I’ve had the opportunity to look behind the curtain and discover how certain galleries operate, and it is a complex business world, often thankless, and often for little (or no) money. The people who run galleries in Detroit and elsewhere are driven primarily by their passion to reach out to people and to help the careers of artists that inspire them. They create a refuge for artists to share their work. More importantly, Detroit galleries create homes. These are homes for the artists to visit and share stories. These are homes that visitors should never find intimidating, because they are built to welcome. These are homes that actually create smaller homes in the hearts of all that visit, and these smaller homes provide a solid structure for beauty to grow.

So as mentioned last week, thedetroiter.com will use this week to highlight some of the various galleries that participate in Gallery Week. We’ve teamed-up with professional photographer, artist, art instructor, and Detroit-art scene insider Jack Summers to bring you pictures and interviews of the various galleries.

Thedetroiter.com’s eagerness to help spread the word about Gallery Week is nothing new – We published the inaugural gallery guide. I actually just came across an archived post by Nick Sousanis that gives a great introduction to a lot of the art galleries in Detroit. Currently, Art Detroit Now publishes an in-depth gallery guide and it gives an overview of the various Metro Detroit galleries. I highly recommend signing up for their newsletter – I receive weekly updates about the going-ons with respect to the Detroit art scene.

So, as always, please visit here throughout the week and learn more about Detroit’s cultural gems. More importantly, get down here!

Saltwater offers Seared Sea Scallops that are prepared with sherried corn purée, bacon, and haricot vert; the Wolfgang Puck Grille offers a Sautéed Salmon served with fingerling potatoes, confit bacon, and whole-grain mustard sauce; and The Caucus Club offers a Classic Wedge Salad served with creamy blue cheese, bacon, and tomato.  You cannot go wrong!

I admit that I do not have the most sophisticated palate, and I am a tad obsessed with the powers of bacon (sorry to all of our readers that are vegetarians).  So I enlisted the help of Cliff Bells , which is a new stop for this year’s Restaurant Week, to help with our coverage of Restaurant Week.  I have also enlisted the help of Detroit’s resident foodie Maria of The Detroit Foodie blog.  I am sure that their insights will go beyond bacon.

So check back here often for reviews and suggestions for this year’s Restaurant Week, and email me with any suggestions or reviews that you have during this year’s Restaurant Week.

“A squirrel is just a rat with a cuter outfit,” Carrie Bradshaw. To all of my macho friends, I am sorry for that reference . . . I’ve watched Sex in the City (my wife made me do it!). I also watch Tim Gunn’s “Make it Work” think tank Project Runway (no one made me do it). What I’ve learned from these shows is that design matters. Throughout this week, the Detroit Creative Corridor Center’s design experiment takes over Detroit.

The DCC established the Detroit Design Festival as a crowd-sourced design festival to expose Detroit’s creative practitioners to one another, and to expose them to new markets and new consumers. The Detroit Design Festival consists of several “Design Happenings” throughout the city, September 21 through September 28. The Design Happenings range from art battles to panel discussions.

Two of the happenings that I am particularly interest in are Mind the Gap and the North End Studios Sensory Garden.  Mind the Gap was a design competition that asked people to propose public art and design projects to fill-in the “missing teeth” of the city’s spaces (i.e., alleys, sidewalks, vacant lots, etc.).   You can help celebrate the best ideas submitted for “Mind the Gap” on September 22.   And on September 23, you can see the ribbon cutting for North End Studios Sensory Garden .  North End Studios and the North End community created a garden in a vacant lot to greet visitors with a palette of beautiful colors, scents, and sounds, with a focus on Michigan native plants.

These are happenings that will make something actually happen–DCC structured this event to act as a catalyst for future ideas to make design work for Detroit. DCC is not just putting cute outfits on rats: Through this inagural design festival, DCC will engage the creative people around town and the community as a whole to make it work!  I’ve asked the instigators at DCC to help with thedetroiter.com’s content this week, so they will send us a stream of information about all of the happenings — so come back often!

