April 21, 2010 Location: Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (MOCAD), Detroit, MI Maurin: We are here at MOCAD [Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit] in Detroit, and this is Hilary Maurin interviewing Marsha Miro on Wednesday afternoon the 21 st of April So, just to start, I guess we can talk a little bit about your background, where you were born, where you grew up, and what your education was. Miro: Sure. I was born here, at Hutzel Hospital, and grew up here, went to James Vernor Elementary School, and Mumford High School, and then I went to University of Michigan. And I got my bachelor s at Michigan, and then I got my Master s at Wayne State University, in art history. My Bachelor s was a major in Political Science and a minor in Art History. So, that s my training. Maurin: How did you choose to get your education in art history, how did you choose that major?

2 MIRO, INTERVIEW 2 Miro: Well, I was at University of Michigan and for my junior year I went to London, to the London School of Economics, and they didn t have junior year programs in those days, so I was part of the regular school, I wasn t kind of in a separate program. And, I got really involved with the students, and protests, and the city, and I spent a lot of time in the museums, and I really got to know the whole scene, the punk scene, it was just starting, but it was really the swinging sixties, and it was -- so The Beatles and Mick Jagger used to come and play in the cafeteria, and it was really such an amazing place to be then. And, I felt like I was much more interested in the arts than I was in the political science, and there were great teachers there, some of the greatest teachers in the world, but, I kind of thought it paled by comparison, all this historical stuff and philosophical stuff, and you know, even though we protest and some of my friends got put in jail cause they were Marxist, and some of them got put in jail cause they were Conservatives, and I just felt like I wanted to be in art, and so I came back to Michigan, and that s how I got my double major. Well, my minor (phone ringing). And I started working in an art gallery when I moved back here, couple years after college, and working on my Master s at Wayne in Art History. It was a very good department at that point, a lot of amazing teachers, Art Schier, and Bernard Goldman, and Wayne Andrews, and I mean they were as good as art historians teaching anywhere in the country, at that point they were great. So it was a great education. Maurin: So were you working at the gallery while you were attending Wayne State? Miro: Mm-hm. It was the Gertrude Kasle Gallery in the Fisher Building --

3 MIRO, INTERVIEW 3 Maurin: Okay. Miro: -- which is a really fine gallery. I was the assistant to the director, the woman who ran it, and got to know some really amazing artists. She showed everybody, from the abstract expressionists, and a lot of great people, and I was just really committed to art. And then I graduated from Wayne and got a job teaching art history at Oakland Community College. Maurin: Okay. Miro: And taught there for a couple years, and we had a recession, and, so I was the youngest, and got thrown out. And there weren t a lot of jobs available then, but there was an opening for the art critic at the Detroit Free Press, and I really felt like the community needed a critical voice, at both newspapers, and even though I was young and wasn t sure what an art critic did, I figured I d learn, I think I learned everything along the way. So, I applied and I got the job, and I stayed as art critic at the Free Press from 1974 til 1995, and I left when we had the strike, the big newspaper strike. And when I left, I was with my friend Susanne Hilberry, who owns a gallery, and we were talking and she really felt we needed a contemporary art museum in the city, and so the two of us started working on MOCAD, and at the same time I was working at Cranbrook. I got a job when I left the Free Press as architectural historian at Cranbrook, and my job was to document all the new architecture at Cranbrook, and there s been some amazing buildings put up. And so, I was doing both at the same time, and I did a movie about the architecture at Cranbrook, and I ve accumulated all kinds of oral histories and interviews and I m halfway through a book about

4 MIRO, INTERVIEW 4 the architecture at Cranbrook. And, the reason I m only halfway is because I stopped to work on MOCAD. And we opened in 1996, but I really started working , I m sorry, but we really started working in earnest, and I stopped at Cranbrook in Maurin: Okay. Miro: Even though it was 1995, we started the idea in 95, and then, finally got it up in Maurin: Wow. Miro: And then I was the founding director here, and helped really establish it with a whole group of wonderful people from the community. And then we hired a person to be the director here, cause I m not a art I m not trained as -- curatorial work or directorial work, obviously, I m a writer. And so, his name is Luis Croquer, and he came and I stopped. And now I m the president of the Board here at MOCAD, and I m back finishing my book at Cranbrook, and working on a number of other books too, and a number of other projects, but that s mainly the story. Maurin: Wow. Miro: (laughing) A lot of years condensed into a few minutes.

