Cass Corridor Art and Beyond
Presented by Robert Sestok
Detroit’s Midtown neighborhood is changing. Detroit is changing. We face an uncertain future. As the City of Detroit displaces people, demolishes buildings, reroutes streets, and renames districts, how do we remember and tell the important, everyday stories of those places before they are lost? The Cass Corridor was once home to a vibrant art community whose impact extended beyond the city and reverberates to this day. Cass Corridor Art & Beyond tells the stories of a half-century of Cass Corridor artists, their importance, and the nuances and intricacies of their artmaking.
Narrated by Bob Sestok, this live storytelling event uses photos, slides, and videos taken by Cass Corridor artists, providing an intimate portrait of this artistic community and their collaborative exchanges. As a movement, Cass Corridor artists democratized artmaking, deconstructing and abstracting the humble materials and detritus of the city to produce works that often transcended genres and disciplines. Accompanied by live ambient musician John Duffy, Cass Corridor Art & Beyond engages audiences with stranger-than-fiction first-person stories from one of the seminal cultural movements in Detroit’s history. This event also serves as an important opportunity to collect and preserve a historically significant archive of materials, re-presenting and contextualizing it for future generations.
Date: September 6, 2019
Partner: Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit
Location: 4454 Woodward Ave, Detroit, MI 48201
Coordinates: 42.35362, -83.06176
Date: February 4, 2020
Partner: Cranbrook Art Museum deSalle Auditorium
Location: 39221 Woodward Ave, Bloomfield Hills, MI 48304
Coordinates: 42.35362, -83.06176
About the Artist
Robert Sestok is a sculptor, painter and printmaker who has worked in Detroit’s Cass Corridor since 1967. Together with other Cass Corridor artists, Sestok sought new forms and methods of artistic expression, using non-standard materials in response to civil rights struggles, the anti-war movement, and the pervasiveness of the automotive industry in Detroit. In 2015, he opened City Sculpture, a permanent public art space in Detroit’s Midtown neighborhood that exhibits three decades of sculptural work.
Sestok’s work is in the permanent collections of the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Cranbrook Museum of Art, and Wayne State University, among others. He has exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Cranbrook Museum of Art, College for Creative Studies, Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, and Marianne Boesky Gallery. He is the recipient of grants from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.