For the past 72 years there has been an association for artists in our community. This group is collectively know as the Grosse Pointe Artists Association and has recently obtained more visibility in the community thru the generosity of the beneficiaries of the Edward Frohlich Trust. Many of you have visited the Grosse Pointe Art Center located at 16900 Kercheval in the heart of Grosse Pointe.

Adults and children have taken classes at the Center; students from the Grosse Pointe schools have taken part in programs there too. Many cultural activities take place at the Grosse Pointe Art Center, including lectures and demonstrations by area artists, music, poetry and writing workshops.

The mission statement for the GPAA is as follows: The Grosse Pointe Artist Association is a non-profit organization dedicated to encouraging and promoting artistic talent and art education through the actions and participation of a diverse membership. The GPAA is committed to showcasing a wide range of artistic styles and media through various community outreach activities, including exhibitions, lectures, and art classes. It is devoted to continuing its legacy of support for the arts by maintaining and operating gallery space known as “The Grosse Pointe Art Center.” The recent exhibition, “The Green Show,” opened on Friday March 19, 2010. More than 170 artists submitted their work for selection by a juror, Anne Fracassa. Over two hundred visitors came to the exhibit on opening night. The founding members of the GPAA would be pleased to see the results of their efforts to support the arts in the Grosse Pointes still active after 72 years.

What may not be known is that the generous support provided by the Edward Frohlich Trust may not last forever and the GPAC may need to relocate at some point in the future. The members of the GPAA Board can not put into words their gratitude to the Frohlichs because the facility they have so graciously provided is the perfect location for a “Grosse Pointe Art Center.” It is in the center of our community. The thought of moving and not having a permanent location for the Grosse Pointe Art Center has been a source for much soul searching by the Board. Board members know that other communities have art centers that are permanent fixtures in their areas. The Birmingham-Bloomfield Art Center comes to mind. The Board members also know that many individuals and foundations from the Grosse Pointe Communities have been instrumental in establishing and maintaining cultural institutions in the Detroit area. A tour of the Detroit Institute of Arts will quickly point out the impact that Grosse Pointers have had on that fine institution.

The Board is positive that as Grosse Pointers and friends of the arts we can collectively make a home possible for the GPAA. After 72 years in the community the GPAA deserves a permanent home in Grosse Pointe!

E. Ray Scott

It was Saturday, Feb. 6, when the cheerful, tuxedoed members of Detroit’s Players Club gathered for their monthly show of plays at their historic Playhouse. The mood quickly sobered when they heard that Player E. Ray Scott had died at 86. As Executive Director of the Michigan Council for the Arts from its inception in 1966 to 1985, and as Director of Michigan’s Commission on Art in Public Places until 1991, E. Ray was the solidifying voice and personality of the arts in Michigan.

E. Ray Scott was born in Little Rock, Arkansas in 1923, and the gentle tones of his Southern childhood never left him. Echoing erudition wherever he went, with a tongue he used as both rapier and unguent, E. Ray earned Bachelors and Masters degrees in Speech and Theatre from the University of Southern California. He then spent six years in the United States Army as the Producer and Director of Army Entertainment for the Armed Forces in Germany.

In pursuit of a Ph. D. in Theatre and Communication Arts, Ray moved to Michigan in 1961. It was as a lobbyist for the State Medical Society and a popular figure in Lansing that Scott became aware of the need for a central figure who could gather the many tributaries of Michigan’s artistic life into one coherent, persuasive and forceful voice. E. Ray had found his life’s work.

As former Governor William Milliken remembers, “I was a State Senator when I first met Ray. He was omnipresent in Lansing and, from then on, Ray gave me advice on when and how far we could go in supporting the arts in the state.” It was when Senator Milliken became Lt. Governor that E. Ray approached his wife, Helen Milliken, with his idea for an art train. Mrs. Milliken describes it as “the genius idea which was soon thereafter copied all across the continental United States.”