5 MIRO, INTERVIEW 5 Maurin: So when you started working for the Free Press, you said there was kind of a lack of art critics in the Free Press and in the Oakland Press at that time, or? Miro: Well, there was one critic at the News [The Detroit News], Joy Hakanson Colby, who was wonderful, but I had a different take on how to be a critic than she did, and I felt like we needed a couple voices. People would come and go at the other newspapers at -- (interruption, tape stops). And there were other people writing around town, but the Free Press was a major forum because we had a circulation of over a million people in those days, and I felt like there needed to be a consistent voice, and when I interviewed, even though I had art historical training, they said that they d be willing to teach me how to be a journalist because they couldn t find any journalists who knew enough about art, so they decided to take that tact. So, that was how I got started in, you know, it was 1974 when I first started writing, and so really, the whole Cass Corridor explosion happened during my a little of it started in when Sam Wagstaff was here, but it really started growing then. And so I was writing about it, consistently, I mean, I would say, at least once or twice a month I wrote a story about an artist involved in that whole movement. And I wrote one story in the Sunday paper, and then a review in the Friday paper, and I did the art calendar with listings in it too. So that was what I did every week. And then if there were news stories, I would write the news stories about art, whatever. Maurin: Could you just describe the scene, I guess, a little bit? The Cass Corridor Artists? And possibly how they fit into the larger Detroit art scene?

6 MIRO, INTERVIEW 6 Miro: Well, what was interesting was that, I think that the city was kind of in turmoil because of the rebellions in 1967, and there were a lot of people who had moved out and the -- it wasn t that safe in the city, but it didn t seem to bother any of the artists, I mean, and it never bothered me either, working at the Free Press all those years. And the artists found these inexpensive places to live on along the Cass Corridor, old -- it was the old, not City Hall, what was it, something like that, god I can t remember, but they were living in the old industrial buildings and they could find inexpensive space, and I think that helped start things because they could live around, most of them went to Wayne State, and then graduated and could live in the area of Wayne, in Cass, and Convention Hall, it was an old convention center where a lot of them lived and had studios. And for very little, they could be there and there was a lot of communication between them because you d live on the Corridor and you d meet each other and you d go to, you know, the Willis Bar, and you d go to all the stuff in the neighborhoods, and then the Willis Gallery opened, and then they had their own gallery space. And there was a really sympathetic curator at the DIA [Detroit Institute of Arts], Sam Wagstaff, he was a brilliant, brilliant man, and he understood that we needed to have artists living in the city and making art here, for this to grow as a culture, that you couldn t just show historical art, but they needed to be of the moment too. And he brought some really interesting things to the museum and he had great faith in some of these artists, he believed in their vision, and he brought collectors to see them and he made the Willis shows really interesting and exciting for people, so you started to have this community growing, or you had the artists living and making art on the Corridor, you had them able to talk to each other and hang out together, you had a space where they could exhibit, and really control the exhibitions, and you had a influential curator who supported them and who brought collectors to them to help support the

7 MIRO, INTERVIEW 7 artists so that they had some manner of living beyond -- (phone ringing) you know all of them had other jobs, but they also had felt some respect for their work. And that to me was what generated this energy and movement and excitement, because the artists felt like they were doing some things that weren t being done other places, that their art was unique to Detroit, because of where they lived and how they felt, and what they experienced. And they had a chance to give the city a voice, which it had never really had as an art center. So, and it was a wild time. I mean, it wasn t really drugs, but it was music, it was the energy with kind of, flight of so many whites to the suburbs, there was this really wonderful relationship between the African American community and the art the people who stayed, the artists in particular, and so there was this kind of wonderful relationship building up and there was also the music scene, was so great and there was a really close relationship between the artists and the musicians at that time and also poets, Ken Mikolowski and Ann Mikolowski were two poets, and Ann was a painter and Ken is a poet, he teaches at U of M [University of Michigan] right now, but they had they did publications called the Alternative Press, I don t know if you ve seen their things. And so, people felt they, you know, there were all these different outlets, and they would bring great poets in and they would meet with the artists and there was a real scene. It was a real art scene that developed because of all those forces. And, you know, the writing was an important part of that too. The critics, Joy and I, and the other people who would write on occasion, because then that voice became more public, out into the world, and it was also a measure for the artists themselves, I mean, if I liked something and I thought it was great, some people agreed with me, some people didn t, but there was discussion about it, and through that discussion you learn and things change and develop and that was also very important to development of the scene.

8 MIRO, INTERVIEW 8 Maurin: I know a lot of your articles, because you wrote for the Free Press, that sometimes your reviews would kind of go out nationally. What kind of feedback did you get from maybe other art critics? Or, you were just talking about getting a wider audience, I guess my question is how do you think on a national or global level did people view the art scene in Detroit? Miro: Well, my articles would go on the Knight Ridder News Wire, which went, you know, when papers wanted to use something, usually it would be if we had a show that was of lesslocal importance, but more national importance, so then they would pick them up and be printed all over the country. But the local reviews usually didn t get printed in other newspapers, but people who were interested in the Detroit scene might pick up another newspaper, might go on microfiche, because in those days there weren t other ways to transmit things, and find them and people would send them to other people, and that was the only way it got transmitted. But, there were curators outside of the area who got to know what was going on, and some of them were interested, some of them weren t, they didn t see the value as we did, to the movement. And so, it got out there, but it didn t get out there with any kind of strength. There was the show at the Guggenheim that Gordie [Gordon Newton] was in, and John Egner, and there were some gallery shows that Gordie was in and Michael Luchs was in. There really wasn t that much, and some of the artists left, and went and lived in New York, and they would bring some of their friends along every so often for an exhibition there, but it one of the tragedies, or at least of the things that I thought was really too bad was that people outside didn t get to know what was going on here because it was a unique voice. And as a figurative abstract expression, abstract movement, there were other people that were doing similar things (phone

9 MIRO, INTERVIEW 9 ringing) in England, and some in New York, but it was a very important movement in the history of art from my perspective, that didn t get credit because we couldn t get it out anywhere. And I think, you know, you see the same thing with the Hairy Who in Chicago, a really important group of Imagist artists who got very little credit for what they did in there finally there was an article in the New York Times a couple weeks ago about one of the artists in that movement from Chicago. When so much art is come since then that was related to what they were doing there, but because they weren t in New York, they never got credit. So, I mean I wish it were more internationally known, but it wasn t. Maurin: Do you think it will be in the future? Miro: I hope so. I mean, I think that as more and more people take a look at Detroit, and that s one reason why starting MOCAD was so important to me, because I felt like we re now a global world. And there s a global consciousness, so you don t find one place dominating as much, like New York did, or Paris did early on, and L.A. is certainly important, but people are looking everywhere now, and they re not diminishing what happened in Brazil in terms of early modernism or you know, Czechoslovakia in terms of the [inaudible], and so and the Chinese traditional painting, and Chinese contemporary painting are really being looked at seriously, and India, and so the whole world is more open to things and I think as people come back and look more specifically, those with some power in -- the more people we get in to MOCAD, which we do on a regular basis, and we kind of, bring them so they know what the Detroit art scene was and that we have this history. The more consciousness you build and awareness of what was