As noted by his long-time friend Robert O’Leary III, “Yes, if there was one defining moment in which Ray took the most pride, it was in the establishment of Artrain, Inc.” (the official name of the art train concept). Launched in 1971 Artrain was a rail car equipped as a traveling art gallery. With great support from the railroads, the original mission of bringing art to under-served communities throughout Michigan expanded and eventually traveled over the whole country, Artrain, Inc. continues today and has provided arts and cultural programs for over 3.2 million people in cities, towns and villages across the country. Artrain’s exhibitions have become the catalyst for the development of local community cultural programs and the artists who have been nurtured by these programs.

Close behind the Artrain project, E. Ray was also instrumental in creating the enabling legislation that created the Michigan Council for the Arts – only the second state arts council in the country. Getting the State Legislature to approve a reasonable appropriation for the Council was his greatest task made easier perhaps by his warm and personal relationship with Governor William Milliken, which lasted for the 17 years he was governor of Michigan. In a meeting during his first year in office, Gov. Milliken told E. Ray, “If you can encourage the Appropriations Committee to allocate more than I have designated in my budget, I will not veto it.,” and he never did.

Though Artrain became the flagship program of the Michigan Council for the Arts (MCA) when E. Ray served as the Council’s Executive Director, his tenure, on all levels, was always marked by his passionate, intelligent and persuasive lobbying for state support of artists, all cultural institutions, artists and arts in education programs. On a national level, he established a warm working relationship with Nancy Hanks, Director of the National Endowment Arts, and served on numerous boards and committees of the NEA. E. Ray will always be remembered, however, as the tireless and determined advocate for the arts and artists in Michigan. He oversaw major growth in the arts council, which became one of the leading – and largest supporters—of public arts in the country.

Under Ray’s tenure, the arts council pioneered the concept of mini-grants – smaller grants to initiative local community arts activities. A large network of community arts councils that provided grass roots support to all areas of Michigan was a direct outgrowth of Artrain and Ray’s own commitment to Michigan artists and cultural institutions. The arts council provided significant support to every major arts institution in the state – supporting commissions, artistic seasons, premiers, new work, major museum shows, and a wide array of arts education projects.

Scott used his own resources to work with ArtServe Michigan to establish the Michigan Artist Award, which awarded $3000 prizes to three Michigan artists for two consecutive years. The purpose was to provide them with a level of economic freedom that allowed them to concentrate all of their energies on their art. In 2007, E. Ray received the Arts Advocate of the Year award from ArtServe Michigan.

E. Ray Scott is survived by his sister, Jo Ann Cole, and his daughter Dana (Mrs. Scott Tschirhart), seven grandchildren and one great grandchild. A memorial service will be held for E. Ray at 11 a.m. on Saturday, February 27th, at the GEM Theatre at 333 Madison Avenue in downtown Detroit. The service will be followed with a light lunch. Once more stories and legends about E. Ray will be passed around among as many of his friends and admirers who can be there.

Family requests memorials to support the arts in Michigan and Michigan Artrain. To make a contribution in E. Ray’s honor, please go to www.artrainusa.org.

Jazz is dead! Here we go again. The recent Wall Street Journal article by Terry Teachout, (the journal’s drama critic? Why is he writing about jazz? With all their resources they couldn’t find someone to write on jazz?) declaring that no one is listening to jazz and featuring a prominent cartoon of a “black Jazz musician” being wheeled out on a cart speaks volumes to a continued bourgeois, arrogant Eurocentric lack of understanding of jazz.

Mr. Teachout’s methodology is the classic case of someone going out to investigate the flowers, but never getting off the horse to “smell the flowers.” Hence the article is so “lightweight” I had to keep a paperweight on it to keep it from elevating and floating away on its own. Put another way, as Amiri Baraka in his latest book “Digging” would say, “The lack of knowledge about America’s richest contribution to world culture is a reflection as well of the deadly ignorance which stalks this country from the New York City Hall to the halls of Congress to the corporate offices to academic classrooms, like a ubiquitous serial killer…”

Teachout uses a number of useless (without context!) numbers from a National Endowment of the Arts survey to conclude that only those with their head in the sand cannot see a larger picture of “lack of mass support for jazz” leading to its demise. There were fewer people attending a jazz concert; the audience is (graying) growing older; older people are less likely to attend jazz performances today than yesterday; and the audience among college-educated adults is also shrinking. On the surface, this kind of approach can scare or misinform a great many people into following the ever present “jazz is dead” attacks upon the music. This kind of approach is not the approach of someone who wants to help jazz survive, but one that serves to drive people away from exploring and learning about jazz.

How about we come at the non arguable “less than healthy’ state of jazz another way? Once again we call on America’s foremost jazz critic for guidance. Why not investigate and raise the question as to the “domination of US popular culture by an outrageously reactionary commercial culture of mindlessness, mediocrity, violence and pornography means that it is increasingly more difficult for the innovative, serious, genuinely expressive, or authentically popular artist to get the same kind of production and the anti-creative garbage that the corporations thrive on.” (Digging, Amiri Baraka). I suggest that this is the inquiry that the Wall Street Journal should be making into the subject matter, the health state of jazz. But when you’re part of the problem, it’s difficult. From the standpoint of the WSJ, jazz’s mystery can/cannot be solved by market forces. “Look here are the numbers!”

From the great work “Blues People,” to his other book, “Black Music,” and the latest contribution from the peoples’ critic, “Digging,” there is one thing that stands out. Amiri Baraka insists that the music, from blues to jazz, is a creation and reflection of the struggles of the Afro-American people. The music is an expression of a people’s culture and cannot be separated from such. Jazz, Afro-American in origin, universal in content and expression, is nonetheless tied to a people, expressing their greatest fears and joys, hopes for the future and repository of the past, that it can said, “the music is the people.” Hence the music can never die, because the people live. Bill Cosby is quoted in Digging as saying, “There’s a wonderful story I like to tell. It’s the end of the world…gray, blowing, turbulent… and there is this tombstone that says, ‘Jazz: It Broke Even!’ The music has its high and lows, but it can never die.”

” a fundamental contradiction, sharp, at times antagonistic, existed between American Classical Music (jazz), its creators, mainly black, and the majority of commentators, critics, critical opinion about the music, which historically are not.”

Art is a reflection of a people’s culture. As Baraka says, “Whether African Song, Work Song, Spiritual, Hollers, Blues, Jazz, Gospel, etc., no matter the genre, the ideas contained in Afro-American art, in the main, oppose slavery and desire freedom.” (Digging). For jazz to die, the entire history and Afro-American people would have to die. This is the content that an interloper like Teachout cannot understand. Jazz is as vital and fighting for its existence today as it was in the 40’s, 50’s or 60’s. Jazz is currently experiencing the “tale of two cities.” On the one hand, due to the advances and demands of the black liberation movement, Jazz enjoys a newfound bourgeois respectability. This is evidenced by the fact that very many colleges and universities have jazz departments (some led by the creators of the music) that produces very rich programs and new venues for the jazz musicians to play. On the other hand, many of the formerly most popular jazz venues have “moved” downtown and have become inaccessible not only to the supporters of the music, but also its creators. Many of the new downtown venues only showcase the “jazz superstars” of the music, hence subsidizing many new young white jazz musicians, while the new black creators and continuators of the music can’t get gigs. This is a sorry state of affairs that must be investigated. Couple with the new thrust in white jazz criticism, the old (black) cats aren’t playing anything new (like in Europe), but just continue to “swing.” How ironic, given that it’s the swing that is the heart of the music. Whatever happened to the maxim…it don’t mean a thing?

I often joke with Amiri that two months after he dies, the jazz powers that be are going to call a meeting declaring jazz dead, or a European creation. As long as he lives this can’t happen, because they know he’ll light fire under their asses.