10 MIRO, INTERVIEW 10 important here, in the hopes that people really appreciate it and it gets into the art history books and Detroit doesn t continue to get relegated to wasteland status in the art world. Maurin: Do you see a connection with the art that s happening now in Detroit with the Cass Corridor artists? Miro: I think it, you know, because the Cass Corridor artists really used the city as their palette, both physically and intellectually and conceptually, whether they made their work out of the stuff they found in the city, which artists are doing, or whether they used parts of the destruction of the city or parts of the buildings of the city or the music of the city, the images of the city. I think it established a base, it established a kind of history, and a voice that was truly ours, that artists continue to mime, but in their own way. And I think, you know, again, because things are much less specific now, that people bring influences or look at art that s going on all over the world, and think in their own terms that the inputs come from so many things nowadays that it isn t the same as it might have been. There was a period when there was a, what I would call, a first-generation Cass Corridor artists, and the second-generation, and the third-generation, and some of it was because they lived in the city and worked from the city as the first-generation did, some of it was because they worked in a similar vocabulary and really just added to that vocabulary with their own voice. But now it s just so much, there s so much in terms of information and ideas, and sources and so, it s different. But I always think that history is critical to who we are as a city, because those artists saw where we were going, and unfortunately, we re there, and now we re trying to move past the kind of destruction and decimation that they were living in and recording and talking about and feeling and turning into

11 MIRO, INTERVIEW 11 something constructive. And now we re trying to re-construct from what they saw and build something new, what s left to us. And so, their vision was prophetic in that way, and that s one reason why I always believed in them, and I believe they re important now. People are coming in from Europe, and there s this new book, Detroit Disassembled by Andrew Moore, that just came out and, you know, Gordie and all those guys, Michael and Jim, they were all working in factories. They know more about all that stuff than 10 people put, you know, a hundred people, thousands of people put together because they have lived the whole history, since 67 when things started falling apart. [laughs] Maurin: As an art critic, what was your relationship with the artists? Did Miro: Well, we were friends. You know, it was a small group of people, and all of us were in this together, sort of. I tried to keep my distance, so that I could be objective with my criticism, and when I really believed in somebody s work, I would write positively about it and and when I thought that they were not doing what they should, I tried to be gentle, because I knew them and I didn t want to hurt them, but you have to say it, because that s how they learn and grow. Again, a lot of times they thought I was wrong, probably I was, but a lot of times I think I was also right, so, it was part of the dialogue. I was friends with all of them, I used to go to their studios, we used to have parties together, we d go to the openings, we d go to lectures and there d be groups of us that would all be at the lectures, you know, the galleries. I was a big collector, or I tried to collect, I collected from the very beginning, as I believed in supporting them, I thought it was really important that they had enough money to live and so, I have a nice collection. I bought it because I love the work and I believed in them as

12 MIRO, INTERVIEW 12 artists. And, you know, I think I did okay keeping all those lines from blurring, but it wasn t easy and I probably might have stepped over the line, but I did it all with the right instincts in my heart, to be supportive and try and help [inaudible] to develop this local art scene. Maurin: Do you feel that because you had kind of that inside view of things that really, as you said -- it seems that you had this passion for the art that really helped you in your role as an art critic. I know you said you kind of had to walk a couple different lines there, but it seems that because you did have a view on what was going on, that you were able to express it in your reviews. Miro: I hope so. Yeah, I did. I bought it because I believed in it too. And, you know, I know a lot of people read what I wrote, but they whether they agree with me again, I don t know, and it didn t necessarily turn into the big support for the artists, but it turned into awareness. I mean, in those days, they sold over a million Free Press papers, on the weekend I think it was a million five, and then you figure how many more people are reading it if one paper goes into each home, so a lot of people read the paper. And they used to like to try and say no one read the art column, but then they did surveys, and they found I had 25 percent of the readership, which then changed the way they treated me, because the only ones who got read higher were the sports pages, no one else I mean the front pages didn t get higher ratings and readings and so, then I would get more front pages on the lifestyle section to write lifestyle stories about artists and art and I kept getting more more inches in the paper. But, you know, I don t know in the end what that meant, but a lot of people did read.

13 MIRO, INTERVIEW 13 Maurin: Is there a particular review or a show that you went to that really has stuck with you, that was just really important and that you felt like you needed to or were they all like that? [laughs] Miro: There were so many shows, you know, and hundreds I could mention, because there were so many, lots of great galleries in those days, and lots of other spaces, alternative spaces, it was just a really strong art community. And the DIA would do wonderful shows, I mean, two of my favorite shows of the DIA did, one was Kick Out the Jams, the Cass Corridor show, there were a lot of mistakes in that show and in the catalog, which bothered me, but, you know, what can you do? At least they did the show and there was a document and that had something about the history of that moment, which was critical because things were getting lost. And then Jan van der Marck, near the end of his tenure, did a show called Interventions, and he invited a number of Detroit and Cranbrook artists to pick a room, work of art, something at the DIA, he was curator of contemporary and modern art there, and intervene in it somehow, work it, transforming it with their work, and there were some really great pieces in that show, some Cass Corridor artists were involved too, a number of them. But, you know, there was a lot of great stuff in those days. I ll never forget Michael Heizer, he s this amazing artist, earth artist, who Sam Wagstaff brought to do the dig on the front lawn of the DIA, with a that was so amazing when they dug up the front lawn, just left that pile of dirt. That was really an eye-opener as to what contemporary artists could do [inaudible]. You know, when you look back historically, it was really one of the most important pieces in the early 1970s, period. It was so significant. So, there s been so many good things. Those are three that stand out.

14 MIRO, INTERVIEW 14 Maurin: I guess Miro: Did you want be talk about the individual artists? A little, I mean Maurin: Sure. [laughs] Miro: -- what I like about their work? Maurin: Sure. [laughs] Miro: And how I --. Are you well, why don t I just pick a few of them Maurin: Okay. Miro: -- because Maurin: There s so many? [laughs] Miro: There s so there s a lot of people. And, just to give you a little sense of how I felt, and how I critiqued and I looked at the work. Gordie s certainly one of them, Gordie Newton s, sort of to me, one of the most important, he and Michael Luchs I think were the most important artists on the Corridor. And I ve written about him so many times, and I still find him a mystery. You can always learn more about what he s thinking and what he s doing. But, I remember

15 MIRO, INTERVIEW 15 some of the first times when I saw his work and he always had this sense of the city and he built, re-built the city over and over again, and tore it down. And, even when he went up north and he lived up north and along the river, he took the life along the river as his subject, and then he embedded that into a whole issue of minerals and oil and gas and how we kind of, are mining our resources and destroying them. And so, he had an abstract structure in the way he painted, but he always put images, powerful, you know, appropriate of the time, and ahead of the time, images into his work. He was one of the first people I know to start thinking about conservation and the Great Lakes. One day I was at a gallery which was in the Fisher Building, called the [inaudible] Gallery, and he brought in some new pieces he had done, and he had just before that he had done these pieces that were bridges, the DIA has one of them, and the -- looked like the city was just and it was made out of like putty and clay, city was just underneath them and they were it was growing up like vegetation growing up to catch the bridge, and then he brought in these glass structures that were very structural, after being very abstract, and they were burnt, totally burnt. And, it was one of the more devastating points in the life of the city, and you felt that he could translate the way events were actually happening into these works of art, whether they were small or big, with such ingenuity and originality. And I had great respect for that, because that was a language where you used political and social commentary that really wasn t being used much in art at that point in the 70s at all, artists were much more (phone ringing) interested, there were minimalists, were very important, there was much less interest in this kind of very topical content, and he was unafraid of it. He was also unafraid of using all kinds of materials, old, new, found, together, sound, imagery, whatever he needed, and that was something that was really important to the Cass Corridor movement, that there were there was still, and it s finally breaking down, these kind of hierarchies in the art world between painting