But since jazz is what the great trumpet player Ahmed Abdullah calls, “the music of the spirit,” it can never die. While the WSJ declares jazz dead, refuses to get off the horse and smell the flowers, the music continues to thrive and fight for its life, for its expression. In New Jersey, new small clubs are opening up all over the place, anchored by Cecil’s in West Orange. You have the work of Newark’s own Stan Myers, who has run a successful Tuesday night Jam session at Crossroads for years;  Papillion, Skipper’s, the Priory, Trumpets, John Lee’s annual concerts in South Orange, and countless other venues all testify to the fact that the “spirit” is alive. This weekend, Saturday and Sunday, the Oskar Schindler jazz program in the park in West Orange will take place with some of the greatest musicians in the world. This annual event continues to grow larger every year. You can’t convince the people attending these venues that “jazz is dead.” In NYC, the opening of Creole’s uptown that now has a dynamite line up of jazz performances, to Sistas’ Place in Brooklyn; the great work of Bob Myers and the Brooklyn Jazz Consortium, the Lenox Lounge and St. Nick’s in Harlem, the reopening of Minton’s demonstrates that there are real soldiers in the field fighting to keep jazz alive in our communities. Countless other new, small venues in Brooklyn is a further testament that “jazz lives, will never die, and continue to find outlets for its expression.”

Jazz is not popular culture. To compare and demand that Jazz be equated with the lowest common denominator cultural expression, packaged for the most extreme exploitation by monopoly capitalism is to have no understanding of the music. By its very nature it is “rebel” music. Teachout complains that it is not the music of the masses, of the youth, as determined by corporate measuring sticks. Well of course. I like hip-hop but I’m not going to any concerts. That’s youth music. Not particularly challenging. Jazz is a challenging experience, for all of the reasons stated above and yes must be able to attract younger listeners. But the commonly referred to model, “jazz must return to its 1930’s swing era roots, when big bands like Benny Goodman’s ruled the roost and young and old danced their lives away to the music. Most reputable jazz historians recognize that period as one of the worst in jazz history, as monopoly capital stripped the music of its vitalness, repackaged it to the public in a sanitized (racist) endeavor. Be-Bop was a rebellion against this co-modification and bastardization of the music.

When we say jazz is “a music of the spirit,” sitting in on a jazz program has the possibility of elevating the listener to heights never experienced by a poplar culture event. For many it is a shared communal experience, as witnessed by the common clapping in appreciation of a musical interlude, or the strictly individual experience of the music. Some can appreciate the full recipe of musical virtuosity on display, some may connect deeply in an emotional way with the music, some relate to the democratic display of the skills of the musicians, and some may not have liked the particular performance. Jazz is a broad palette, some things we don’t like, some things we like better than others. All of this is part of the learning curve as people come to appreciate jazz. It’s great when a young brother or sister after leaving their first jazz experience, say “I really liked what I heard.” Or to say, I didn’t understand what I heard. This too is part of the learning process.

McDonald’s is popular fast food. Many like it, many do not. But McDonald’s is not the only food on the market. There is other food, much tastier, much more healthful in the long run, more beautiful in its presentation, that people should be exposed to, for a more elevating food experience. This is the difference between jazz and popular music.

Often times when inviting someone to a jazz club, you get the usual question? “How’s the parking, how’s the security, etc.? I usually chuckle to myself because this person has no clue to the different vibe in a jazz club than at a popular musical event. Because the music is so elevating and brings a different emotional approach given its history, the experience, as I said before is much more a shared and communal experience. Jazz does not attract the kinds of persons prone to antagonistic conflicts with others, but just the opposite, in that it attracts the kinds of persons prone to spiritual connections with the music and other patrons. I’ve never seen a “weapons detector” at a jazz club or venue. As we used to say back in the day, “we ain’t about that!” This music means something else.

The WSJ approach to “summing up the current state of jazz” has the open or hidden affect of driving people away from the jazz experience. “Who wants to go hear music that no one attends anyway?” It can’t be any good if as the market numbers show that no one is listening.

In “Jazz and the White Critic (Thirty Years Later),” Baraka in Digg says, the theme of one of his former articles was that,” a fundamental contradiction, sharp, at times antagonistic, existed between American Classical Music (jazz), its creators, mainly black, and the majority of commentators, critics, critical opinion about the music, which historically are not.” Sadly, the WSJ article confirms his observations, then and now.