16 MIRO, INTERVIEW 16 and sculpture and everything else. And nothing else, you know, if you were a painter or sculptor, you were at the top of the heap, but if you used ceramics in your work, and you had some ceramics training, then forget it, you couldn t be a painter or a sculptor. But, the Detroit artists had no compunctions about bringing in poetry and music and there was always this fusion here, of all these things, and Gordie was one of the people who did it, with brilliance, over and over and over again. You know, you would talk to him and he didn t like to talk about his work. He s a recluse, he never sought attention in the art world, his passion for making art is within him, and it s because he has to do it, I mean, he s got these things, he sees, he synthesizes, he turns into art, that he has to keep doing, and he knows art history better than many art scholars, he s not isolated, an outsider artist, any of those labels that people give to people who aren t in the mainstream. And, his art has all the criteria and characteristics of great contemporary art. And so, that was why I always believed in him. And I think that in the beginning, there were times when people felt like maybe the art world outside would recognize his work, for instance, certainly, and it never really happened. But, it didn t stop him, he kept making it, and he makes it to this day and it s just as beautiful and powerful. He was in a show we did here two summers ago, and he did this entrance to the museum. He decided that the entrance wasn t hospitable in the rain and the snow, our doors, so he built a new entrance out of this fiberglass stuff he found, and it was really tall, and he took his inspiration from temples. Historical, like Egyptian temples and religious temples, and all sorts of things that he felt had character and had a presence, so that you would feel like you were walking in something that had some sort of loftiness, like they used to do museums, like the DIA, where you have those stairs you d climb and you re entering this temple of culture. But he interpreted it in a very contemporary, kind of pop way because the structure looked like it would fall apart, but it was wonderful. And the panels were green and

17 MIRO, INTERVIEW 17 cast a green light inside the museum and a green light when you re inside of it, and it felt a little like one of those fishing shacks that fisherman build on the lake when they re fishing, and he also does that. So, he s never ever had any division between this very high art, high culture things, and low culture. He s always meshed them together in his work, and made sense out of the two together in terms and when you were in there, it had this kind of really funny quality, like lots of times we d walk in and be happy it was there because it was pouring out, and you wouldn t get wet, and then you d sit in there and the sound echoed and your body was green and kind of remember that? (interruption, it was funny ) It was funny. It was really funny. And so, the man, here he is, forty years later, still doing really relevant art. And I think that, you know, if you asked him, he would never answer that question, but, from my point of view, the answer is that he just kept to what he believes. He hasn t let anything stop him, and there are really important artists who have been able to maintain their voice over a long period of time, are like that, the passion is too strong, creative instinct is too powerful for them, and this is who they are, and he s one of those people. And I think the other person who I would point out is Michael Luchs. And Michael is, just, a totally different case. He could have been a folk artist, cause education isn t important to him, he s very smart and savvy savvy as a person who lives in the land and knows nature, and knows the world that way, from the natural side. And his sense of animal life, and what it means to human nature laces everything he does. Even though he lived in the Cass Corridor for awhile, he always had a place in the country and he s always lived in the country, he grew up in Ohio, in the country, which was very similar to here. I always think about his house, because it was kinda ramshackle and I don t know how he ever paid for food or anything, and his wife is this wonderful photographer Kathy Brackett Luchs who did the great documentary film about the

18 MIRO, INTERVIEW 18 Cass Corridor [ Work in Progress: Images from Detroit s Cass Corridor]. And you know, he has no teeth left, but he comes in and they don t I think he s not well right now, because he never took care of himself, Gordie always took care of himself. And, Michael was just, he understood, and he could make nature in the manmade, and I think that when you look back at what s happened, what was starting in the city there, is now so clear in the city, is that as the city has disintegrated, it s going back to nature, and Michael s work was always about that. I mean, he did bunnies trapped in old, rusted screens, and bunnies covered in all sorts of things, he did rabbits that had computer bodies, he constantly thought about this intersection, what will happen as the two worlds become more one, and how that can affect our future. And at one point he did these huge paintings of bears, I just loved those paintings, and they had these stars coming out of their hearts, they were like a light, like a divine light, almost like you would see the Madonna has in traditional Christian painting. And it was just this kind of adoration of nature that was in what he was doing. And so, this is kind of the other voice of what these two were talking about, and how they saw the city, and how they understood it. And I could go on and on about all the artists in the Corridor, and if you ever want that too much information, from my point of view, I m happy to do that, but I think those two were really seminal, and there was a lot that came from them, and a lot of other voices that were important in their own way, because they were living here too. Maurin: You know, you ve talked a little bit about, how the artists almost seemed to be, almost prophetic, like they knew the direction the city was headed in, and then here we are. How do you think they knew what was gonna happen --

19 MIRO, INTERVIEW 19 Miro: Well it s a great Maurin: They just saw it? Miro: Yeah. Artists, that s their genius, you know, when you re with really important artists, who have that kind of vision, they can see, and that s why they trust their instinct and they trust their creativity. And I hope, I think our society is moving more in that direction instead of less, instead of everything being a timed test. They re starting to understand that as human beings, we need to cultivate the creative vision, and the insight that that brings. And those two in particular, just were very aware people, and they saw what was happening around them, and they felt it from the first inklings, and this has taken forty years to get here, so, they understood where we were going. I think when you study art history, a lot of important artists see early on what s important, and some of them continue to see, but a lot of times what they see early on in their careers becomes their voice throughout their mature career. They don t see, like these artists haven t seen new things that are happening, their voices were prophetic from the 70s on, and their prophecies are occurring. You can see it everywhere, not just in Detroit now, so I m sure there are other artists who are seeing what will happen in 2030 now, or 2040, who knows, I mean, so much of the technology, and cartooning, and gaming, and intersection of so many kinds of intelligences and all that stuff is the future. But, they understood at that point in time, and so, that was one reason why I always admired them, you know, cause I learned from their vision.

20 MIRO, INTERVIEW 20 Maurin: Why do you think people are still interested in the Cass Corridor artists? I mean, like you said, it s been forty years, why do you think new people that are younger, are still coming back to this group of artists? Miro: Because they are our history. You know, it s like I said about the new art coming out of them, I mean I think that if you look at what happened in Paris, with the Impressionists, it didn t just land there and all of a sudden grow, it had a history. And I think that in the history of American art, these people were prophetic, for the city of Detroit and a lot of other industrial places in this world, because we re moving moved out of the industrial age, and I think that the relevance is undeniable, and if you re a smart young artist today, and you live in this area, and you should know that stuff, because it helps you have a base to grow from, it helps you understand where you can go and find your vision. It s like anything, I mean I think some artists grow without knowing the history of art, they just have this innate vision, and they have these tools that they are born with and that got cultivated. But other people are really observers and commentators of the world, and so that s why you have to go back. And their relevance to me is proven by what they ve done, and why they had to do what they did, so, and I think generations have kept going back, I mean, there are other artists who have gone out into the world who are fairly well known who know the Cass Corridor stuff, and maybe their work isn t Cass Corridor related, but they learned from it. Even Mike Kelley, who is this phenomenal artist, who s world famous, grew up in Detroit, who went to University of Michigan, whose work sells for millions of dollars, we re doing a big piece of his in the back of the museum, I mean, his music came out of Detroit, Destroy All Monsters, the kind of noise band, he was the first noise band, and, a lot of what he did came out of reclaiming things from our history and returning them, turning them into

21 MIRO, INTERVIEW 21 something else. There s a strand of that that already existed, of course, because Picasso did it, and Joseph Cornell did it and this one did it, and that one, but the Detroit people did it in a totally new way, because they came out of abstraction, they didn t come out of, you know, Picasso coming out of Impressionism, or early modernism, so, that s the difference. But, anyway [laughs]. I think it will be relevant because it was important [inaudible] a lot of meaning. Maurin: Is there anything else? Miro: I think that s enough. I mean Maurin: I know there s more, but [laughs] Miro: If you look at the history of what I wrote, I just wrote for so long, I mean, I d be happy to come back, and when you have more information and have learned more about all the different artists, and, if you want my comments on them, I m happy to give them. But now you have a sort of philosophical base, you know where I was coming from Maurin: Yeah, like the general [laughs] Miro: Right. And if you want more specific, just call me, I d be happy, cause I really think the more we gather together, the better that will be. So, it s great that Wayne s doing this and, you know, I m really thrilled.

22 MIRO, INTERVIEW 22 Maurin: Me too. Miro: Thank you. Maurin: Alright, thank you.