Jazz, like the Afro-American people: We got problems, but still we rise. The music of the spirit will never die. “It may break even!”

The Obama administration has made clear its plans for GM: the Chrysler bankruptcy was the “test case,” and now Obama’s Wall Street buddies inside the Auto Task Force plan to replicate it. … the greatest single attack on American workers since the Great Depression, the precedent of which will reverberate loudly through business-labor relations in the country — that is, if workers at GM and its parts suppliers don’t put a stop to it.

Why was Chrysler so important? Most significant was the fact that workers were scared into accepting large wage and benefit reductions. They were told by the U.A.W. “leaders” that, unless workers conceded to accepting the wages and benefits of non-union workers, bankruptcy would be unavoidable. The workers conceded, and the very next day it was announced that the company was headed towards bankruptcy. …

Applying this type of “restructuring” to GM is hard to imagine. GM is a global conglomerate with factories and suppliers all over the world — a monster when compared to puny Chrysler. The new sell-out labor contractbeing negotiated between Gettlefinger and Obama on 5/21/09 has yet to be released to the public, though the results have already been leaked, and they would be crushing for GM workers, in a “…deal that would cut [GM's] labor costs by more than $1 billion a year and reduce its $20 billion pledge to the United Auto Workers to cover health-care obligations [by ten billion]…” (Wall Street Journal, May 19, 2009).

Not only this, but 20,000 more GM jobs would be cut. Dealerships and suppliers all over the world would close as well, producing immediate job losses in the hundreds of thousands, and indirect job losses that are impossible to calculate.

Also, GM will likely be split into two companies: one that will build cars with cheap labor for the world marketplace and the other consisting of factories and machinery that will be sold for scrap metal. Instead of this tremendous productive power being used to create a much more rational mass transit system, the company is downsizing itself, laying off thousands of workers and filling landfills.

… Obama’s autoworker precedent will encourage other companies to destroy union contracts via bankruptcy; the stage is being set for a colossal attack on the American working class. Already wage cuts are being implemented throughout the U.S., alongside massive unemployment — Obama’s technique is simply a way to hasten the process, so that the speed and scope of the recession is equally matched by reductions in wages and benefits.

The economic crisis has put corporations into “fight or flight” mode. In order for them to stay “viable” on the world market, they are slashing wages and benefits, led by Obama and the Wall Street insiders among his administration. It will take a U.A.W. rank and file upsurge to repel these attacks, aided by workers everywhere, since labor in general now faces incredible challenges. They could demand the nationalization of the auto industry so that workers would be bailed out, not the banks. Then these companies could be retooled in order to produce not only mass transit vehicles but an alternative energy infrastructure that could both save jobs and help save the planet from global warming.

Obama cannot be “pressured” into doing the right thing. He’s surrounded himself with people representing the big corporations and banks, entities that are intrinsically anti-worker. The Democratic Party must also be tossed aside, since their total silence on this most important of issues is one of utter complicity. Labor must now, more than ever, take an independent stance in defending their interests. The fate of the labor movement hangs in the balance.
http://www.zmag.org/znet/viewArticle/21543

Tom Stephens
www.peoplessummit.org

I have always been a contrarian by nature and tend to not go with the crowd. When it came time to expand my business, I chose Detroit.  I found I had comfort level with the area, having spent many summers here with my father who was a GM executive at the time.  As a business owner with seven sites located across the eastern United States, our Detroit office has become the fastest growing in only three years.  With great people, solution-based customer engagement, constant process improvement, strong corporate responsibility, support/buy local mentality and respect for the environment, our commercial flooring service is thriving. 

We are not alone.  With hard work and sound practices, businesses like RD Weis are determining their own fate without the benefit of taxpayer money or stimulus.  We’re not just in business to make money, we’re here (in Detroit) to build relationships and make a difference… in more ways than one.

Hey Detroit, put those Midwest values to work. Let’s move forward. 

Randy Weis, President

RD Weis Companies

www.rdweis.com